PhD training is no longer fit for purpose – it needs reform now

One thing that most people don't realize (or willingly try not to think about) is that every "higher education" level, all the way from the BSc to the last day of your PhD, is actually, first and foremost, a selection process. I have felt this ever since I got my first foot in my first BSc lecture, and the feeling has never left me. And I'm doing the exact same thing right now as an Associate Professor, both as a lecturer and as a supervisor. Most the talk and ideas we hear all the time about pedagogical skills, teaching methods, better techniques for supervision, etc. will fall to earth when push comes to shove: the truth is that the vast majority of higher education staff has no idea what they are doing when it comes to actually educating students. We do our best, we present our knowledge in the best way we can think of, and we are genuinely interested in students learning them, but the truth is that the knowledge of exactly what kind of education techniques work better or worse, is non-existent (for all practical matters). So, what happens is that, some students learn, others don't. Would they still have learned if we were using completely different teaching methods? Probably. Would they have learned even if we were not there? Maybe, but probably not. Because our real task (we as in, the staff), when you really get down to the basic core of what is happening in higher education, is to be there and give them a goal: if you want to have this certificate, if you want to be like me, and reach this milestone, you have to endure this, and pass these tests. I'll show you some things here and there in an arrangement that is probably as close to random as it is to not random, and well, you deal with it and find a way to pass the test. It doesn't really matter how you do it, how you find your motivation to keep on keeping on, what matters is that you survive this process and reach the end. And so is the selection process implemented.

These experts in education unfortunately take one thing for granted, that PhDs need to be trained. I really don't think that's true and that there is any need for PhD training. At least, there shouldn't be any need.

Here is the thing: The purpose of a PhD is to demonstrate the ability to conduct scientific research independently. When a student enters a PhD program, they should have all the prerequisites to do that. If not, the university has failed and the study program needs to be reformed. A PhD student needs to have the ability to conduct research and write a thesis, and they get more time for that than they will ever have again as a postdoc.

In my opinion it's really that simple: Do the research and write your PhD thesis, and finish it in time. This "training" idea comes from the US, and the only effect of this in Europe I've seen so far is that unnecessary and off-topic PhD courses with point systems have been invented. At least in my area, these are completely useless and merely delay work on the PhD thesis.

What they should do, however, is to stop the grade inflation and stop handing out a PhD to everyone, no matter how bad the thesis. That's the real problem, I've seen plenty of lazy, extremely low-effort theses, and every time the lazy PhD student passes the defense and gets the PhD. That devalues the PhD and the work of those who take it seriously. Please start to let at least the worst PhD students fail.

Bit of an aside:

Most people in PhD programs misunderstand the actual objectives (I sure did). They assume that the academic environment is just like the undergraduate one they have come out of. That is false.

To better understand the new rules that they are operating under, I suggest looking to 'literature'. The two best examples that I have found to illustrate the real 'rules' are:

1) The Horatio Hornblower series. It follows the career of a noble, poor, yet educated British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. It follows Horatio from midshipman to Admiral.

2) The Sharpe series. Also set during the Napoleonic Wars, this series follows the Army instead of the Navy. You read of the career of an orphaned son of a whore commoner who is elevated to officer rank. Much conflict with the inherited nobility and chafing occurs with the commoner protagonist.

It is quickly discovered by the protagonists of both series that to survive at officer rank, the lives and interests of the enlisted must be second to the demands of career. Much deeper discussions about this occur in both series.

The key for a PhD student is to observe the fighting and jockeying of the officers between each other over career. These dynamics, even through fictional books, are identical to the fights of academics even today. How the protagonists deal with these challenges should be a lesson to any PhD student in their own careers.

The question is, do we really need a PhD reform? Or should we restructure the academic process to enable more people to pariticipate without going through the ardous process of writing a thesis? I have a PhD and work in an industrial research environment, with 50/50 PhD and non-PhD colleagues. There is no difference in quality of work and output. So maybe universities should be less discriminatory against non-PhD research fellows.

To be honest, we probably see an alternative to academia grow and disrupt it before we see academia reform itself – the academic institution is so old and has so much legacy at this point, that it is close to impossible.

I am curious on how these new structures would look.

Is there really an army of suckers who are rushing to waste years of their lives on doctoral degrees and the associated lengthy, underpaid indentures? The statistics would seem to say so. Or perhaps this is the natural progression of the research (especially academic research) pyramid scheme?

Are we going to up the degree requirements for everything? High school to college diploma, bachelor's to master's, master's to doctorate, doctorate to ???

The PhD is never going to be "updated" because it has never been updated throughout its history. It will be obsoleted

Education is changing before our eyes. The world increasingly has all the material and resources to learn, customized and tailored to the ability of each student. There will soon be a tipping point where traditional school-based education becomes irrelevant, all-at-once

It also needed reform 20 and 10 years ago, but it does now as well.

The problem is that universities, at least in my experience here in the UK, are just getting more bureaucratised and less committed to pure (non-corporate/"enterprise") research. I don't trust them to reform anything and actually improve it.

Will PhD training eventually scale to allow for more people to participate in research?

I don't think I can see an actual argument in this.

Could it be summarized as approximately 'The current PhD system has good points but it's several decades old, you learn from someone who actually knows the stuff in practice, and politicians don't want to spend enough for it despite lionizing the economic value of the outcomes'?

I fail to see the problems beyond the obvious, and while there are obvious problems, people with agendas published under titles like "Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education" seem uniquely qualified to aggravate them.

If anyone is to muck around with one of the core arrangements for real scientific research (on a global scale, no less) they had better be very clear about the distinctions between "changed" and "actually improved".

This thread is the most entertaining thing I've read in a while. So many PhD's showing off how their education traumatized them.

Excellent points have been raised in both the article and the comments (especially the reliance on a single advisor; that's trouble).

But one thing that no one is addressing, is the fact that a much of the reproducibility crisis is caused by bad methodologies. Why are PhDs still misapplying statistical tools meant for normal distributions, by using them for power law distributions? That's endemic in the social sciences (see: economics, psychology). Why aren't universities giving all PhD students a proper background in stats & probability?

There's a description for spending years in a tertiary degree: not needing a full time income, or having it come from somewhere else While I completely understand the sentiment and would also personally like that, the fact remains that to live for years untrammeled by the need for an economic relationship is something that is paid for by somebody.

Should society be saddled with excessive taxes for academic welfare?

Society pays for a lot of waste, so maybe it's unfair to single out academia. But it's a symptom of some kind of imbalance.

The article feels more like a rant than a well-thought-out argument. It hardly says concretely what the problems with current PhD training are (it mentions a few problems in different places, but misses important ones like the ongoing mental health crisis in academia [0]), and it makes very few suggestions about what concretely should change to address them. The authors don't even say what they mean by 'PhD training', ignoring the vast heterogeneity in the structure and duration of doctoral education programs between countries, institutions and even between different programs in the same institution.

In the US, PhD training typically consists of a coursework phase and a research phase, with a target duration of about 5 years. In the EU, a PhD has a target duration of 3 years, according to the European Qualifications Framework [1]. While some coursework will typically be demanded in EU PhDs, it would usually be more lightweight than the coursework in a 5-year US PhD. Some EU institutions will offer doctoral schools that mimic the US model, some institutions will actually offer multiple styles of doctorates in parallel programs (even for the same subject). The UK has 'Centres for Doctoral Training' (CDT) and 'Doctoral Training Partnerships' (DTPs) which look like a compromise between the US and EU models (with typically one year of coursework preceding the research phase). CDTs can be joint programs between multiple universities, with students commuting to other institutions to take classes. CDTs and DTPs are are offered alongside regular PhD programs in the UK (the latter will look more like the EU model in most cases and more like the US model in some). Other countries and regions will often have a similar mix of US- and EU-style training programs. Add to this various lesser known types of doctoral programs like part-time PhDs, professional doctorates, DBAs (Business Doctorates in the US), 'PhD by Publication' in the UK, PhDs that are primarily based at non-university research labs like CERN, Max-Planck-Institutes,... and you will see that the term 'PhD' or 'Doctorate' can refer to vastly different types of academic programs, lasting anywhere from 2 to 8 years, being based at one or multiple or no university, with coursework being anything from absent to equivalent to a 2-year Master's program, funding being provided by a professor, a university, a foundation, a government, a corporation or not at all, having one or multiple supervisors, administering letter, numeric or no grades at all, requiring substantial teaching to none at all,... There is really no point in talking about 'PhD training' or its shortcomings without clarifying which of those countless different types of programs you mean.

The premise of the article seems to be that there exists a uniform model of PhD training that emerged in the 19th century and hasn't been reformed since, which simply doesn't stand up to closer inspection.

[0] https://www.ecn-berlin.de/mental-health/the-mental-health-cr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process

As universities are medieval institutions, it's apt that they run their education programs like a gauntlet.