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This also leads to a few bad outcomes for society at large.

- PhD programs can become abusive of their students/workers. Paying below subsistence or even charging money to study.

- PhD programs can become places where only those with no opportunity cost go.

- PhD students will stop caring about long term careers in their field - recognizing the impossibility.

- Science enters a hyper-competitive phase where scientists do not target ground breaking research. Instead focusing on small repeatable wins.

- Scientists adopt anti-competitive practices to secure their small slice of research funding including review kabals, and disuading research in conflicting views.

While I'm all for letting students take the risks they feel like taking, the current situation is the result of a systemic massive overproduction of PhDs through government funding. It's possible this overproduction of apprentices results in decreased productivity amongst those working in the field by introducing noise, and training costs to researchers.

If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.

> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.

Then science would have a serious problem, because the only way to get things done is to abuse this cheap labour: it is much easier to get funding for a handful of PhD students or post-docs than for the equivalent in permanent staff. Large research universities would have a very hard time, and the way things work with funding agencies would have to change fundamentally.

I am not saying it would be bad, far from it. But in the current system, it’s easier for everybody to go along, so changing things will be hard. It does not depend on individual behaviours.

OTOH, I think that overall it is good to have PhDs going out and do stuff in unrelated fields. A PhD is still a wonderful way of broadening your horizons. We’d be better having more PhD politicians, for example, instead of lawyers. You can do a lot of things after a doctorate. I think the post-doc trap is much more insidious.

> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.

I don't know about that. A 3-10x reduction would mean grad classes of 1-2 students. In the grad classes I took, there was never "dead weight," everybody contributed in study sessions. Even those students who would go on to get tenure were learning from those who wouldn't. I'm not sure professors would even be motivated to teach such small courses. The price of graduate tuition would also go up by that 3-10x factor, so PhDs would be exclusively for the rich.

Several of my coworkers have PhDs, as do I. We all bring special skills, and working together, we combine those skills to great effect. None of us are faculty. That's not the only thing you can do with a PhD. Should ta/ra/sessional positions pay a living wage? Absolutely. But don't cut the rest of us out because you don't see our value.

Instead of reducing the number of trainees, how about we increase the number of faculty positions?

Isn't research good for society?

If the latter is possible, then yes - however in a society with a declining population and modest productivity growth increasing the number of faculty positions 3-5x to account for current PhD program capacity is likely infeasible. Even a massive increase in science budgets at the federal level would likely only yield 2x the positions.

While Universities could cut administrative bloat to make way for faculty... they are unlikely to do so, and there are few levers to motivate them. With a looming student loan crises, they are likely to be forced to cut budgets significantly sometime in the next 10 years either through inflation or direct cuts.

The number of PhD candidates is partially based on the way the federal government cuts grants, at a roughly flat budget the only way to create more faculty positions is to cut PhD student grants. From a very rough perspective, the government could create roughly one career track research position for every ~1.5-2.5 PhD/PostDoc position grants they cut. If you doubled the science budget, then the 3-5x cut would work out as 1.5-3x, However due to the expectation on the number of students each professor has.. doubling the budget in the current system would simply yield the same problem with twice as many people involved.

You make some good points and I agree with your ballpark figures, but you seem very stuck in a status quo mindset. The entire NIH budget is about what we are giving Ukraine in aid. High-frequency trading alone saps billions from the economy. We could easily find money to triple our science expenditures if we wanted to.

And yes we'd need to evaluate faculty success differently so that we would no longer require each professor to run a lab of a half dozen grad students in order to have enough publications for tenure. But that's easily doable via a collective decision.

Fair, but we (hopefully) don’t need to fight the Ukraine war every year - and we have many more agencies than the NIH who need science funding. Choosing not to fund the military to support the NIH may directly translate to undesirable geopolitical outcomes.

Agreed with problem, not sure about solution

Ex: 10X smaller enrollment. In top programs, most competitive undergraduate applicants have _already_ published top scientific papers. Making 10X more competitive will turn up the pressure even more.

Ex: More funding. Competing is hard. CS PhD programs, with assuming occasional well-paid CS internships, having slightly-below-median salaries. Definitely tough for those with families, but the rest can easily come out with savings even in the highest COL areas. So the real issue is opportunity cost when competing with FAANG etc (which grad students would be able to get into). I believe > 50% of US PhDs are foreign-born because american cs undergrads know they can work in cool tech envs for more $ and less work by going direct to the great companies courting them before graduation. Competing with FAANG salaries is hard - most professor salaries are below FAANG starting salaries, which is its own problem.

I found myself agreeing with much of your comment, except: "For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals."

Is there possibly a separation between PhD students who work 9-5 with a mentality of hard work but strong time boundaries, versus PhD students who work 9-5 but don't plan to make the most of the opportunity?

I'm also instinctively wary of any romanticization of a PhD program, especially when working long hours. From anecdotal reports, national labs also provide the resources to do great research, with far more reasonable hours and less of a pressure to work longer hours. I've read of too many reports, which exist even if they are minority situations, where advisors take advantage of the power they have over students, such as in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099

I believe that doing "amazing things with like-minded individuals" is worthwhile, but can also happen in the private sector where the pay is commensurate to the value of the provided work. In general, I'm very wary of the idea that working longer hours should ever be romanticized, because the potential downsides are severe and should not be underestimated (including physical/psychological health problems due to burnout from long hours and failed relationships/divorce).

Yes, weaker programs already do so. The faculty generally are top notch, and superstar students do seek out individual professors due to whatever alignment and succeed. So IMO it's more about the student, there are definitely places with different expectations already.

Likewise, in industry, it's not the hardest thing to get an r&d gig in say a hospital network or university as a research engineer supporting whatever lab(s). Basically a forever postdoc. Though salary may of course suffer.

One of the biggest things that comes out of a PhD is the ability to formulate and pursue open-ended problems. IMO that comes from (a) apprenticing and (b) repeated success/failure, both of which take time. So yes, you can stretch a PhD longer, or do a weak one and try to learn that later such as a postdoc. It's not hard to sniff out who has done the work / magically rocked it because they are magical / hasn't.

> For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals.

“Clocking out” is not incompatible with “work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals”, far from it. Particularly in academia, where inspiration and reflection is important. Getting out for a walk, a dinner with friends, watching movies, etc are all opportunities to broaden your outlook on things and be more productive in the long run.

Far too often I have seen people “working hard” spending way too much time working on something because they did not really take the time to think about where they were going (including amongst the PhD students I work with in my lab). This leads to tunnel vision and abusive behaviour way too often.

> Numbers-wise, something like 3% of phds lead to professorships: it's not quite as competitive as becoming a professional athlete, but not far. Peak competition.

This is a false conclusion since less than 100% of PhDs have the ambission of professorship. It probably varies a lot by field but from anecdote most PhDs I know don't aim at staying longer that possibly postdoc, and even those are in minority - most are aiming for industry or research.

I have no idea if it's a significant fraction or not but IMO you'd need to to at least have some estimate to follow that assumption.

Agreed. Most of my labmates lost the desire to stay in academia by the end of PhD. Some of them didn't have it even in the beginning. Myself, I went from "I am not sure if academia is the right place for me" to "I am out of here and will never look back" in a span of two years.

> This is a false conclusion since less than 100% of PhDs have the ambission of professorship. It probably varies a lot by field but from anecdote most PhDs I know don't aim at staying longer that possibly postdoc, and even those are in minority - most are aiming for industry or research.

You can't say that without factoring in that by the end of their PhDs they realize that they cannot be professors. There aren't any positions for them. Competition tends to be nasty. The career wears them down.

If most PhDs had the option to stay, like say, 100 years ago, and conditions were better, the statistics would likely be very different!

Yep. Something like a masters is different, which explicitly is about not continuing in academic research. In contrast, the number of folks going on to a phd with one of their potential outcomes being a professorship is probably closer to 97% end or say 30-50% when the numbers get revealed, than the current 3% end.

not worry about $ as much

AFAIK the wages PhD stipends are pittances and make it very difficult for someone without money to survive, especially for non-STEM programs. If anything doing a PhD makes you worry more about money because you can't earn enough to survive

OP may have been referring to individuals who are independently wealthy or financially guaranteed by parents/relatives. Families may only be inclined towards generosity when someone is at least notionally working to better themselves.

Given a lack of career path through the PhD program, these programs are likely to attract individuals who don't need a career in the future.

Have you been in a PhD program yourself? It could be my field, but there are way more idealists than financially secure people. I was one, and my family was not wealthy.

To be fair, I went to a highly prestigious private institution where funding was guaranteed, and while pay was shit, it was enough for a single person to live reasonably comfortably (forget saving, of course). Some public schools I got offers from like Berkeley couldn’t even guarantee funding.

During my PhD (many years ago, so these figures are outdated) I was paid a stipend of £16k to teach undergraduate students who, upon graduation, were going to jobs paying £40k.

None of my PhD student peers had billionaire parents - but they almost all had parents who were reasonably well off. None of us had to rely on handouts from our parents, and none of us had loads of disposable income - but we all had a safety net.

The undergraduates who grew up in poverty and went to university to improve their lot in life? The £40k job offer represents financial security. It was rare that they'd forego that.

Yep, referring just to CS. Different even from other STEM fields.

In CS, stipends are below median income, but get close to median when students do the occasional R&D internship.

The main CS grad students I've seen struggle are those with families (ex: someone I respect had single income supporting his wife and ~3 kids!), big spenders, and those ignoring (many) corporate R&D internship offers. For everyone else, it's a nice life, and not hard to come out with savings. Likewise, if you're used to living a beyond-median-income lifestyle, e.g., software engineer returning to grad school, it may be hard to go back to living like the rest of America.

As others noted, much harder is the opportunity cost. Why would a student turn down an offer for 3X+ the US median income doing ads etc at some FAANG/VC co for a long, below-median, and relatively thankless & isolating phd experience? "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads".