The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223

by billswift • 16 years ago

116 78 16 years ago

billswift• 16 years ago

Found it from a post on Overcoming Bias http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/how-hopeless-a-phd.htm... Robin's last line is: "Overall, my estimate of the chances of success went up after reading the article."

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%.

I wonder what this number would be like if you cut the number of academic jobs in half. Because that's what I see happening in the future.

I mean, I don't want to say the people on HN are smarter than the rest of the world but we do tend to spot trends earlier only because of the collaborative nature of the site and that people here actually evaluate the world around them. Which means societal trends can become apparent here before the rest of the world realizes they're going on.

So I think it's instructional that we see a "Higher Education is broken" item about every couple of days. In the years to come I suspect we'll see a lot more competition from lower priced options that provide education using online tools and who don't need armies of research fellows and "postdocs". Combine that with Governments making serious budget cuts and I think you'll see the demand for PhD's plummet.

shef• 16 years ago

The armies of research fellows and postdocs are useful if you do actual research, something that you just can't do with "online tools".

Also, my guess is that academic jobs don't influence the earning premiums that much... the pay is quite low, unless you really reach the top

grav1tas4• 16 years ago

I have a feeling that you're equating a PhD with a Master's or Bachelor's degree. The ultimate goal of a PhD is to prepare you to do 'real research' in that you're trained to collaborate with academics, dig through academic materials, compile results, and ultimately add to the knowledge of mankind. This is fundamentally different from a BS or MS. Replacing the academic setting for this, in my opinion, would be suboptimal, if not detrimental. This is academia in its purest form almost...basically what it was originally intended to do! Not train people for the job market, but to further the actual academic studies of everything!

What you're forgetting is that if there are a ton of hungry PhD's running around looking for work where your Joe-Master's Degree or Jim-Bachelor's Degrees are looking for work, chances are they may displace quite a few of those guys if they look to enter the standard work force. Not because a PhD makes one inherently better, but because it seems like so many employers look at paper qualifications, and actually a lot of PhD's did work REALLY HARD to get their PhD...so at least they've shown they can work really hard on something and come up with a contribution.

Also, government budget cuts never seem to affect military research, where a TON of research dollars stems from. I have a feeling that the government will get its house in order without massive research spending cuts.

jmount• 16 years ago

Nice read. Speaking as a PhD I am okay with the PhD certificate having no value (you don't deserve extra earnings for having the certificate). It was my intent to learn some valuable things during the degree process, and I did.

grav1tas4• 16 years ago

Exactly my sentiments. I'm currently in a PhD program, but not because I intend to be in academia. I love the field I'm studying, and I just felt like doing it instead of joining the workforce. I'll probably learn a cool thing or two. Why not?

There are a decent number of ding dongs in PhD programs too. The level of ding dong-ery doesn't seem to change wherever you go.

Saad_M• 16 years ago

For me earning a PhD was not about the money or wealth creation. It was about the chance to work on a exciting research project that could make a real difference and contribution to scientific knowledge.

Besides, in the UK at least the scholarship funding is not bad at all. I found the £12K per year tax free funding was easily enough to be comfortable on whilst doing my research.

jforman2• 16 years ago

The answer to "why not?" is pretty simple: opportunity cost.

I spent three years in a computational biology PhD program before getting an e-mail from a college friend looking for people to join a new startup (where I am now a co-founder). I enjoyed the research I was doing, but I asked myself: should I really spend three more years here toiling away at very cool but very obscure science just to purchase a lottery ticket? Where if I lose the lottery (which is the most likely result by far) I will have languished in postdoc roles until I burnt out past my prime?

You have a lot of energy between age 25 and 35. I decided to apply that energy to something where the expected value of total reward (both intellectually and monetarily) is much higher.

levesque• 16 years ago

I agree with the argument that PhD's might be underpaid a bit, but I think the author is exaggerating when he says that universities exploit them to get cheap research done, or that there are too many PhD's being produced by the system in general (as if this had a strongly negative impact on our society?)

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

I read a much longer article about this, and I wish I knew where it was, but the oversupply problem is far more pronounced in the humanities, where the average time to graduate is peaking towards 10 years, yet all the PhD confers is the ability to teach, where we know there are few jobs. I think that such a system is, in essence, exploitative.

The problem is far less in Computer Science, where your skills transfer over to The Real World relatively easily, and companies like Microsoft and Google value them. This means the potential job pool is much bigger.

As a CS PhD student, of course I feel underpaid. Universities have reached a point where they can convince students that what they are doing is being paid for being taught, which must be a great deal, right? However, everyone else calls this "on the job training" or "starting at the bottom of the ladder" and they get paid better for it. However, I think about the benefits I get (work when/where I like, use whatever language I like, nap when I like, release all my work as open-source, never feel like I'm waking up to "work", don't have to worry about mundane but potentially catastrophic life things like health insurance), and it does even out somewhat.

pierrefar• 16 years ago

I've always explained to my friends and family that the only real requirement of one passing a PhD is stubborness (or tenacity if I'm feeling charitable). It's certainly not intelligence that's the determining factor, although there is a minimum threshold you need to be over. You have to be stubborn enough that despite all the crap the Economist article is describing, you still want that certificate.

But there is real value in doing a PhD at a prestigious university: it opens doors. Many many doors. I think of it as a cognitive short cut for others that, magically, you're now someone worth listening to. I actually don't like this, but that's what I've observed on multiple occasions.

PaulHoule2• 16 years ago

I dunno. I think they let me out with an honorable discharge because I might have made too much trouble for them otherwise.

microtonal• 16 years ago

On underpay: this varies highly by country. I am a PhD candidate in The Netherlands, and am employed by the university for four years (as most PhD candidates here). This gives around modal income, a 13th month of salary, holiday allowance, and about two months of holidays per year.

This is a bit less than one would earn going into business immediately, but it buys you a lot of freedom. The education/research split is 0.2/0.8 FTE. There are specific goals with respect to the research project, but other than that there is plenty of time to pursue your interests.

Our university tried to implement a scholarship/bursary system, which was not welcomed by potential Dutch PhD candidates. Foreign candidates do not seem to mind as much, since such scholarships are common in other countries. In my opinion, the scholarship system was a bad move, since pursuing a PhD becomes less attractive to the best of students, due to higher wages in the industry. In the end the scholarship system was shot down by the court (they see a PhD as a normal employment), and seems to have vanished for the time being.

Conclusion: you get what you pay for. Higher PhD candidate wages equals less PhDs, but more high-quality PhDs. With lower wages or scholarships universities can have more PhD candidates, but you will probably lose out on talent who'd rather go to the industry, and the PhD population has a miserable life (low income, long working hours).

gizmo• 16 years ago

It kind of depends on your point of view, I suppose. Let's take a look at two examples.

> Example 1: Highschool dropout with no advanced education earning minimum wage; 23 years old:

Gross minimum wage for 23yo and above € 1424,40 per month, assuming a 40h workweek. Usually with paid overtime and some benefits depending on employer.

> Example 2: Student who excelled at high school until 18, completed bachelor at 21, completed master in science at 23, started PhD at 24:

Gross wage[1] €2000 per month, with realistically a 45h to 50h workweek. Better benefits and usually a 13th month. Intellectually more challenging work (probably), but few career possibilities in the academic field.

Also you have to take into account that the grad student has to pay substantially more in taxes than the minimum wage employee. The difference was only 1.5x to start with, after taxes the PhD student will probably only earn 25% more than the minimum wage employee. Just for the record, I'm not arguing against education here, or even making any statement about whether it makes sense to do a PhD. Just adding some numbers because your message makes it seem like PhDs are well compensated given their intelligence and the work they have to put in. From my point of view they're ridiculously underpaid.

A few of my friends are grad students, and they all live in 600 square feet (55 meter squared) apartments. It kind of sucks to live a 600 square foot apartment until you're 29-30, with no substantial savings for a down-payment on a house for after you graduate.

Source 1: https://intranet.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=91ae4d5c-5d21...

maurits• 16 years ago

As a phd in Switzerland, one can only dream about a 55 square meter apartment. O well, doing research is good for the soul, isn't it?....

RK7• 16 years ago

What is a 13th month of salary? Is that like a bonus?

Confusion2• 16 years ago

Yeah, that's basically a predefined end-of-year bonus consisting of an extra month worth of salary. Some companies even talk of a '13th and 14th month' to indicate a 2-month bonus. It's kind of silly, but for some reason it has become common parlance.

jteo• 16 years ago

The sole purpose of some PhDs is to serve as cheap labour for the research efforts of a professor.

thebooktocome• 16 years ago

Yes, this is somewhat true -- I know several professors that accept virtually any student as an advisor, provided they're willing to work on their over-arching research program.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, though. In some of these fields, one of the bottlenecks seems to be the low numbers of researchers worldwide in the area. While the students do provide cheap labour, they also (depending on the fame of the professor) get immense networking resources. Since the field has comparatively few people, the big names all know each other, and all help get their students hired post-thesis.

Nepotism? Perhaps. But for the research program I'm thinking of in particular, if the problem does get solved, it'll revolutionize mathematics. Talking to some of the students involved, I feel that's why they're willing to put up with being cheap labor -- they're getting paid in happiness and a feeling of being worthy.

cperciva2• 16 years ago

Some, yes. But definitely not all. My supervisor only had a very vague notion of what I was doing most of the time (to be fair, I only had a very vague notion of what I was doing most of the time).

RK7• 16 years ago

Did your supervisor think your work was good enough to attach his name to? I think that counts in the cheap labor argument, even if you aren't just a worker on the assembly line.

I think good advisors (should) enjoy supervising for the sake of supervising, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also boost their CV's.

naveensundar2• 16 years ago

A PhD is all about wealth creation [1]. Also many of the technologies we take for granted were due to "lowly" PhD students toiling away. I can't even imagine how without decades of dedicated academic effort we can have semiconductor based electronics, massively layered software that work seamlessly, etc. Maybe the author can. "The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes." The "fiercest critics" don't want to and can't see or think beyond their noses.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

blackguardx• 16 years ago

Actually most semiconductor technology was developed by industry. Nowadays it is often too expensive for a university to do any cutting edge IC research without industry partnerships.

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I'm beginning to worry about some CS disciplines, especially Software Engineering. SoftEng appears to be playing catch-up to industry in a number of sub-disciplines, due to the pace of knowledge sharing across the net exponentially increasing. It feels like unit testing might be the last huge thing academic SoftEng contributes.

There's going to have to be a little bit of realignment, I think, and some disciplines are going to have to start letting go of being "we're the practical ones and you could deploy our tech tomorrow" to pushing out a little bit, maybe incorporating things like AI and stuff.

naveensundar2• 16 years ago

Yes. Academic research need not be done only at universities. Even industrial labs award PhD degrees and do solid research which is one of the things a PhD trains you for.

anthuswilliams• 16 years ago

You've missed the point. The article readily concedes that PhDs are good for society as a whole. The argument is that they are generally a bad idea for individuals.

johnswamps• 16 years ago

If anyone is curious, here are the median starting salaries for graduates from Stanford's CS/EE departments (survey was self selecting so the numbers are probably skewed up, but there were a large number of responses):

Undergrad: 80k Masters: 87k PhD: 114k

amichail• 16 years ago

Money is not everything. A successful career as an indie developer can be a lot more rewarding than one in academia.

tjr• 16 years ago

Sure. So maybe instead of trying to pattern our lives according to blog after blog and article after article, we should all do what we believe to be best for our own lives, be it spending more time in formal education, or be it dropping out, or be it starting a startup, or be it working for a huge company.

I think that society today needs people to do all of those things, and more. We all need to find our own place, and excel there.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

The PhD hits the workforce ~6 years later than the undergrad. It is entirely feasible, in fact most probable, for a 80k undergrad to hit ~115k in 6 years.

endtime• 16 years ago

Also significantly more than 4 years later than the MS students, since a lot of people in Stanford CS do the 5 year BS/MS co-term.

Confusion2• 16 years ago

However, salary usually climbs fastest in the first few years after starting, so if they are both at 115K at some point, the next year the PhD may be at 126, while the undergrad get stuck at 118. This difference only increases and the end-of-career opportunities for the PhD are also larger: on average, he can attain jobs for which he will be preferred above the undergrad, who gets stuck at a lower rung. Of course, this is all 'on average'.

jpendry• 16 years ago

It would be interesting to see how much the undergrads are making after two years (expected amount of time to finish the degree), and the masters after four (to finish the PhD).

InquilineKea• 16 years ago

And also, the variance in the amount of money undergrads make after 6 years, compared to the variance in the $ that PhDs make. Some undergrads could earn MUCH more money than PhDs, but it's also ENTIRELY possible that undergrads could fizzle out/make a major mistake and end up in a perpetual cycle of low-wage jobs (and this can happen to the highly intelligent too)

donaldc• 16 years ago

Undergrad: 80k Masters: 87k PhD: 114k

In addition to the fact that the Undergrad may be making more than $114K by the time the PhD student has acquired a PhD, there's also the issue of selection bias. Perhaps, on average, people choosing to get PhDs are more capable than people with Bachelor's degrees. In this case, the extra degree could be absolutely useless, and yet people having a PhD would still earn more.

geebee• 16 years ago

median JD: 160K (http://www.law.stanford.edu/school/facts/#graduates)

MBA is also way up there.

not sure about medicine...

keep in mind that elite MBA, JD, and even MD programs have very high completion rates, much higher than PhDs, and that MD and JD degrees can take less than half the time. MD degrees take as long as PhDs when you factor in the residency, but the job prospects and earnings are probably much higher.

From a purely financial point of view, it just doesn't make sense for someone who already has US citizenship to do a PhD. For non-citizens, though, it can be an excellent way to get into the country (though even then, an MS is usually enough to get that first work visa).

kyleniemeyer• 16 years ago

A lot of the issues raised in this article (low or zero stipend, poor job prospects after graduation) are more appropriate if you're talking only about the social or life sciences.

In science and engineering (engineering in particular), PhD students rarely have to pay their own way, with stipends around $25000 or even up to around $30000 with a fellowship. The job prospects are certainly a lot better as well- since research funding in the US is very much focused on science and engineering.

gruseom• 16 years ago

The assumption in the article, and in most of this discussion, and of our society if not our civilization in general, is that the only things that matter are money and jobs (a.k.a. money). What pinched, impoverished excuses for human beings we are.

j_baker• 16 years ago

Really? The article makes it sound to me like a PhD isn't a good idea either from a monetary standpoint or from the standpoint of being satisfied.

"One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”"

"Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs."

cma• 16 years ago

The article also talks about having an office with better decorations than one's house! Now they'll never get asked to the school dance!

Loic• 16 years ago

This article only take the money value of PhDs. It forgot the most important stuff in doing a PhD: Networking. Doing PhD is like doing SEO in the real world.

First, you need to pay attention to your supervisor, select a good one, one ready to trust you and give you freedom of action.

Second, grab a university where there is effectively budget for you to travel to conferences and meet people.

Then, work hard and network a lot.

I am French but did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), it was 3 years with a very good salary, with a lot of travels all over the world, with an insane level of networking. Now, after some work in a company, I have setup my small consultancy, the quality of the network I have from my PhD is a gold mine.

If you do your PhD to just enter in a company with a higher salary after some years of feeling like a slave, you are doing it for the wrong reason.

timr4• 16 years ago

Your experience is completely atypical.

Most PhD students -- at least the ones I know in the states and overseas -- spend most of their time in school trapped in a lab or office. A few make time to "network" with people outside the department, but most have to be forced to socialize with a broader audience than can be found at the weekly beer hour.

The far more common pattern for a PhD student is to spend years busting his/her ass in near-isolation to accomplish research goals and graduate, only to find that it's hard to get a job without real-world contacts. So you're absolutely correct in the sense that PhD students should be networking, but it just doesn't seem to happen very much in practice.

harshpotatoes• 16 years ago

So the PhD students you know don't go to conferences and the like? Odd.

jbbuck• 16 years ago

As a third year Ph D student I'd say that it's on the student to make the most out of their time in school. Part of that is networking, meeting people in related fields and mastering some of the softer sciences (presentations, writing style, etc.) A student that fails to build connections seems no different to me than the student that didn't gain as much knowledge from their courses or didn't master writing because they didn't have to.

PaulHoule2• 16 years ago

All the "networking" opportunities I had in graduate school were all with academics on the research track and were utterly worthless once I started doing something else.

The other day I found that a bunch of braniacs at the local Uni were working on something a lot like what I'm doing... More advanced in principle, but without the need to have a product that actually works at the end of the day. I talked with four people involved with the project but there wasn't a single one who had any interest in commercialization or knew anyone who was interesting in commercialization of this kind of technology.

Of course, I'm the kind of guy who shows up at seminars and always asks the same question "Is this development commercializable?" although I always ask it in different words... It's just a whole different world.

RK7• 16 years ago

From what I hear, Denmark universities pay grad students unusually high salaries.

I do agree that networking is very valuable. As a PhD student I do about 95% of my work from home, but I also have been able to attend a lot of conferences and workshops. (I already have 5 lined up for 2011.) My experience has been that I will meet random people and then see them again and again. This has lead to collaborations, letters of support for grant applications, and ideas for new projects. I have no doubt that it will help me when I take the next step after graduating.

MoreMoschops• 16 years ago

A phD; you put in time, humanity gets out knowledge. Presumably it's only waste of time if the knowledge humanity gets out wasn't worth the time put in. This article seems to think that a phD is for turning time into money.

Aloisius• 16 years ago

Not all PhDs are the same. They vary in duration and difficulty from country to country, school to school and field to field.

For instance, you are not guaranteed a PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley even if you go for 8 years. You don't get one until your research pans out.

This is very different from some countries where you're essentially guaranteed one after 2-4 years.

RK7• 16 years ago

In the US (and other places I assume), the endpoint of your PhD is determined by two things: successful completion of your research and your advisor's approval. (You could argue that your advisor's approval is the only thing). That means that the time to completion is an unknown.

This is a such a different feeling to what students I have met from the the UK/Europe experience, that it's almost like a different degree. They typically have 3 years to complete their projects, but I have no idea what "completion" means in that context.

The other one is funding, in that American PhD students could potentially be funded indefinitely, but that's a different issue...

arethuza• 16 years ago

Certainly in the UK (based on my experience in the 90s) completion of a PhD meant getting a thesis written up, getting it approved by your supervisor and then sitting an an oral examination with your supervisor, an internal academic from the same department and an external examiner who is an expert in that field. The usual rule of thumb was that you probably should have published 3 decent papers in that time.

The "3 years" came from the length of time the standard PhD student was funded for - there was no guarantee that you would finish within the three years. Quite a lot of people did PhDs while working as Research Associates - where you were typically on a 3 year fixed contract, paid a decent salary but your focus then was the research project paying your wages - not strictly your own research. Most people I knew doing it this way took between 4 or 5 years - some as long as 7 or 8 years.

wazoox• 16 years ago

Hum, isn't a PhD about, you know, _learning_ something? The economist eyeglass always wants to filter out everything that isn't money.

TheBoff• 16 years ago

I intend to do a PhD for the intrinsic value of the research and learning itself, not just to earn. There is more to life than money.

impendia2• 16 years ago

(Crosspost from my comments at economist.com:)

Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No."

Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted that they really wanted to do academic research.

I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do anything else.

The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.

jforman2• 16 years ago

The problem is that the people who are doing it to become a professor are playing a game that is stacked against them. And if/when you lose that game you're well behind your peers in opportunity cost (see my other post).

I know several brilliant scientists (postdocs and PhD students) from my time at Princeton who had / are having a very hard time finding an academic job. At some point even the purest motivations will succumb to feeling used in these circumstances.

impendia2• 16 years ago

Fair point.

In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other disciplines.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

I'm interested in doing a PhD and I'm not concerned if it doesn't increase my salary - I'm totally happy if it just opens some doors to work in interesting fields.

However - I am quite concerned that it may decrease my salary or even make me border line unemployable. Right now I have a good number of years experience in software development under my belt. I can search for jobs on any given day and find hundreds or even thousands of opportunities that I would be able to make a credible application for. I'm quite concerned that once I have a PhD many of these people would look at my PhD and turn me down as overqualified.

I'm curious if anyone with strong software skills has any experience in what the effect of a PhD is on employability?

robinhouston• 16 years ago

I did a PhD after working in the web/software world for a few years. I'm now back in software, and the PhD doesn't seem to have done my employability any long-term damage. But of course there’s an opportunity cost.

tluyben2• 16 years ago

It's the economist (which I like and often listen to and read), however doing a PhD, imho, is not about money. More extreme; if you are doing a PhD for the money, you are not really worthy. It's about getting an academic career, which means research, which means going hardcore deep into the things you value and are passionate about. It's about shaping your head to be a scientist, not a millionaire. If you do the work to become get a PhD, you know that you'll be in it for a long time and you do not belong to the 'normal workforce' or to the 'become rich people'. PhDs hardly ever become rich, nor do they particularly want to (at least not the ones I have met). In my experience a PhD doesn't make you more qualified for software related jobs than a MsC, probably less so actually. It's a different mindset; you are a scientist or you want a good, commercial job. You can have both, but don't whine if the effort of the study didn't pay off; it was not meant for that.

jaxtapose• 16 years ago

Who does a PhD to get a job as an Academic? I did a PhD to have the opportunity to learn something that nobody else did.

giardini• 16 years ago

Philip Greenspun has addressed this to some extent, although focusing on graduate study and advanced degrees in science and engineering: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

m3mb3r• 16 years ago

Depends on how you define waste. One might want a PhD because of the learning involved. Not everyone cares about money.

Oh wait, but, it's The Economist.

The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

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