Fixing the Ph.D. | Hacker News Reader

Fixing the Ph.D.

newyorker.com

36 pointssizzle21 comments

This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.

Yes... books and poems and epics and dramas are all technologies, too.

I should hope the HN community isn't fooled by the _New Yorker_ article's professional typecasting. After all, Paul Graham has an entire book called _Hackers and Painters_, and he argues: "Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things." (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html).

"Hacking" -- as both Paul Graham and much of my dissertation argues -- isn't a purely scientific discipline. It's also a humanist and aesthetic pursuit.

If you don't believe me, go pick up a collection of Emily Dickinson poems (you know... the things you probably haven't looked at since you were in 9th grade). You might be surprised to discover all of the conditional logic, the programatic loops, and the object oriented structures.

Impressive. However, judging from the available empirical evidence from recent professional surveys [1], you and your like-minded peers are indeed the exception, not the rule: over the last 35 years, a consistent 90-95% of newly-minted English PhDs sought academic faculty positions; with only 5-10% seeking careers outside academia [Fig. 2]. There is a reason why the so-called 'alt-ac' career track is called that way in the broader MLA community.

[1] http://mlaresearch.commons.mla.org/2014/02/26/our-phd-employ...

This is an important point, I think. It's not that English PhD's aren't hireable, it's that they drink the kool-aid where the only possible route is a tenure-track job in their field. On the other hand, some of my best mathematics and computer science teachers (with PhD's, not at a research university) have started in English.

I think it's really a culture problem. PhD students aren't encouraged to think about their career early on. My PhD advisor (mathematics) is very insistent that I know all of my options, and as such I have a huge list running of potential employers and avenues to seek furthering my career. I have a list of the "tricks" I need to try to get various kinds of postdocs, I go to both theoretical and applied conferences, I maintain a list of interested industry contacts, and I exercise my teaching, programming, and writing skills just enough to keep them in shape. I have backups for my backups for my backups if I don't get a tenure-track job, and I would be happy with all of them.

And this doesn't mean a PhD isn't worth doing! My experience, at least, has been immensely satisfying in most respects, and has unlocked many more of these options than I would have had just as an undergraduate looking for a coding job.

apdinin, thanks for sharing your perspective, professionally however, you shared that you chose to go into IT instead of humanities academia.

I see the value of literature in conveying the human experience but don't see the value of literary criticism. I like to read on my own and the direct experiencing with the author with their characters and stories, and forming my own interpretation. I've read Harold Bloom's literary criticism and found it wanting, like an old man hanging onto the vestiges of the past century of whatever someone called the "Western Cannon" and isn't his theory of authors' "anxiety of influence" a bit formulaic, a little bit derivative, a little bit obvious. Not everyone attended Execter and then attended Yale and took Harold Bloom and Bloom's mentor's literary course and read from Shakespeare to Dickson to Faulkner, and said "yes" eagerly and thusly beamed at his literary professor's exaltations as the sunbeams shifted dramatically its orientation on late New England spring afternoons through the ivied windows in the harrowed lecture hall. How do you go about to qualify Jack Kerouac and Murakami who takes as much influence from Jazz? Or novels composed of text messages?

Conversely, I form my own interpretation from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and find it a bit presumptuus that these so-called "multi-cultural" AFAM professors cram down their sociological manifestos down in their criticism; why should I care about the African American or Chicano experience told by Henry Gates Sr. pontificating, when I care about my upbringing as an Asian American and see only through that selfish lenses and rightfully so; and instead like the strong black female characters' sexual awakening and relate to the search for that sexual fulfillment under the strict matriarchy and small-mindedness of her ethnic community that has internalized that hatred and hierachies that was imposed upon them such that the enemy has slowly become themselves,

Our reading experiences is a sensuous, viceral and private one and I don't see why a literary professor's interpretation of that great work is worth than my love for erotica or Michael Crichton or a mom's love for Anne Rice or a monkey's love for a banana. As for comparing literature to coding, coding in the sense of "startup's, exit's" is like comparing Emily Dickson to the slave traders traveling in tugboats in deep south, individual monastic pursuit vs. merchantile activity. Emily may be poorer but she certainly didn't feel a need to overcompensate with digital humanities.

Fixing the English Ph.D; that's the only field they mention. They can make inferences about related fields but would have a hard time with other fields (STEM fields and even psychology).

"The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation"

It's even worse for sciences.

But I think there are some insights in common; worth a read.

Once you get your doctorate, the logical step for most STEM graduates is a postdoctoral position. There aren't many of these at all, most departments have double the number of PhD students than they do postdocs. So right off the bat, half the students will be finding jobs elsewhere. Industry (hardware/software/analytics/whatever) pays more, is often more fulfilling and although your work isn't completely open it is usually more obviously relevant than your PhD.

So 60% will find tenure track jobs? Well that's obviously true. If there are only about half the postdoc positions compared to the number of new PhDs then only half the PhD students will be getting tenure track jobs.

Most postdoc positions are 2-3 years and are filled by newly minted PhDs. The logical evolution for most people is to do a postdoc (or two) and wait until their research is renowned enough for the university to offer a lectureship. You do that for another few years until they offer you a Readership, wait a bit longer and you get your coveted Professorship. If you're really lucky and you're top of your field you can hit assistant professor by 30-35 in the UK.

Until you get the all-important lectureship offer you're a contract worker and there is always the prospect that funding will be cut and you won't be able to renew your position. Remember that once you've done your postdoc there are even fewer positions to be promoted into.

Doing a PhD has largely put me off the idea of staying in academia, I think this is becoming more common. Being a professor would be nice, good pay (£60k min) lots of travel, but it's a very stressful job, you have no time to do any real research beyond project management and by that time you're thoroughly institutionalised.

Should point out that my experience is from physics, ymmv. On the plus side I don't know anyone who has struggled to find a job from my department; plenty go into research in non university groups like Microsoft, the British Antarctic Survey, the Met Office, etc.

> If you're really lucky and you're top of your field you can hit assistant professor by 30-35 in the UK.

This role doesn't really exist on the UK, the equivalent is that of Lecturer/Senior Lecturer. I think you're overstating the barrier to entry -- it's not that high unless you're fixed on a top university. In CS,I know lots of people younger than 35 with SL jobs. Getting to the level or prof after that is another matter but on the whole I think that should be hard.

OTOH, in the sciences, there's probably a greater likelihood that newly-minted Ph.D.s aren't wanting tenure-track jobs. There's not a lot of work specifically for English Ph.D.s in industry...

That number is entirely false by the way. They divide the total number of open positions by number of new students for that year only. The denominator, of course, should include everyone looking for a tenure-track job: The entirety of post-grad pool for a few years, part-time faculty in adjunct / teaching jobs, foreign grad students delaying graduation (thus can stay in the country) due to lack of jobs, etc.

Assuming the numbers are reasonably stable it's fairly accurate. Basicly, they don't care if someone waited 10 years they found a tenure track job so there 'in'. Which means some of this years graduates may a need to wait 10 years but the ratio should be close to jobs / graduates.

But they only compared it against job listings on their own association website. This seems like incredibly lazy statistical research. They didn't look hard for a number, but instead accepted the first, easiest number they could generate as a "rough figure."

Becoming a professor is hardly the only reason to do a PhD in the sciences.

From reading other articles and blogs on the problems with PhDs suggests that the situation is generally the same in other fields.

It is generally accepted that the PhD program is to train academic researchers. People who do both research and write papers, articles. Grants, etc are awarded on the basis of publishing accomplishments. Hence the "Publish or Perish" cry.

There is an oversupply of PhD graduates, so the academic job market is very competitive. Of course, in STEM, many PhDs find jobs in non-academic fields.

As someone who has earned a PhD I think the key thing is these programs are set up to train _researchers_, not specifically academic ones. As you say non-academic jobs in STEM are easy enough to find, and industrial research is alive and well.

It seems that the main issue is that people are only now discovering that PhDs and perhaps sometimes undergrad degrees in humanities are not vocational. This isn't to say they aren't worthwhile or that students shouldn't pursue them. There are plenty of degrees or experiences that are unlikely to be marketable in the future economy. The main thing students must learn is how to learn, and one can accomplish this by studying a variety of fields.

It does, however, mean that subsidizing higher education is a risky proposition. Universities go to great lengths to create humanities requirements perhaps in part motivated by a genuine belief that core requirements are necessary for a proper education, but likely also to beef up departments that have been isolated from market pressures. These departments are often political (almost always liberal), ideological, and rarely subject to any kind of quality control (there was the famous case of Larry Summers questioning what exactly Cornell West was doing as a tenured Harvard professor). Subsidizing learning with no direct market rewards can be a very smart long term investment in human capital. We need history and literature to have the cognitive tools to innovate and to articulate ideas necessary for the Western world to exist. But on the other hand, it's a dangerous proposition to create a mini-industry where you pay people without a clear understanding of what they are doing and why.

It takes a while to get to the key point:

If anything, a continuing over-production of Ph.D.s will only make the problem worse. It creates an ever-growing pool of cheap labor, which administrators are only too happy to employ in place of tenure-track faculty.

Shortening Phd programs, and many other so-called solutions doesn't fix this. Blaming a lack of interest in writing doesn't fix it either.

In my mind, the #1 fix is to highlight with full transparency the lack of career options, so that potential Phds know what they're up against.

The second is to create a relevant drop-off point after 2 years. 2 years in a Physics Phd program is good enough to enable many other careers. 2 years in a Phd program in English should be enough to prepare the student to work in the news, writing or something similar.

The big issue here is optimal school behavior (produce as many Phds as possible) conflicts with optimal system behavior (produce roughly the amount as jobs). In the sciences, limits to funding helps provide some of the cap.

In honesty, part of the problem with PhD 'grad school' in the US is that the prior parts of the pipeline - undergraduate and high school - are so poor. If you're spending a couple of years when people come to college teaching them, effectively remedial science, then of course it's going to set the whole thing back a number of years (manifesting itself, at least partly in this case, in it taking 10 years to complete a PhD in the US.) (Data source: the ten people or so I know who've worked in academia in the EU and the US - hardly conclusive, but compelling qualitative data when you consider the strength of their views.)

The other issue here is that, if you take into account the fact that most people studying a PhD in the UK will already have done a (taught) Masters level course, then there's a helpful process of elimination there as well. It seems much less of a pre-requisite in the US.

Interesting that they are blaming the profs. There is certainly some culpability there. But there is plenty of info available to students about their prospects. If they want to take on massive debt to essentially be entertained for a few extra years, at some point, that is their choice.

It's not a always the case that people incur massive debt. A lot of students have scholarships that cover their fugitive fees and include a small stipend.

There is advice in business:

"fail, fail often, fail EARLY!"

Yes, the article is right in one thing: It can take you ten years (including undergraduate studies) to get a PhD. It takes you 10 years to find out if there is a market (not now but in 10 years) for you.

Don't get a PhD. Don't get a PhD in any field.

TiaTia, PhD

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