Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)
economist.com
economist.com
I guess I shouldn't expect any better from The Economist, but not everyone in the world just does whatever they can to make the most money possible, ignoring all other considerations.
Assuming I'm making enough money to survive comfortably (which is essentially guaranteed with computer anything, including grad school itself), I don't care. What I get to work on, and what environment I get to work on it in, is far, far, more important. Overridingly important.
This mentality (though usually not so extreme) is pretty common among math and computing people, which is probably why industry is finally starting to notice that workplace perks are very important. There are plenty of extremely talented people who'd gladly take a 50% pay cut to work in a less shitty environment...
I agree that people value the environment they work in, but I think that to the people you outline, working in a culture that values original ideas and open discourse is more important than having workplace perks like free sodas.
Most programmers in NYC could get a raise going to Wall Street. They don't do it because they don't like the abuse.
Most Physics professors could get a raise going to Wall Street. They don't do it for a variety of reasons.
It's about more than money.
But... The core of the story is true. There's a systemic problem with the Phd market. Every school and professor has an incentive to churn out more than the market needs. Like any career choice, people need to go into this with open eyes.
Wall Street is, on the whole, less abusive these days than VC-istan. However, it is more selective. Also, the chances for rapid career progress aren't there. You can make as much money, but you certainly won't be leading a team at 27 in a hedge fund; whereas if you are 27 and not at least a "tech lead" in VC-istan, you've lost.
Don't rule out finance based on its reputation, because it's not as bad as it's made out to be, especially relative to the other high-paying options. I've seen both and engineers are treated worse, on average, in the VC-funded world than in the hedge funds.
- Immediate respect. It is harder to question the authority of a (technical) PhD. This is much more pronounced in 3rd world economies. Also Germany. Basically anywhere besides the non-super-meritocratic US. This is a huge benefit: my opinions are more likely to be listened to, my consulting fees are likely to be higher and be more credible, career breaks (maternity) will not set me back by much, because a PhD proves technical mastery of an area as well as tenacity, responsibility, and independence - all of which non-PhDs will continously try to prove to new coworkers and new management.
- Universities are forever open, but not so with Masters. That gives immense job security as a private university lecturer for the rest of your life, in any country (flexibility to travel and find a job even in countries you don't speak the language of). Private universities in rich countries pay a lot to be able to say they have a, say, MIT-PhD on their faculty. I knew a person who had a data-entry job and saw the faculty salaries in Saudi Arabia. The profs were making 396$k/year, housing and living costs fully compensated by the university.
- Flexibility to find jobs forever (especially because of the university thing). Normally I imagine it would be harder to be a salaried employee after 65 years of age. Nobody will hire you because it is so weird to have an employee your dad's age. Ageism is real. But because you can always lecture, you are pretty much unretirable.
The 4-5 year salary cut is nothing compared to a lifetime of these benefits and zero anxiety about job prospects after 50. I personally want to work and earn money in a respectable job well into my 80s.
Further, the university sector may be on the verge of massive disruption - look at startups such as Coursera and Udacity. Its difficult to be sure it'll provide reliable employment by the time you reach 65.
I've just finished a PhD program in an Irish university, which I got a lot out of; but I wouldn't do it for job security, or earning power.
But maybe you are talking about doing a PhD in a best-in-world institution; if so, maybe the picture is different.
1. Business people tend to mistrust highly educated people with no at least as impressive industry credentials. The meme of the crazy scientist with the head on the moon an no concern to real concerns runs deep and wide. Once you have both the schooling and the provable hands on experience it starts to pay off, but getting there is not trivial. Also, to make it pay it off you must go into consulting, since no employer will think they can afford you full time past some point. And to make it as consultant you need to pick an specialty that provides hard qualitatively measurable value.
2. Scratch that immense job security in the private university. As a matter of fact, they tend to hire a lot of adjunct professors and post-doc lecturers in order to avoid giving the sinecure for full professors. Public universities and research centers are still ok, but you will have a hard time in any education center whose bottom line depends on undergrad tuition.
3. Don't count on the flexibility thing either. University may be happy to hire part time lecturers with lots of industry experience, but not the other way around. I had a very hard time crawling out of this particular hole and have know others that never were able to make it back after a "short stint as a teacher".
4. Jobs prospect after 50 might be right, but you have to know how to play your cards really well. It is not a given, and in any case you are probably better off knowing your way in industry than relying on academia.
I don't earn a huge amount, but I have a fantastic job, I live in a wonderful place about 5 minutes from my office and doing my Ph.D. was the best thing that I ever did.
I agree that you don't need one, and many people with one that I have met and employed are fairly hopeless (in comparison to razor sharp and super talented B.Sc. folk) but babe, if it floats your boat go for it.
Don't listen to the haters!
I'm sure that I am overreacting, but the suggestion that a PhD is the first and only time that you will experience original knowledge in your life seems quite smug.
However, original knowledge is one of the core tenets of an academic doctorate after all, and it's certainly one legitimate avenue towards original research and knowledge.
But I don't see any place where Dr. Might suggests that it's the _only_ experience that can lead to original research.
I think a PhD is definitely one of the only experiences where upon completion you are required to have contributed to the world of original and new knowledge in some way, though.
I don't know... If I spend up to 7 years of my life studying and researching my ass off to become one of the foremost experts in a specialized field, then it better have more benefits than just personal satisfaction.
A fantastic job with good living arrangements do not require a Ph.D.
Where did you get the magic number 7 from?
I could have gone academic, in fact I could toss it all away and go academic right now. However ... I would never voluntarily make my wife and kids suffer like that. Maybe after I retire it would be safe to go academic.
It boils down to you might be able to fire me up enough to eat ramen and live in a cardboard box because of topic X, but I'd have a hard time looking my kids in the eye and telling them they'll never eat anything better than ramen because dad likes topic X more than them.
That's the screwed up nature of the system. "Everyone knows you HAVE to take a vow of poverty and give up your private life to advance science". Oh really, and why is that? Why isn't it "Everyone knows you HAVE to take a vow of poverty and give up your private life to stamp license plates, but if you wanna be rich go into academia..."
You might have selection bias. All the pro athletes I know of, appear to be financially healthy. That doesn't mean pro basketball is a great plan for kids, given the evidence that 99.99% of kids who want to be pro basketball players end up doing something else, something much less profitable than NBA star... I would theorize this is directly analogous to going into academics.
The winners win. Turns out that winning is, in fact, pretty fun. The losers, well..., that's most of the them, but we're not going to talk about them.
I respect your desire for more money in exchange for more commitment, but we should also recognize that money is but one of many motivators, all of which are ultimately in the service of increasing personal satisfaction.
The only kind of benefits any job can have is subjective "personal satisfaction". The degree to which any particular objective result of employment (e.g., material gain) is an important factor in producing personal satisfaction, of course, varies from person to person.
It is possible that others have different considerations?
The educational aspects of a PhD, at least in my program, were essentially equivalent to the educational aspects of getting a masters degree in the same subject area. The difference between them was after you finished the educational aspects you were now expected to produce between 3 to 6 papers a year corresponding roughly to the important conferences in your field and get most of them published. Speaking personally it takes me about three to four weeks to write a good research paper assuming I already have the results, so I worked out at one point that I had about two weeks to generate meaningful work to write about if I was to publish to that schedule. It is impossible to do anything more than the famous Least Publishable Increment of Work in that environment, and as a result most papers in Computer Science aren't especially compelling. A healthier field (say, chemistry, physics, mathematics) has you write perhaps one or two a year, with actual data.
Then, I vainly read the comments hoping that someone had made my point, but alas.
So, a couple of propositions:
1) pay in academia is less than that in industry (especially in engineering and computing) 2) more PhD's stay in academia. 3) Averages are affected by extreme values. Note I'm using the mean here, as that's what all the studies do (annoyingly enough).
Therefore, it would make sense that on an aggregate level, the salaries of people with PhD's would not show an increase relative to those with masters.
Note that clearly this does not imply that doing a PhD is an (economic) waste of time, as it may be that PhD's, conditional on being employed in industry actually earn more than those with master's degrees.
Man, I hate the mean sometimes.
This article would say something more meaningful if it included data only from PhD's that attempted to go into industry.
Also, where I'm doing my PhD, a starting salary as a PhD student is comparable (slightly lower) with entry level programmer salaries.
edit: economists -> economists/journalists/outsiders
They're not implying reasons, they're reporting it. Its all about how much your culture values people with PHD / in the pipeline to get one. You may not like what your culture is saying about you, but no point in blaming the messenger.
Rotate into a (hopefully) nonpersonal analogy. Say a statistician reports that your average ex-con makes 25% less than someone who hasn't been punished yet. The proper response isn't against the statistician, or that the point of prison isn't to make money, or that ex-cons used to make more money in the good old days, the point is to observe that our culture doesn't particularly value ex-cons, much less than most assume, and much worse than it used to be.
Like being a black sheep? Nothin wrong with being an individual. But don't give someone a hassle for reporting the emperor has no clothes.
They're reporting outcomes, not processes. Reporting actual measured price not self perceived value.
IF they were morally or ethically attacking because academia leads to poverty etc etc ... you'd know. The tone of the article wouldn't be "hey guess what"
Weasel words all over the place, invented problems (at least not backed with anything): |Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things.".
I'm not reading further now as I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019665 [886 days old]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503996 [46 days old]
A plane ticket every six weeks will increase your selection far more than anything congress can pass - especially for a hot coder with you know family and commitments
Or is that it - let the cheap young single coders in ?
American jobs is the wrong term - google jobs, apple jobs, Facebook jobs - all up for grabs by the best in the world
May not be that easy given what you are allowed to use a Business visa for.
PhDs grads aren't financially driven - they are mathematically driven - to the extent of thinking about problems all day. Everyone I knew used to keep a notebook and pen by the bed because waking up in the night with an idea was so common. With this much passion, the desire to leave academia for a well-paid industry job is low.
After a certain level of education we are not training the individual to optimise their income - we select those who will be paid and supported to do research to invent the next generation.
We need to grow grad students and professors of every science so that one of them will have the breakthrough that keeps humankind on an upward trajectory
Ps It's two years old to you, it's brand new to me ;-)
If you have a crazy idea and the peer reviewers find it worthwhile publishing, it'll make it into publication even if you don't have a GED.
Open Access is a completely orthogonal issue to this.
Often times, the knowledge guild is actually never put down on paper. You, sadly, need to be at a university where people are working on what you want to be able to do anything. Papers are just waypoints.
IMO, there is nothing wrong with companies making a profit from providing access to publicly funded research; the only problems are lack of competition and (IMO consequently) profit margins that society finds unjust.
The former, I think, is being settled. More and more new research is effectively open access. The latter, then, will follow.
And to your second point: there used to be companies that had university-like environments where short-time profits do not rule the day (AT&T, Xerox, Philips Natlab, Apple's ATG). Nowadays, Google and Microsoft Research still have similar groups.
Here's an example. When I did math research last summer at my university, I looked at 16 papers. It took a while to gather these even with my university account with which I obtained the articles for free. If I had to google every single article, it would have taken me much more time - at least double if not triple the time.
In a lot of HN conversations pertaining to computer science research, it appears to me that a lot of folks equate doing computer science research with publishing papers.
I suppose that if your job is to work as a researcher, or as a grad student, or as a professor, perhaps publishing papers is very important.
But in the context of doing research independently (as this subthread seems to be about), why should we care? Isn't the more fundamental point of computer science research to develop new software systems that either do something totally innovative, or improve upon previous systems in novel ways?
(1) What you're solving has already been solved
(2) You have a bug in your solution
(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)
(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).
Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.
The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).
Now, if you're doing research in biology, then this is a bigger problem. Pubmed is great, especially when you get access to freely available papers, but open access is not the norm yet. The tide is turning though, and I think most (all?) NIH-funded research is supposed to be open access.
However, if you're doing research in biology, not having a PhD is not really the main issue -- you need a lab, money, equipment, mice etc. There's no AWS for biology, sadly, though in fairness it would be a need idea! :)
Even a masters in CS is overkill these days. Most employers are looking for entry level code monkeys in order to underpay, or industry hardened, bitter individuals to act as leads and seniors (assuming they didn't promote from within).
I have the opportunity to get my masters in CS for free, but I'm not sure if the time spent is really worth it. I could either have another expensive piece of paper, or add more code to my github account for future employment... Whenever I decide to switch jobs.
If you are back to back sprints (it's a marathon but if we ring the bell on every lap we will get there faster) then you need a masters to put the time aside
You could always do both. Academics who can actually write good code are a pretty rare commodity.
I feel guilty about not up and doing it already, but I'm only 1 year out of college, and don't want to go back to that grind just yet.
I really have no excuse aside from "I don't wanna" right now, and that's a pretty shit reason.
Would it even come to mind to people writing this kind of article that one might do a PhD by passion and interest? If one wants to do research and teach, on one hand doing a PhD is the (only?) way to start doing this two-sides job immediately after a master and on the other hand it's the better way to get this kind of job after?
And even if one doesn't want to pursue a career in academia, one could perfectly want to do some research in a first time and only after that get a job in industry. Maybe one doesn't care that he is not paid more than if he did get a job in industry right after his master, because he did something that passionated him for a few years in between?
Seriously what's the point of this kind of article? A PhD is a fantastic adventure! If people want to do a PhD let them. People don't do PhD to earn more money, that's just a stupid idea.
EDIT: Ah! I'm happy to see that while I wrote this comment a few others with the same idea were posted :-).
PhD programs differ widely between schools and disciplines. If you're going to pursue a PhD do some investigation. Find out what graduates from the program are doing now. Do you want to do what they're doing? If so then consider a PhD from this program. If not then either don't do a PhD or find another program.
One of the key reservations that I had before starting my PhD was how much it would reduce my employment options and limit my earning potential; I did it anyway. I don't know how things will work out, but I made peace with the fact that I will in all likelihood be earning less after I get my PhD than I was beforehand.
YMMV, though.
Mathematics allowed me to see things in a more general light, appreciate the importance of elegant code, and work on interesting problems that others might find difficult (eg. graph-theoretic constructions, encryption, etc.).
And it's really nice to formulate and prove your own theorems just to make your code work.
Putting a $ figure on higher education is like setting the value of a hair transplant.
I don't think it's useful to compare the value of a successful PhD experience to some amount of money. This is especially true for the people who would be considering a PhD in the first place.
Whether or not someone pursues a PhD likely comes down to the personal value they believe they will get from the process, not the projected economic benefit.
On some level, it makes sense that the majority of PhD-holders do not have a starting-gate income advantage over BS holders. In recent years, a BS has become a gateway to the workforce.
I think this is partly because of the ease of hiring it presents to employers. If someone is a college graduate, that serves as a soft guarantee of ability, responsiblity, and education.
PhD work is by nature ill-suited to the workforce. Research positions are rare, and finding an open opportunity that speaks perfectly to a unique education will be difficult. Hiring a PhD student may only come with the 'soft guarantee' mentioned above, and little else, if the position does not align with the students' research.
1) It's the only way to get a job in certain really interesting fields
2) Ph.D's garner massive respect from peers
3) Disrespect for industry, there's a perception of tedium, and looking down on people who are "code monkeys" or "project managers"
4) Some kind of academic momentum - it's socially and psychologically easier to stay in college/academia than to switch to industry
(disclosure: we are working on a tool for academics: http://bohr.launchrock.com/).
We don't pay extra for advanced CS degrees. In fact, we prefer to hire people with EE, physics, and math degrees over CS in general.
Academia as a career, unless you're unambiguously one of the top minds of your generation, is a bad idea. That boat has sailed and sunk.
However, a PhD in math or CS will make you eligible for higher-quality jobs more quickly than a Master's degree. There's a certain prestige that PhDs have that someone like me probably won't, and by the time you're 35+, it's almost impossible to go back, due to a combination of financial problems and admissions (you're now what is called "non-traditional").
I left a math PhD program for an internship on Wall Street. It was the right decision for me, especially because it got me on the job market before the Crash of 2008. Would I recommend that for everyone? No, I wouldn't.
By the time you are 40, whether you have a working brain or not will be a function of the quality of work you did in your 20s and 30s. If you do a decade or more of stupid work-- and the work most people get assigned is that-- you'll have lost your edge. On the other hand, if you keep doing exciting stuff, you'll be one of the sharpest people out there (and running circles around young people falling flat on mistakes you've already made). For your future, interesting work matters, and a PhD is a powerful asset (though it doesn't guarantee anything) in the battle for the scarce interesting projects.
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/dont-look-now...
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...
Anything else falls down, both because the interesting work gets hoarded and distributed as a political token, and because the best people find it easier (after 3-5 years at most) to leave then to get the work they want internally.
Good companies are out there, but they tend to be slower growing. This ties in to my r/K-selection analysis of capitalism: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1es505/corporate...