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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Of course, when you are dumb as a brick, you will not finish PhD. However, finishing PhD will not make you "more intelligent". It will make you more knowledgeable in whatever you finished PhD in and it will make you prepared for doing science.

And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.

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>And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.

The other way to look at it is that failing to employ 95 qualified scientists means society's leaving a free lunch on the table.

Or it's paying 95 people for years of free lunches without getting any return on that investment.

you miss my point to argue semantics.

What if the PhD is the ends (in and of itself), not just the means to some other end?

It's not. If it were, it wouldn't be called "training".

It's an academic credential to show an ability to do research, and to present that research, in an academically sound and rigorous method.

I would be quite surprised if the overflow of PhD holders in science spent that extra decade of double hours and crappy compensation just to say they did it, and expect that percentage is in reality negligible.

If more people are granted PhDs per year that want to do research than are needed, then there are too many produced. It's really that simple.

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