The Jobless Ph.D. Generation
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But:
>students still come out with a very narrow window of extremely specialized knowledge
Duh.
>Additional courses in broader topics such as writing and business would also be beneficial (6).
Huh? This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized.
(And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.)
If students or employers want alternative degree programs, that is well and good, I encourage universities to begin offering them, and as a professor I would be quite happy to teach and advise such students.
But I see no reason to dilute Ph.D. programs, which continue to serve the purpose for which they were created.
Do they have the time?
My undergrad program was extremely... focused (a word the administration would no doubt use to describe it). In my entire 4.5 years I had exactly two non-engineering electives, the rest of the schedule was a full stack of "core" courses. This was not atypical at my school.
The result of which is that you create a bunch of people who are very narrowly educated. I dodged that bullet with a combination of suicidal course loads (e.g., taking a 7th course in a 6-core-course semester) and class-skipping. Neither were good solutions and I only made it out by the skin of my teeth.
The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented.
There is a dramatic misalignment of what you think you're doing there and what your students think they're doing there.
People in my program take Spanish. I knew one person who did creative writing. We actually have a class on consulting in a closely related department that you could manage to sell as an elective. I took some only faintly related classes in another department.
It's not easy, and it will add time (that's the true problem with a PhD, balancing 'Things I want To Do' and 'I want to finish') but it's doable. PhDs are also often much less "locked in" to coursework than undergraduates, especially after their first few years.
"The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented."
I can't think of a single person in my program who wasn't fully aware that a PhD is about producing original research. They might struggle with doing that, but it's a known and understood requirement.
There's a career-oriented degree. It's a Masters.
The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career.
The problem is that there are a lot of people paying the quid, and barely anyone getting the quo. Unless you are a student of independent wealth, you are not producing this research out of the goodness of your heart with no greater, more important objective. To the vast, vast majority of people doing their Ph.D's, a Ph.D. is a career maneuver.
PhD students generally just love research. We sign up for this because it's what we enjoy doing. Companies try hard to recruit us away, but we stay in spite of that, because why would we want to do anything other than work on the one problem we've always wanted to solve?
Maybe it's different in the humanities, but every STEM PhD student I've ever met has low expectations, with the exception of one-- and she has a first authorship on a Nature paper and is working on a Science submission, so I still think she's pretty well-grounded.
Honestly, at this point, finding out that the job market is grim takes only a shred of research, and absolutely the kind of research you should do before applying.
Anecdotal rebuttal: The first conversation I had with my research advisor concerned the difficulty of getting a tenure track position at a research university straight out of Ph. D. school. In her words, "that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anymore in this field (Computer Science)."
There are no delusions of academic grandeur, at least in my neck of the woods. I agree that the Ph.D. may be pursued as a career maneuver, but if your end game is a teaching position at a research university your approach to the program has to be very different (and extremely more ambitious) than someone pursuing industry or other goals. And if you're pursuing a prestigious academic position, you are quickly educated on the slim possibility of attaining it, even if you're willing to post doc.
I don't know exactly what I'm going to do when I'm done.
Granted, not everyone thinks like me. But certainly not everyone thinks as you do.
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I work in academia here in Spain. The Masters is usually a prerequisite for doing a PhD here.
The purpose for doing a Ph.D. is to produce original research.
Motivation can vary: intellectual curiosity, desire for employment (academic or otherwise), because their parents demand it, because "Dr." sounds impressive when hitting on strangers at bars... I'm fine with any of the above, as long as the student is willing to do the work.
The students might love research, or perhaps they feel as if they are being made to jump through hoops --- but, unless the students are getting their information from people who aren't actually familiar with academia, there's no misalignment and our students are indeed getting what they came here for.
I dropped out of my PhD when I realised my strongest motivation - my actual strongest motivation, no jokes - was to be a "Dr." who dressed downmarket. This is not a reason to choose a career path. I'd fallen into the PhD program by accident and it had never been a particular ambition of mine...
There appears to be a dramatic misalignment between what you think a PhD is for (seemingly, to secure a job) and its actual purpose (to advance human knowledge in some area).
That would be a perfectly sensible position if not for the fact that they kick you out of PhD school after you finish instead of promoting you.
A PhD is an apprenticeship in doing original research. It is not your first job. It does not pay well, or have any job security or benefits. Your first job is the one you get after your PhD, because they punished you by accepting your thesis, printing your degree, and kicking you out of graduate school, thus forcing you to find an actual position.
Which means that if the job prospects after PhD school are "nothing permanent involving research", then the system is indeed broken. It's broken because thousands of people spend years of our young adulthood working incredibly hard on a single project, only to be told at the end that we haven't really ever held a job, that we are not qualified for a job, and that figuring out what to do after five years of experience in the world's most difficult intellectual endeavors is our problem.
If grad school is not going to lead to, well, anything afterward, then we should stop considering it to be school at all, and just all go on strike to demand that our first real job out of undergrad pay a whole lot better for the hours it makes us work.
Promote you? Why would you expect that? A PhD is not a meal-ticket. It's just an endorsement that says you are very good at undertaking novel and independent research. There is no promise made any point that an academic position or related industry position will be waiting for you at the end. As you say, it's just an apprenticeship. Nothing more. It's up to you to figure out what, if anything, you will do with that education once you receive it.
Because that's what happens when you spend five years in one job and spearhead a large project independently.
You've successfully proven my point: it's an apprenticeship. The problem is, apprenticeships are supposed to be followed by a career as a master practitioner of the craft you apprenticed in. If there are thousands of apprenticeships in science each year, and no permanent jobs as scientists, then the guild structure is unbalanced and the guild is responsible.
So go be a master. Make your own way. A PhD is not a promise of a salaried future at an academic institution.
People who were planning to make their own way got bachelors degrees, people who planned to teach got Masters degrees, and people who planned to research got PhDs.
Now, you can of course keep repeating "make your own way, you dumb ignoramus who doesn't understand market imperatives!" until the cows come home, but all that means is that you consider market imperatives to override guild structure.
Which they have! But a descriptive statement about how the system has come to work is not a normative statement about how it should be made to function. Certainly I would say the guild structure is malfunctioning when job qualifications have gone from "produce one masterpiece (a PhD) over a few years and you can get a job" to "produce two to three masterpieces (a PhD and one or two post-docs) over a dozen years, and then you're considered just about qualified to apply for a permanent job".
By the way, we're certainly not talking about my personal plans, since at this point I simply don't anticipate any currently-known career structure actually lasting. Even if nothing revolutionary actually happens on the political, economic, or environmental fronts, the continued subjugation of all institutions and enterprises to short-term market imperatives (the ones you support ;-)) means that job tenures longer than a few years probably just won't ever be available to me. I'm living in a world built by people who think Thomas Friedman has the right idea.
EDIT: It's important to note that if we really believed in fully and entirely replacing the Guild of Science with a scientific labor market subject only to market imperatives, it would mean taking a lot of funding from the university/lab administrators and tenured PI's, and using it to create a less-strictly-pyramidal career structure more like the tech sector has: bachelor's degree, junior-level researcher for a number of years at full pay and benefits, senior researcher at full pay and benefits with real job security, management and leadership.
In a real market system, you don't get to work people to the bone for years at a time for hourly wages less than those at Wal-Mart solely on the promise that they will someday have the opportunity to gain a 1/3 chance at a real job in their field. In a real market system, that is called an unpaid internship, it's illegal, and it ends in your workers unionizing and suing you.
Why shouldn't someone be allowed to enroll in a PhD program if they want to conduct research in the field they are interested in?
At the same time as dramatically expanding the number of higher-level positions, yes. The pyramid must be made into an ordinary tower.
Too bad, so sad.
Next you'll be telling me that people get degrees for education rather than as a signal to employers...
It starts with writing and business. And of course you'll need a course on teaching as you'll be teaching. A course in research tools like statistics and designing surveys will help you avoid some potholes. You'll need to reference things properly and avoid plagiarism, better have some training for that. Everyone in this field uses (Matlab/Excel/Latex/MS Word/SPSS/R/NumPy/Fortran/EndNote/BibTeX) so we'd better train you to use that. Effective study strategies will be vital, as will effective note-taking skills. You'll need to know about time and project management, better have a course on that. Of course you'll need to know how to use the library, research databases, and how to make document supply requests. Writing papers and working out which journals and conferences to target is important of course. Presentation skills and public speaking are vital in all manner of jobs. Not to mention career planning, networking and professional development. And you can't be a public academic these days without managing your online presence. Oh, your project involves spending money? You'll need training in managing a budget and working the purchasing procedure...
True this. Almost every university I've dealt with loves for their math and science Ph.D. students to take a business class or two. But requiring it would be outside the point of a Ph.D. Honestly, most Ph.D. programs have a couple core classes, then they are pretty flexible about what classes you take as long as you can make up an excuse.
Additionally, one friend getting a Ph.D. really wanted a job in science journalism. He found time to intern for a newspaper doing the journalism while still a candidate. Plenty of others build up a portfolio just blogging on the side. If you come out of a Ph.D. wanting to be a writer, it's your fault if you don't have a well put-together portfolio.
I learned to how to write and to enjoy writing in my PhD program. Writing and communicating research ideas and results coherently is actually one of the primary things a PhD does...
If you want to work at a hedge fund, a masters in financial math is a lot more efficient than a Phd in Physics.
I'd modify this a bit, since a PhD candidate is still a student, and still works under a teacher. The purpose is to learn how to produce original research, by doing it under a mentor. The mentor has some responsibility to guide the student away from making themselves so specialized and unemployable that their first research result is their last.
Now, I think that as students move up the ladder, they are afforded greater responsibility for their own careers, and greater freedom to -- frankly -- make mistakes. A PhD student should be able to figure out that a job in business might require being conversant in business. But they should also be free to master a skill that no employer cares about, with eyes-open awareness of the risk to their careers.
On the other hand, a student could also think strategically about their research project and employment prospects. I had a physics thesis project with a particular research goal, but considerable latitude as to how I could carry it out, and I steered the project through a series of obstacles that "forced" me to become demonstrably proficient in areas such as electronics and programming, which also happened to be my hobbies. In other words, I tackled a specialized problem by being a generalist.
My father gained his PhD yet was and is a generalist. He went to work in industry. Perhaps this gave me a natural role model, and a background that enabled me to manage the same transition.
M.Sc. gives you the background to produce the research, but just like in the industry, you will learn while on the job. You could be doing equivalent work outside the academia with your M.Sc., in an R&D department of some large company.
As for specialization, you must be extremely specialized to advance your field, which is a requirement for a Ph.D. The point is not to be hired because of your particular speciality, the point is to earn the highest "license to practice science".
Most PhD students don't have that choice, and that does seem like something of a problem. Realistically, most of them aren't going to have the opportunity to enter a meaningful tenure-track program and stand a real chance of becoming a full professor. Pushing a bunch of people down that track without providing any support for the ones who aren't going to make it seems pretty unreasonable.
I'm not going to argue that that means we should dilute PhDs. I'm fine with the current degree remaining as it is. But we should stop encouraging people to do PhDs just because there's a chance that they're going to get into academia. I gained a lot from my degree, but I could have been taught that without the aspects that were tied to the assumption that I'd spend the rest of my life in academia. We should work out how to provide the more generally applicable aspects without making people feel like shit for doing that and then discovering that they don't an academic position to take up.
A PhD is either a segue to a job in that field, if there is an industry (like pharmacology) or to launching a new segment of industry (as in computer technology) or a non-pecuniary pursuit of folks who are intelligent and financially independent.
see: figure 3, p7 http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Stat...
[1] This data is cited above.
A "university" is not a single actor. PhD applicants generally apply to advisers or departments, not universities administrators.
Tell that crap to the tourists, the purpose of the Ph.D. is afaict to get the student a high paying job that requires a Ph.D. (because existing phd's say you need one), and the professor tenure and grants.
Why is everyone here so insecure that they feel the need to beat up on those who choose knowledge instead of money? You don't go into a PhD to get rich. You do it to learn. If you want to learn, do science on your own. Let's see some detailed reports, complete with hypothesis, methods, data, and conclusions.
Nothing is stopping you. As for these articles, they are not science. There are infinitely more of these than actual science by the HN crowd. That is because zero startup science articles come through here. The occasional industry science piece comes up, but even most of those are collaborations with academia.
If you are truly so passionate about science, prove it with actions.
1) Finish college
2) Do PhD
3) Get funding from gov. to do startup or academic project.
Angel investor path is:
1) Drop from college
2) Get funding from investor.
Investors don't want 30 year old PhDs. They want 20 year old dropouts that will work 22 hs per day. It makes economic sense.
A PhD is about science and learning. If you don't do science, or cannot do science, then your opinion about the academic system is irrelevant.
Having gone through it myself I will be the first to tell you of it's problems. But to compare it to the non-science world is a complete joke. Want to make a difference to science? Demonstrate an alternative implementation.
Beyond that, if you went into it for the money, it's your own mistake that you need to take responsibility for. Don't try to paint yourself as the victim. You were never promised riches, only knowledge in a subject of your own choosing.
Yes but they compete for the same kind of people: Talented, persistent and technical-minded persons willing to sacrifice a huge part of their lifes for their careers.
Should be goal of angel investors to "steal" those human resources from academia. Ergo, anti-academia bias in HN.
I wish Startups, Businesses, and Government would hire the best and the brightest, but nepotism and networking seem to be more important factor. So many guys who got rich in the Startup world--owe a lot to luck. They are usually in deep denial, until the company is sold, or goes under. I had a friend who got lucky with a gaming company. He went from a humble guy to someone I just couldn't listen to. What bothered me was he never let me in on the "game" early on. I guess he wasn't much of a friend? And that's why I never kept in touch. (This is not geared to you, but your post got me thing about this industry.)
You clearly don't read many academic blogs, or the Chronicle of Higher Education.
> But to compare it to the non-science world is a complete joke.
Huh? I'm having trouble understanding why you think that the points you are making and the points aortega is making are incompatible. aortega is more or less agreeing with your original point and shows how the startup scene and academia could be seen to be competing for similar, I don't know, type of persons from the similar talent pools. One is public funded, one is private funded. Are you implying that academia is the only place that science is pushed forward? You seem to be and of course that is untrue.
And besides, to say that a PhD is about science is vague. Surely you mean that a PhD follows the scientific method and uses scientific methodology - its problem domain may not be in the sciences which is what you seem to be implying.
Nonsense.
Let's look at Warp Drive Bio. They launched with $125MM in funding with three founders who are professors in their 50's[1]. All three of those founders would put most 20 year old start up founders to shame with the amount they work and how much they love what they are doing.
Clinkle's seed funding of $25MM is chump change next to these guys.
[1] http://www.warpdrivebio.com/news/Warp%20Drive%20Launch%20PR%...
(got 3 degrees myself, including a doctoral level degree, but wish I had joined my father in the plumbers union)..
Why does it have to be insecurity? I think it's a matter of competing ideology, and that's okay.
Interestingly if I'd gone into industry I'd have been earning much less than my equivalent in the USA.
Go to Science Career forum (hosted by Science magazine) and see how urgent the need is to cull Ph.D. crowd.
First, there seems to be the idea that a PhD's place is in academia. Where is this idea even coming from? Back in a different time I got a degree in chemistry in Germany, and the idea was that you would sign up with one if the chemical companies. The degree program was very thorough and broad and lasted five years, and you would start work, be given a mentor, and do anything chemical. Your degree equipped you to do that, it was very broad, if it was chemistry you had heard of it. A PhD was required, chemical technicians would be trained on the job. The lesson here is that a broad degree makes you more employable, but you cannot sell this idea when students have to raise their own funds to pay for their degree and when state and federal funding lines for universities keep shrinking.
But what happened was several things: the great monoliths that in Germany had a standing like Microsoft or Google were broken up and sold off (except the BASF), and the perennial pharmco crisis started.
There is another lesson, I think: deep science requires deep pockets that only a large, established company can provide. Startups are no solution: it seems that the big pharmcos are now turning into brokers that acquire startups, in-house projects aren't done any longer, instead you acquire a startup, and testing is contracted out abroad. Another problem: no one cooks up their own compounds any longer, you contract out to a Chinese contract shop that employs PhDs from China. I'm not sure if this is cheaper or better (there is something to be said for short communication lines - just walk up a floor), but it is current practice.
Also: at my second-tier state school the quality of applicants started really going up after 2009, when the crisis had settled in. To me this means that private jobs have disappeared, and universities aren't hiring much either.
This is an economic problem, and I really can't see how turning universities into trade schools could be helpful to create jobs. Neither do I see how increased reliance on privately-funded research institutes would help - no matter how big their endowment they would still be competing for external funding, the biggest source of which is the NIH. But the NIH keeps getting its funding cut.
There's the other problem: the government isn't funding science as much as it ought to.
It's in the air, in the environment. Perhaps your circumstances are different, but in the US the overproduction of Ph.D.s is sufficient to sustain at least one business: The Versatile Ph.D. http://versatilephd.com/.
The online blogging on the phenomenon is hard to miss.
Yes, this is this systemic problem in the US. It started with many second-tier schools opening grad schools to compete for NIH and NSF funds, which at that time were freely available. The career path for those graduates would be to go into teaching at other second-tier schools, or at four-year colleges.
But now, after the crisis struck, even top-tier graduates have problems, and they are now being hired by second-tier schools to compete for less external funding. This leaves no way out for the graduates of weaker programs.
Another problem: the quality of the applicants for PhD at second-tier schools. Man, it's awful, it is. Top tier schools are as large as they want to be, and they hire whomever they like. Lesser schools try to make to with the rest that didn't get into the top places, and it's no fun, let me tell you that.
I can't see how the endgame will play out, but I'm glad that I have a job and that I am support staff. (Note: universities will always need support staff, and because they need them, they will find funds to pay them.
My tremendous error: it should have been http://versatilephd.com, not http://versatilephd.org.
Call me cynical, but this article looks like more edu-propaganda from the higher education cartel. Why? It deliberately conflates technical and non-technical PhDs. Yes, there may well be a good many non-academic jobs for tech phds, although not as many as this article seems to airily assume.
As for any sort of job for non-tech phds, well, those are hard to come by....
This article makes unstated assumptions that all PhDs can just up and get a non-academic job, should that professorship job somehow not come through.
The higher education industry is evil and has deep, deep pockets. They buy media propaganda like you and I buy potato chips at the convenience store.
I wonder whether this article is bought and paid for propaganda.
In contrast, I'd guess that 90+% of my physics BS classmates in the US went on to do PhD's in physics or something very closely related. Of my PhD classmates, I'm not sure any are working tenure track jobs 3-6 years after graduating... I switched over to data science.
I've been in several departments that are very welcoming to industry and non-profits. What they tend not to be welcoming toward is the idea that, because you're not headed to academia, you can either half-ass or rush your research.
The whole article relies on that sentence, but it's not supported by anything but an anecdote. Certainly that was not my experience. Although I did pick an advisor who was very practical and worked in industry before coming back to academia, I don't recall any of my friends feeling like they were being pressured towards academia (this is across many departments at many schools).
Similarly, I'm not worried about jobless PhDs. If you're smart enough to get a technical PhD, you're smart enough to do many things (check the unemployment rate by degree level if you don't believe me). Friends who have gone the postdoc path typically chose that over more lucrative and stable job offers from industry, and with full knowledge that it could very likely lead them nowhere in their career. You might be ignorant of the harsh realities of becoming a tenured professor when you start your PhD, but you certainly aren't by the time you finish.
Of course, these are just my anecdotes... but I guess my point is that I probably wouldn't submit my anecdotes to HN without something more meaningful backing them.
[1] Example: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
Edit: That said, I don't think my advisor does a good job preparing us for industry.
Surely, a professor should strive to have his/her students graduate with sufficient publication record to be suitable for an academic job. Not everyone will have it upon graduation. And it is not the sole point that you must go to academia!
In some fields, there are research jobs outside of academia (eg in CS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel). And in most fields, if you go to industry you make way more money. You just don't get tenure, sabbatical and as much freedom, but it is hardly a failure.
EDIT: I cannot reply inline to dinkumthinkum's naive mischaracterization of my remarks, and the unhelpful and the misleading question he asks, but my remarks were certainly not confined to "IT admin stuff." They included scientific programming and substantive intellectual contributions to published research. Of course "IT admin stuff" isn't that valued in industry--one of the points was that it is even less so in academia, which is a strong reason to avoid doing it. It is an occupational hazard to take a research position only to be steered into it when one's superiors cannot or choose not to distinguish between "IT admin stuff," scientific programming and substantive contribution to published research.
Sure, if you're good, you get some kind of respect, but respect sans doctorate still won't let you join the "academic" caste as far as the PhDs who tell you what to do are concerned. If you're good, you're considered to be akin to an especially fast and vigorous race horse, not a skilled jockey.