Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
nature.com
nature.com
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
I can attest it allowed me to do literal jumps way above what my peers and rest could do setting up much better life path. Pure numbers don't do this justice, not sure how to explain it properly.
Now it may not be your goal in life and thats fine, this comes from a guy who spent 6 months on unpaid backpacking all over India and Nepal well into his career work days, but be sure you are really fine with these decisions long, I mean LONG term. And we don't know who we will be in 2 decades.
Also a good quick start could easily mean retiring much earlier if one has a bit of luck and can control expenses growth (and they will grow regardless of your life path). One can focus on academia then.
No debt, no opportunity cost.
Wish one would let me do the same with a PhD.
It's more common that entry-level jobs in highly paid fields start at close to the median wage. Salaries can rise rapidly once you have demonstrated your worth. But unless there is a talent shortage in your field, it doesn't make sense to pay much for an unknown quantity.
When I did my PhD, I was making roughly the same money as all of my friends (none of whom were in tech) except I had waaay more freedom and job satisfaction.
If your other opportunities are things like a school teacher or generic “office job”, a PhD program doesn’t really have an opportunity cost penalty
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
The fields where you are bound to academia for a reasonable ROI are definitely the humanities, since there is essentially no demand for a history PhD in the private sector, or an English PhD. It can help for job hunting in an unrelated field, I guess. But, a chemistry PhD? or any other applied lab PhD, it's not like you're shooting yourself in the foot by getting an advanced degree in such a field.
As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...
I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.
Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.
I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.
My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.
(No, not me, I don't have a PhD.)
If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.
As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.
My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.
Research Scientist positions are also embedded in product teams in Google IIRC, certainly less "prestige" than DeepMind though, and probably easier to get into
(Also for the broader audience: Harvard here probably carries less weight than the likes of UT Austin)
Personally knowing a couple PhDs who did the rounds, it is highly competitive.
Of course, one of them also supports fascism; I'm not "both sides"ing.
Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.
Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.
I think we’re at the “so what are you going to do about it” phase where the courts and congress are going to tisk tisk at the most, because they don’t want the deep pockets of Elon and Co to primary-them-out
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/musk-vivek-ramaswamy-h1b-vi...
The good things
1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great.
2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places
3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives.
4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too).
The bad things
1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell
2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless.
3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough).
Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.
For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV style salaries. That made me feel like it was all a bad decision.
But now that I'm approaching my 50s, I feel a bit differently. I traded variability for steady consistent growth. When SV lays of 80% of the work force and a bunch of people lose their jobs and their fancy SV salaries go to 0, I've luckily (knock on wood) never had that experience.
I bet in the long run a person making SV salary right out of college and invests smartly will still out perform economically than a steady growth after a delay for the PhD. But mentally the lack of variability has been good for me. YMMV.
Its hard to know if the risk of a bad time is always high or if it is dependent on culture etc, but I do not recommend PhDs as a pathway anymore.
In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going
Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.
I feel like everyone says this regardless of what level of education they have. I have a PhD and I've never felt this way. Everything I've learnt has contributed to the whole. The broad, shallow exposure from school has been extremely useful. I think I've used just about everything at one time or another. The PhD was less about learning in the specific area and more about learning how to do a PhD. You have to learn how to study a field and get on top of it, how to organise and assimilate that information, and how to build on top of that. This is definitely still useful to me and I'm not sure I would have learned to do it without actually doing it.
- I did my PhD in Europe where it's only 3 years after master, so the opportunity cost is less
- I noticed a lot of frustration with PhD candidates comes from applying to academic positions. If this is not the end goal, this could also lead to a better experience.
- I said a lot of what I learned is useless, this can be mitigated by carefully choosing a topic, although not easy when you have little perspective, and possibly limited options (lots of candidates pick a topic in their local university for instance). It's also possible to intern in companies during a PhD.
- Having a PhD can open new doors.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)
These days I think the reciprocal square root intrinsic is the fastest where precision is not that important.
I think there was a bit twiddling hack for pop count which was consistently faster than the equivalent cpu intrinsic due to some weird pipelining effect, so sometimes it is possible to beat the compilers and intrinsics with clever hacks.
Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.
> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry
I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.
The idea that someone who knows a high-level object-oriented language could translate that to immediate success in low-level C++ syntax at a level higher than the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.
this is not synonymous with "most [C++ programmers] in industry"
The claim was the person learned it better than most people in industry, not most people writing the libraries upon which the industry is based
EDIT: Also we don't technically know when this happened. If this story is from the 1990s, it's a lot more likely, because think of how many shitty C++ programmers there were back then since we didn't have all the language options we do now. It was still the language taught in schools, for example. Then it was Java and Python and JS etc. But back then, Jonny Mackintosh was writing bad C++ out of uni.
C++ --
Don't forget to bring your rain gear!
This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)
What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)
And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.
I expect I'd be fine with this because I don't normally interact much with sunlight, the windows in my home have the blinds down 24/7, etc. But you can't really tell for sure without trying it.
More power to pure academics who don't pursue money or fame, and instead make an impact.
Not sure that is a perk. In EU (not sure about this exact offer in Norway) to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU). But it is mandatory social insurance (tax) of 10% to 40% of your income.
Quite far from the truth.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/retire-abroad/sta...
Eligibility periods
In some EU countries, you must have worked for a minimum period of time to be entitled to a pension.
In such cases, the pension authority has to take into account all the periods you've worked in other EU countries, as if you'd been working in that country all along, to assess whether you're entitled to a pension (principle of aggregation of periods).
How your pension is calculated
Pension authorities in each EU country you've worked in will look at the contributions you've paid into their system, how much you've paid in other countries, and for how long you've worked in different countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
But that is what I am talking about! Maybe you get something, maybe not! And nobody knows if Norway will be in EU in 30 years from now!
This is not a stake where you get 10% share of your pension, for working there 3 years (10% of 30 years), but very vague promise.
> all the periods you've worked in other EU countries
What if I worked OUTSIDE of EU? I worked 15 years in Norway, than moved back to US.... Now I am freeloader and get NOTHING!!!
I don't know the specific case of the US and Norway, but some EU countries have extra bilateral agreements with non-EU countries. Italy for example has agreements with countries all around the world (among them the U.S.).
If you are worried that you may not get your money in 30 years, other agreements give the person going back to his home country the right to get back the money that he gave to the pension fund (this include the U.S.).
Now, this depends on the country, but I wouldn't discount the destination without checking first.
I am not worried. I am saying there is no contract that says you get X in N years! Maybe that maybe something, but it is very vague promise.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/freeload...
a person who uses money, food, a room in a house, etc. given by other people, but who gives nothing to them in exchange
Read laws, locals who only worked 15 years are also not entitled!
You wrote that in the European Union (nothing to do with Norway) you don’t get ANY (your uppercase) money if you don’t work « like 30 years » at the « very same » country. If you don’t stand by what your wrote so much better because it was false.
In fact it is similar in many countries (i.e. UK) where there is a minimum period required to get anything
This is not my experience (close friend in a flyover state makes 55k), so I googled and found this website: https://postdocsalaries.com/results
55k looks to be well within the normal range of American postdoc salaries.
1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.
2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.
3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.
4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.
Why?
Yellow flag not red because this is a general observation with plenty of exceptions, of course.
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
> Plus it would be fascinating
You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.
It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research. It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.
The obsession with the ‘STEM’ acronym (well, really the grouping rather than the name) also winds me up, but I better not go there…
It’s not HN. It’s the fact that doing PHD is only a reasonable choice if you either want to get into academia long term or you come from wealth. (Historically science and research was a rich people thing, and only became accessible once student loans were more accessible)
I genuinely considered doing PhD after my Masters degree. No matter what I couldn’t justify spending 5 more years, borrowing more money on top of my tens of thousands of student loans just to stay afloat. I would still be living roommates well into my 30s, have no prospects when it came to dating, rely on student loans and my parents to support me, while literally any job I did would put me in a better position. Like I could bartend full time and I’d be making more money than the stipend. All of this in the hopes of what? That I’d have a dissertation in super specialized field, not necessarily the one I want in because I won’t have the advisor I need and the one I have only wants me to do very specific things they want. And that dissertation may or may not be relevant to the industry or even academia in a year or two.
And if you decide after your PhD, that you’ll join the industry, you’ve lost out on 5 years of compounded growth financially and personally. It’s not like a PhD gets you more money in 95% of the jobs.
Realistically, the only people with me who ended up committing to doing this were people who had no other prospects or were looking for a full time role in academia.
5 years of professional experience beat a phd title in 98-99% of IT job searches, no question there.
I would even more deeply probe such a candidate for good personality match with rest of the team and company overall, ie sometimes one has to suck it up and do non-ideal solution instead of having endless discussions about ideal one. And IMHO folks form academia are sometimes tad too idealistic and need additional 'baby-sitting', pushing them even further into junior less-ideal box. Smart alone is mostly meaningless when not harnessed efficiently.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
- George Bernard Shaw
I was going to say something in my own words, but I don't think I can do better.
What about a decent stable life where you are not struggling, and actually can start a family before turning, say, 35?
I don't think it can be supported by academia anymore.
I just don't want to go through 5-10 years of PhD, then two postdocs, and then start a job that is by no means tenured.
And PhD isn't really a place for satiating your unfettered, unhinged curiosity. You have to do research along your advisor's line of inquiry, look at funding prospects, churn out papers at a cutthroat pace, and then deal with politics. Also, you can somewhat easily change a job, but cannot switch advisors that easily. Switching institutions is considerably harder.
If you want a FAANG job, you can get that without a PhD. And earn much more by the time your PhD were to be finished if you didn't go for it.
EE and CS are fields where you can do your research on your own if you are genuinely curious. Maybe, you won't have a career as a researcher. But you also won't be with a thinning hairline, single, and far from financial indepence at 33.
I suspect you are an American who doesn't know much about the outside world. Here in the UK, for example, you can finish a PhD in three years (so you could be around 25!).
> And PhD isn't really a place for satiating your unfettered, unhinged curiosity.
Try stopping me! Seriously.
> You have to do research along your advisor's line of inquiry, look at funding prospects, churn out papers at a cutthroat pace, and then deal with politics.
This is simply not true in general. Perhaps it's true in the more woolly, fashion and politics-driven disciplines.
> If you want a FAANG job, you can get that without a PhD.
I mean, no shit...
> at 33.
Again — I don't know where this idea that a PhD takes '5-10 years' comes from. It's nonsense.
In defense of being money centric, we are not talking about yachts and drugs level money. To me, money means buying a house, starting a family, taking care of my parents, looking after my own health, and overall stability. These are the hallmarks of what used to be a middle class lifestyle in America.
If people are getting PhDs to earn more money long term, these are also not people who intend to live lavishly. It only seems exceptional because almost every other avenue to previously “normal” life has been closed off.
There’s nothing wrong with studying something because you’re interested in it. But for me, it would’ve likely meant foregoing the above.
It shouldn’t be surprising that people are putting a premium on financial stability these days.
What people are, quite rightly, pointing out about getting a PhD is the "will live in poverty for a decade+ with better odds of winning the lottery than getting a tenured position to do research".
Even if you want to do research, you have to eat, too.
It's just not a great win in any way unless your main thing in life is your job being your main intellectual stimulant.
Counter - I recently asked a faculty candidate how he would recruit curious, talented graduate students, and he said “I develop connections from interesting online communities like Hacker News.” I loved this answer because it’s consistent with my observations. HN may seem cynical but the average level of potential PhD students is higher than many alternatives!
Not to be dismissive, because career academics are important. But there is an unnecessary anxiety for many about leaving school and entering the workforce.
I think one attraction is also: “wow, I can get paid to continue my education?”
Academia is like universal basic income for the highly intelligent. It’s a good system, overall and I think it will have a strong future. But it is not a good way to build wealth.
That said, the freedom it provides can make a PhD a great place to start a business, start a family, etc. But, it requires bravery and self direction, because it certainly won’t steer you there.
Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that.
If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.
If you get lucky and find a PI that is interested in exactly the same thing, you're good. You might get lucky enough to find someone who is interested in something near what you want. Most likely, you will be assigned the thing you do for your PhD.
That's why I did a PhD, but of course, I'd still like some job security at the end of the pipeline. Currently a postdoc.
I always thought I was lucky because I was into computers and was able to do what I actually enjoyed, but when I look back I don't think working for Wikia for $850 a month was the best choice I could have made.
If you're able to ignore that fantastic, great for you and I hope you're happy, but even fully funded positions have just enough money to cover the minimum length of a PhD. To get the most from it chances are you will either end up with minor debt or wipe out some savings. Unfortunately such is life.
IMO the goal of the PhD shouldn't be to think of a city job as a high frequency trader at the end, but that's my worldview that why spend X years studying in a field of you don't intend to follow it...
Chances are if you say that during an interview for a place, unless it's in studying high frequency trading you won't get a call back.
All that while your age mates from school/college/town are progressing in their life and career.
Also if you get into non-academic job then those early years foregone usually have disproportionately bigger impact on your career progression and your accumulated wealth.
The decision is really big one and it’s only natural to consider money angle. I’ve known quite a few get into it because of interest and then getting disillusioned as they watch the world pass them by.
Further, there was an "unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption" that faculty were in the business of bringing in grant money, and he who didn't wouldn't last long.
Then in the last few years we came to learn that much of the "academics" that gets published today is completely bogus. What subject are those "researchers" interested in?
Then you need a stable situation first. Not everyone can choose to spend years badly paid while accruing debt from tuition and renting in a high cost area.
You read like a privileged person who comes from money or won the lottery.
Lol! Are you new here? Y-combinator is literally about selling your soul to VC.
Not surprising at all. It's a forum run by a VC firm populated with a decent number of people who are wannabe founders, trying to jump on the latest fad, hoping to win the startup jackpot.
And (way back when it was small), I think a big part of the appeal was you could rub shoulders with some VC people and founders who actually made it.
> It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research.
I think it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.
> It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.
I don't know about "earning a lot of money," but the whole PhD thing seems to have gotten super exploitative. Passion is one thing, but it's not a good thing to get taken advantage of. IMHO, long and difficult educational programs should be designed to guarantee a high chance of a reasonable stable and comfortable outcome.
I think it is beneficial for everyone that the money angle for PhD is openly discussed and made public. This way, the correct audience (those who don't need to work for a living, i.e. born rich) might be attracted instead of burning out middle/lower class youth with dreams.
...Or steps can be taken to change PhD programs. Which does not seem likely.
I don't think I read a single first-hand account in this whole thread; just a lot of whining, hearsay, entirely made up bollocks, and a hell of a lot of chips on shoulders.
Frankly, no. Because as beautiful as that concept is, it's 6 years in your younger decades, where the magic of compound interest makes every dollar you save or spend count a lot more than any money you make later in life.
Add tuition and loans, also with compound interest, and well, I have no resentment against people from wealthy enough backgrounds that they can just do this. If that's how want to use your privileged background, nothing but respect from me.
But 99% of us have to consider the money.
Dude, you got-a eat.
It has always been heavy on Silicon Valley (legal) hustler types? Even more earlier. Concerning startups most seems disillusioned about the prospects nowadays.
Why is it surprising? The market is saying most people don’t have that privilege and academia is still in denial about that and completely out of touch, your surprise suggests you are… in touch? if this was a standardized test question, which you’re probably good at, you would not choose that answer
Both the private and public sector have co-opted university credentials as prerequisites for employment, leading a different audience to demand and feel entitled to being accepted at universities
I will give you something though: I agree this is all a mistake and the universities will outlive this 100 year folly of the plebs wanting to be there for employment, and revert to being half millennium old networking and refinement clubs for upper class children
Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.
Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
They also employ <100 PhDs. The entire company is small. Might not be worth mentioning as an employed because the chance of getting in is miniscule.
> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part
they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.
Hard to imagine any relationship between that outcome and a policy of exclusively hiring a demographic that's notorious for having high intellectual skills but low life experience. Wait, no, not hard. Easy.
Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking.
If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work and getting the education, go for it. If you have to make the PhD pencil out financially, think long and hard before enrolling. And if your ambition is to be a full professor, reread the first paragraph.
Otherwise this point is indeed correct.
The academic pyramid was never sustainable.
However, for some fields (science and engineering being good examples) there are decent jobs outside of academia.
PhDs might not be working in schools, but there's plenty doing meaningful research outside of academia.
I'm sure 3M hires plenty of PhDs; and venture-capital-backed health device companies; and oil companies looking for new ways to capture oil; and so on.
The opportunity cost isn’t just in life-time earnings, it’s also the time you sunk hyper focused on one very specific topic.
There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/
I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.
You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.
As maligned as the poverty lines are—and they do have plenty of shortcomings—they are still a far closer approximation of "the true cost of living in a modern economy" than this drivel.
†No, really, go compare the "living wage" figures (https://livingwage.mit.edu/) with AMI stats (https://ami-lookup-tool.fanniemae.com/).
Which is generally above poverty levels right
Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.
Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.
Not all PhD graduates get there; many just skate by because no one wants to fail them. They are an essential part of the modern labor force, though.
So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.
It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.
On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.
It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.
My sense is you might get paid when you start what an undergraduate makes after one year and a pay raise.
Your career will probably develop faster than the person who started working after undergrad. Your ceiling is likely hire.
I don't have a PhD, but this is what I've observed.
I also have many friends with humanities phds that I really hope figure something out. They are all extremely intelligent. But one is literally getting a phd in Shakespeare. Cool. I love it. But there’s like 3 openings a year and they aren’t even at a top tier school. It’s all a mess.
Also I think from NSF stats STEM PhDs are on a slow and upward trend, unlike the countries mentioned in the article.
35,566 / 57862 = 61.5% (overall)
26,622 / 45,533 = 58.5% (stem PhDs)
Survey of earned doctorates, national center for educational statistics, 2023 data…very useful, as are many of the data products the federal government collects, for however long this is up
8 years on, I'm still in the same map company along with 3-4 others who have joined after or mid-way their PhDs (and some more who didn't bother) and we do routing for hundreds of customers and basically have everything a PhD group has, including Seasonal Seminars on Routing Algorithms.
Finite element Method is not as exciting as AI (I used to think at some point that it would) and Port Hamiltonian Systems is something not a lot of people talk about, except maybe Dr. Volker Mehrmann and his group :)
Academia is not for the faint hearted and a PhD isn't just about research anymore. It's just a low paying job now, sadly. I still say things like "if I ever happen to go back to academia", as if I did a lot there. But I am an academic at heart, just that pursuing a PhD didn't certify it any better or seem to provide more freedom for exploring my passion for studies or a particular topic.
Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees.
I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need
I've always wondered what signal they were acting on. Perhaps the value of the MBA has been watered down, or it was just too easy to game the admissions.
Every year you have to accumulate enough points. The main source of points are publications. But they're not valued based on the gravitas of your writing, rather than which publisher is willing to publish. And these valuation seems to be random. Senior people will often offer to open doors to younger reserchers in exchange for their name to be put in their papers. Stealing someones ideas is not even the goal as is getting more points.
I have no idea how this translates to other countries, but as someone who - with one or two different choices in my youth - could easily end up as a sociology scholar, and who has a lot of friends who chose that path, I'm deeply flabbergasted.
A young naive version of me seen academia as polar opposite of working for evil bigco, but the reality that the amount of politics and backroom scheming is just mind boggling.
I question the premise that low pay caused this drop. PhD research was never about financial security , instead it pays in prestige and expertise of notoriously ramen-eating overworking geniuses. Prestige has certainly gone down since they became so commodified, and expertise can end with a Master's. Most PhDs are not even computer science and related fields (where the most interesting research roles are in companies).
We should rethink the duration and archaic formulation of the doctoral programs. Our times are faster
You're looking at this wrong. PhD was always about financial security for the vast majority of PhDs. You think all those Chinese and Korean etc. students are coming to study engineering to get invited to the good parties back home? No, they're doing it because it provides financial security. Same for places all over the world. Europe, everywhere.
It's basically upper and upper middle class white Americans who pursue PhDs for the social prestige, because they already have actual capital, so they're pursuing social capital. Everyone else does it for a combination of money and love for the subject matter.
This means most students don’t get to be integrated into a research group, and many supervisors get very little funding for students as their university doesn’t have the funding.
Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.
The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.
The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.
Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.
I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.
The degree turned out to have a lot of transferable skills - especially in researching and solving problems.
Just 25 years later I am a Principal Engineer in the Oz Telco industry writing Rust!
I don't regret the degree for a moment - although when I went through the degree was free, even at a top tier Australian university.
I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.
All-in-all, it's not really a retirement hobby. If you're really rich and can self-fund your graduate studies, then you can probably go to all types of schools and work in all sorts of labs. A self-funded rich student would be great for most labs. Many schools will accept all types of people, but if you're not getting an acceptance letter with an offer of funding, it's basically like a rejection letter.
I've heard of people in retirement becoming a student for the healthcare benefits some schools offer though. They maintain enough credits to have the right status so they aren't paying a boatload, but can still be on a student healthcare plan that gives great benefits.
But even after the money consideration... you still have all the "lost credibility" in the system, because the institutions are not properly funded, and also because science is very dependent on grants,politics, and stupid criteria + nepotism and corruption inside the institutions, etc. That goes beyond PhD applications to even "who can sell the coffee in campus". On PhD apps, I will never forget when one of my housemate just said to me that he would leave the country because one teacher said to him in advance that he would not enter on PhD, because everything was bought out.
I think this is only the ""beginning"" of at least 10+ years of colleges having a hard time/ losing credibility year after year (sometimes because they are failing, and other times because they dare to have opinions different than people like Musk, which is not fair for academia). Either way, should I feel sorry for them? For the institutions, sure. But for the people who rule the institutions right now? My only fear is that they will be substituted by even worse individuals.
This is supply / demand.
There were just a bunch of articles about 'not enough' positions for PhD's.
So, now there are fewer enrolled.
Doesn't this happen in every field. There are two many people for the jobs, so people stop perusing those fields. Then the cycle kind of moves around, to, now we don't have enough people.
While we all can agree to that, reducing the PhD to just the new MSc comments is a bit worrisome.
But then take a look at so many ML PhD theses and one can truly see this is the case. So much unregulated garbage on ICML, NeurIPS as well.
The later if you love working in a particular field and want a reasonably straightforward path to success.
Very few true eccentrics left.
I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.
Everyone wants the benefits of research but no one wants to pay for it, and slowly over the last three or four decades administrations have pushed researchers into these Faustian bargains that have led to the system have today. A lot of what we have is a pyramid scheme, but that pyramid scheme exists in part because people somewhere along the legislator-funder-administrative chain decided that is what would be rewarded. Once it started and was encouraged it snowballed.
All of it is made worse by governments that don't seem to understand the problems or implications of their decisions. Anti-immigration laws (not talking about the US here actually necessarily) hurts enrollment, which has downstream effects even though that immigration is bringing in net income. Yes, indirect costs are gamified sometimes, and there should be some accountability system put in place with researcher protections (the original point of tenure), but no, that doesn't mean just cutting indirect costs down to some unsustainable level that doesn't reflect real costs.
Also to be fair there's a lot of this gamification and false prestige that happens all over the US and world economy, we just don't like to admit it. I think it's one of the defining problems of our time probably.
Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.
In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).
Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).
I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.
I see this as being the same as
> the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.
Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position.
Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.
Forget pricey degrees. Just start streaming, become controversial af, gain an audience of young followers, sell them on quasi-legal gambling platforms, rake in that cheddar.
Or become a “political talking head” that doesn’t contribute to the conversation but instead provokes audiences with click baity material.
Or if you are traditionally attractive, start teasing the waters with “Just Chatting” streams and potentially switch up to selling OF subs. Nothing wrong with it, got to make that cheddar. Right?
I’m calling it now. The alignment with neoliberal economic policy is the downfall of not just the United States but the end of capitalism itself.
PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs.
The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.
Come on use the words that are actually plaguing PhD programs, exploitation of cheap labor and minimum pay for working endless hours
what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything
My temple became the library and would go there immediately after class and every weekend at 8am. I graduated at the brink of COVID so could no longer go to my favorite and on my very last final of my college career couldn’t take the noise of my roommates cheering me on and also just wanted to be done to used chegg on a small part of my test and got caught.
Do I deserve to get my PhD? No. Why? I showed my academic integrity can’t be trusted. Do I still want my PhD? 1000% Yes. Do I regret my decision? No.
My school told me I could either not be awarded my degree or receive it with the exception that “cheater” be branded everywhere on it. I originally wanted to go with no degree at all but figured I’d own up to my mistake and use the label to rebrand myself as someone who learned their lesson and won’t make the same mistake again.
During COVID I obviously couldn’t find work so utilized my spare time to pick up a new hobby and landed on tinkering. That lead into my discovery of software and the rest is history. I fell in love with software engineering and have been doing it for the past 4+ years.
I’m extremely proud of myself and all that I’ve accomplished because with absolutely no incentive or motivations or even help I managed to learn a new subject completely on my own. A cheater can post code that isn’t theirs’ to their GitHub over the course of 4 years however a cheater can’t show you 4 years worth of work. Also if you think a tech job might’ve been my motivation, I did try to obviously get a job but failed at yet another goal and quit several months ago. I’m working construction but still learning and coding each and every day.
A PhD is becoming an expert in a specified subject and then thinking up an idea no one has ever had before and backing up your ideas with proof. In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen. I think (big emphasis on think) I can do that completely on my own. If I’m being honest I’ve actually already begun and don’t know if it’ll work out, come to fruition, or even be read but at least I tried. If I try the only cost is my time but if you’re in a program it costs time and money.
Did you ignore almost every other comment in this thread when you wrote this?
What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.
on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.
The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.
So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.
Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.
Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.
And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561
If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.
Also, circulating particularly weird dissertations for the express purpose of angering people has gotten a lot more rewarding