The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you

https://bigthink.com/thinking/school-phd-too-good-for-you-academic-arrogance/

by Mistletoe • 4 years ago

52 73 4 years ago

cwoolfe• 4 years ago

My wife has a PhD. She told me that universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas from other institutions, in order to avoid an institutional echo-chamber.

clcaev2• 4 years ago

Being in the same department as your faculty advisor can also be politically challenging.

AustinDev• 4 years ago

That's an interesting excuse but isn't most PhD level academia at least in the United States a pretty big echo-chamber?

tensor4• 4 years ago

No, it's not. Compared to industry, it is very normal to challenge each other in academia. So much so that many people moving from academia to industry are often told they are too "mean" or "aggressive" in meetings because they tend to challenge the status quo thinking too much.

YossarianFrPrez2• 4 years ago

Another factor is that if your department's area is hiring for a new position that you might be a good fit for, your P.I. or advisor is likely on the hiring committee. Thus the committee then has to be wary of nepotism and conflicts of interest. When everyone is so incredibly specialized, it turns out that the sub-field you are working in is small.

skunkworker• 4 years ago

Almost all of my CS professors had PhDs from Universities other than the one I received my degree at, but most of them had undergraduate degrees.

School 1 (BS) -> School 2 (PhD) -> School 1 (Teaching).

tensor4• 4 years ago

Yes, this is considered ok. It can also be the case that you have School 1 (PhD) -> School 2 (professor) -> School 1 (Professor). But that's still fairly uncommon.

tensor4• 4 years ago

I have a PhD, and yes this is exactly the reason Universities don't want to hire their own. It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.

time_to_smile• 4 years ago

I've been tenure track faculty and university departments are the last place I would go to look for a "diversity of thought", I've seen people excellent faculty attempted to be driven out of universities precisely because there thought was too "diverse" for the rest of the faculty.

There's also too many counter examples of this I know to believe there is any truth to that statement. The few times I've seen it it's because of how perfectly aligned the candidates thought is with the department (for both good and bad).

TedShiller• 4 years ago

It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.

If you think universities have diversity of thought you haven’t been to a university in the last few decades

jmole• 4 years ago

You also don't really want to hire someone who's been completely beholden to another faculty member's whims for the past 5-6 years. That would lead to bad organizational dynamics – you want faculty who see each other as peers.

Jensson• 4 years ago

They mostly get their faculty from higher ranking schools though. They maybe say it is for "cross pollination", but it is mostly that faculty works at much worse universities than they graduates from so they prefer to get people from similar places they came from.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02998-w

PhasmaFelis• 4 years ago

That would explain why mid-tier universities don't hire their own grads. Per the article, they don't hire other mid-tier grads either.

It does seem that the majority of universities are knowing producing grads that aren't up to their own standards. (Whether their standards are based on quality of teaching and research, or just paper prestige, is another question.)

sidr• 4 years ago

I have a PhD and this is absolutely not the reason universities don't want to hire their own. In the modern day, there is no reason whatsoever that university affiliation limits the spread of ideas or collaborations. The reason is there is a funnel - only the top x% of students get the TT positions and students of prestigious institutions are just more likely to have the big name publications that forms the sole criterion for academic hiring. Even the prestigious institutions like to spread the mantra of "we don't hire our own" but this is just so that professors can avoid having the awkward conversations with their students along the lines of "you're good, you're just not better than <y> candidate".

thebooktocome3• 4 years ago

This is a white lie at best. I’ve never sat on a hiring committee that cared about diversity of thought.

cjoelrun• 4 years ago

It's mostly an excuse. They're looking for reputation or monetary gain. If you have grants waiting to write a check to an institution or some high individual reputation that the university can claim as their own this excuse of cross-pollination disappears.

screwturner682• 4 years ago

MY dad who had a PHD and was a college dean said the same thing years ago. While that may be true but a lot of the universities only seem to recruit professors from a limited number of universities so the feed back loop is still there -Head of the IU econ department gets PHD from Harvard, hires new professor with PHD from Harvard, how is this different?

yunohn3• 4 years ago

universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas

Maybe in her case, but that’s just not true. The whole point of the Internet was to exchange scientific ideas, and that has actually come true - all academics I know share data/ideas online in real-time.

Universities are just too cheap to hire as many PhDs as they generate.

rightbyte• 4 years ago

That sounds like the same rationalisation companies use when people quit.

"It is good because we don't get inbred ideas".

More often than not the person departing has expert competence in the university or company specific systems or social structures, that are of no use somewhere else, and no one recruited from the outside have it.

lowken• 4 years ago

It amazes me how far down a dark road folks will travel without taking the time to look around and evaluate if they are indeed heading in the correct direction.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

Between the sunk-cost fallacy, and how many years both grad students and would-be grad students have spent on the ivory tower's propaganda treadmill, with little other (adult) life experience to be able to objectively judge things...

TheRealPomax• 4 years ago

This sounds like a fantasy description of a post doc instead of normal real life people, so... maybe talk to some post-docs and learn what their life is really like before putting down entire groups of people for an internet point?

trap_goes_hot3• 4 years ago

However small the number, some people believe that the correct direction isn't copying others' path to success.

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

Young people are ambitious and believe the odds don't apply. Academia is no different than other highly variable status-seeking paths, such as entrepreneurship or sports. Different personal values, same basic combination of youthful idealism and hubris.

The west would atrophy and die if everyone took the path of least resistance to a comfortable lifestyle. Market economies with perfectly rational actors would cannibalize themselves in a single generation.

sigstoat2• 4 years ago

every department produces more PhDs than it has openings every year. they'll all hire the best they can. most universities don't produce the best.

thebooktocome3• 4 years ago

“The best” here is measured by reputational vibes—not research value added.

sigstoat2• 4 years ago

sure. i'm not attempting to describe the metric, just asserting that they all use basically the same metric, and have the same goal.

there'd be less of a "problem" if a decent fraction of schools used different metrics, or had different goals.

fein• 4 years ago

Similarly, the best way to get a promotion in a university is to leave for a new job for a year or two then apply for a higher level job at said university.

smelendez• 4 years ago

Best way to get a promotion in many organizations!

fdgsdfogijq4• 4 years ago

PhD students are mostly cheap labor to carry out research for faculty. It's not a feeder to a faculty job. Most of them are immigrants who view it as a way to get into the USA, and so its a worthy trade off.

Its like in investment banking where analysts are hired to crunch numbers and make powerpoints. Banks hire analysts that have the proper training for those duties, knowing they don't have the potential to rise up the ranks and will be kicked out in a few years. Banking analysts/associates and Banking higher ups are then actually two separate careers.

Academia is basically the same

secabeen• 4 years ago

This may be the case in the sciences and engineering, but is much less so in the humanities and the social sciences. They are very different situations.

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

It's different but the same, in the sense that your primary occupation is PhDing, you aren't paid well, and the most obvious pathway to reasonable employment is joining some faculty.

In the humanities, social sciences, and sometimes math, it's mostly teaching instead of research. The students are paid a bit worse (usually). The overall deal is a bit better because a TAship really can be a part-time job if you work efficiently and don't "care too much". Of course that also means the research work is unpaid. Whereas the type of research work done by most STEM PhDs is more like a 40 hr work week on top of occasional TAing, so the overall deal is worse but at least you're being paid for the thing that can get you a decent job afterwards. Different tradeoffs.

It's really the applied/clinical life/health sciences, education, and a few other "professional pathway" fields that work much differently. Most people getting those degrees aren't interested in TT faculty positions and are working a full-time or part-time "grown up" job outside of the university, so the power dynamics and expectations are quite a bit different.

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

The comparison to banking/consulting is bad for a few of reasons:

1. Analysts and consultants make very decent livings. Spending your mid 20s as a banking analyst/associate is a very nice life for someone in their 20s. PhD programs barely pay a living wage, and in large cities simply don't pay a living wage.

2. When deciding whether a lottery is worth playing, you are looking at both probabilities and outcomes. You covered the probability aspect well -- that's the similarity between banking and professoring. The massive difference between the two is in the outcome. Banking higher ups have won a lottery that is worth winning. Professors, on the other hand, max out just above FAANG entry-level wages. Even then, it's only after decade+ of top-decile performance.

3. You might counter #2 with things like "work-life balance", "lifestyle job", "job security", and so on. None of these are true anymore.

3a. Universities are run by middle managers who are mostly less competent and more petty than their private sector counter-parts.

3b. Moreover, tenure doesn't mean anything. At this point, it's nothing more than a gentleman's agreement with an MBA. I have literally zero doubt that over the next 20 years every single university in the US will go through a round of layoffs that target tenured faculty, and will do so without declaring financial exigency. This already happened at a lot of places during COVID, despite massive bailouts and even at places that increased enrollment without increasing spending ex-headcount. If you got into academic for the stability 30 years ago, your bet was pretty good. These days you'd have to be an idiot or have your head buried under a hundred feet of sand to make the same bet.

"Tenure" now is nothing more than "continued expectation of future employment"; i.e., it's the only "normal" job in an industrial sector (edu) where the majority of employment contracts are not only at-will but even come with with your dismissal date attached (post-docs and even phd students). Can you imagine working at a software company but they tell you up-front they will have to fire you in 3 years? And also only pay $55K? LOL. When push comes to shove, in most modern faculty constracts, there isn't that much of a substantive difference between "tenure" and "at-will".

4. The glide-path out of a STEM PhD is usually at least as lucrative than out of an unsuccessful analyst position, but the scars of poverty make it feel like an insanely lucky success. I've seen 32 year olds with Mathematics PhDs cry because they get a job doing nothing related to their PhD but that pays the same amount that their students are making at their first job out of undergraduate.

So, I think a PhD in a technical subject can still make sense, but there's no rational reason to be an R1 faculty member outside of a teaching track. Well, except one: "massive ego that can't play well enough with others to hack it in the private sector". And that's certainly who you'll find yourself surrounded by if you choose that route.

fdgsdfogijq4• 4 years ago

I agree banking is a good job and has good outcomes. So does a Phd at a good school in an in demand field.

But my point about PhD students and Tenured Faculty remains the same. They appear to be part of the same job ladder. If you were to view a venn diagram of the skills/background needed for those two roles, there is less overlap than initially appears.

lapcat3• 4 years ago

PhD students are mostly cheap labor to carry out research for faculty.

This is true.

Most of them are immigrants

This is false.

valarauko2• 4 years ago

At least in the molecular biology field, most PhD students are not immigrants, while the majority of postdocs definitely are.

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

> Most of them are immigrants
This is false.

Doctorate means different things in different fields. In particular, getting a doctorate in Education or some of the applied Life Sciences fields looks more like a masters degree with a long paper at the end and you typically work full-time at a "real job". You or your employer may even pay your tuition. Ie, not the type of PhDs the article is talking about.

Digging into SED data, the "Citizen / Resident" numbers are propped up by two categories:

1. the applied biological sciences / health sciences, many of which do not resemble a traditional PhD program in any way.

2. education, which again functions very differently from a typical PhD program in every way: who pays, how they pay, what you're doing during and after, etc.

You can then track by field in the rest of the SED data and see that a huge number of these people aren't on the traditional academic track and are not doing a phd in the sense that most people in STEM mean; ie, they're working other full-time jobs, probably not publishing or barely publishing, never planning on going into academia afterwards, and so on.

More details: The NSF runs a survey of earned doctorates (SED) each year.

These reports include a table entitled "Research doctorate recipients, by detailed field of doctorate, citizenship status, ethnicity, and race: <year>". Let's look at 2021.

In Computer Science, 953/1545, or about 62%, were Temporary visa holders.

That's a lower bound! The other category includes permanent residents and the survey happens at the end of the PhD. Many PhD students receive permanent resident status during their PhD -- particularly those from places other than India and China, or who immigrated to the US prior to starting their PhD (eg for undergraduate or work). There are a variety of pathways, bu suffice it to say that many people end those 6 years no longer on a temporary visa.

Additionally, there are about 100 PhDs in 2021 that reported neither "citizen / permanent resident" or "temporary visa", who are almost certainly majority immigrant who don't (or at least don't think) they fall into either category.

All-in, I've seen estimates that up to 70% of earned doctorates in Computer Science are awarded to immigrants.

For all earned doctorates these numbers are closer to 33%, so flipped in the opposite direction. But if you start breaking down by field you will notice that the vast majority of fields where citizens are over-represented are exactly the fields where "PhD study as research assistant/TA" is less of thing and full-time employment during the PhD is much more common/feasible.

yunohn3• 4 years ago

Most of them are immigrants who view it as a way to get into the USA, and so its a worthy trade off.

Simply not true; I know of innumerable cases where European universities keep same-country academics on indefinite post-doc or other roles, refusing to ever grant tenure.

Most end up working in different EU unis and switching every 2-3 years, moving house regularly, all while having a horrible work-life balance.

trap_goes_hot3• 4 years ago

Actually, post-docs are the cheap labor. PhD students are given a stipend and many/most have their tuition waived. The overhead of running a research department in the US is fairly high and leaves little room for high salaries[1]. Anything can be improved, and its easy to criticize from the outside.

[1] In the main-stream case, not withstanding the egregious greed that sometimes occurs at the management level. But no industry is immune from human nature.

dieselgate• 4 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this as I was thinking the same. My SO is a PhD student and she often mentions her pay is greater than a post doc (or she would be taking a pay cut to pursue a post doc)

thebooktocome3• 4 years ago

Higher education is just paradoxes all the way down.

Public universities funded with taxpayer dollars that take primarily out-of-state and international students. Too good to recruit from local high schools.

Professors hired supposedly for their merit as researchers, chained to massive teaching loads with little autonomy.

Adjuncts. Just, everything about adjuncts.

Journals too prestigious to give permanent access either to the public who ultimately funded the research, or the academics who did the work, or even the other academics who reviewed that work for free.

It all sucks. We desperately need a new model. But the sunken cost of the current system and the perverse incentives keeping it afloat are too great.

csh0• 4 years ago

Public schools generally charge much more for non-residents (between 2x and 4x more in my experience) in part because of the reason you describe, not having contributed to the tax base which funded the school.

Students whose parents maintain domicile in another state (or another country) are generally considered by the school to be residents of that place for tuition purposes and thus not able to access the, much cheaper, in-state tuition.

Do you have any statistics on public schools which enroll a majority of international students? With a cursory search, the highest I found was UC Davis with 16% [0].

UC Davis charges, for undergrad, 14k~ for resident and 44k~ for non-resident.

Domestic Non-Californians are eligible for loans and potentially a small number of grants via FAFSA from federal tax pools, as with anywhere else.

Generally, only Californian residents are eligible for state and university need-based funding.

Most non-citizens, such as those who are undocumented, are not eligible for FAFSA.[1]

It seems more likely to me that these students, given how much more they pay, contribute to a reduced tax burden for tax payers on the whole. Not to mention the economic benefits from them buying housing, food, beer, etc. In the area where they live while in school.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...

[1] https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requiremen...

trap_goes_hot3• 4 years ago

FYI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1

For what its worth, I've always received a favorable response when I email the author to received a private copy of their paper.

feintruled• 4 years ago

The title confused me - I think the 'it' is ambiguous. It refers to the school not the PhD. So I think the meaning is "The school that grants your PhD thinks that PhD is not good enough to hire you".

clcaev2• 4 years ago

This article incorrectly asserts intent or bias.

In most fields the number of graduates is much, much larger than job openings. This creates a very competitive marketplace. Consequently, most graduates will not find a faculty position; and for those that do, most will be at less prestigious institutions.

screwturner682• 4 years ago

It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lot of money and time or you plan on going into teaching. The issue of course is there are not nearly enough teaching positions to employ all the people with PHDs. Further, while a school might have a well respected program it may not have the cache value that a department wants so the positions seem to go to graduates of schools with impressive names. It's kind of funny when a law school wouldn't hire one of their own to avoid inbreeding but the entire department is filled with people from only 3-4 schools who were taught but people from those same 3-4 schools. It's a slightly wider gene pool but inbreeding none the less

netfortius• 4 years ago

When I arrived in the US, over 30 years ago, with a PhD from an Eastern European country, I was advised to not mention it on my resume. Too much school without American experience was (still is?!?) frowned upon, by private businesses, as they were concerned about losing highly educated individuals, once they got "off the ground". Advice worked wonders, and the PhD was eventually used to just skip a few core requirements for a degree in a different field.

kiwih• 4 years ago

I have a Ph.D. and can build on this in the other direction.

As this article accepts in its own statistics, it is entirely possible to move up university rankings, as long as you don't simply rely on the weight of your degree. I started in a non-US university, world rank >250 in CWUR (CWUR [1]). I applied for several post-docs in several universities, getting three offers, and taking one at a US R1 ranked in top 30 in CWUR. After the post-doc, my boss said that I would have been able to go to just about any of the top-top-ranked R1s in my field, but I wanted to look for opportunities outside the USA. Now I have a tenure-track offer at a leading Australian Go8 university (top 120 on CWUR).

What you need to remember if you're pursing a career in this area that you need to be _visible_ - this means publishing in the best venues, collaborating with renowned academics, and networking outside your sphere.

If you are only pressing for the top 10 unis in America, sure, they can be _very_ selective and can afford to choose from candidates amongst themselves. But there are a lot of universities in the world, and many that are extremely well-regarded. Also: rankings aren't everything. At the tenure-track search level of your career, you should be considering the complete package (work/life balance, salary, students, political climate, proximity to friends and family....)

Also as cwoolfe says, there is actually a lot of incentive for universities to hire outside for the diversity of opinions and backgrounds, and as clcaev also said, you almost don't want to stay at the same university as your advisor for political reasons (you should be able to show you can operate outside their direct sphere of influence).

[1] https://cwur.org/

yummypaint2• 4 years ago

If you receive a PhD from a university department, that department will think that it is too good to hire you as a faculty member. Instead, they lust after faculty hires holding degrees more prestigious than the one that they bestowed upon you.

This tells me the author has no knowledge of the academic hiring processes. Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything. If you're trying for a liberal arts school, then your research needs to be compatible with involving undergrads, and they care alot about your record as an instructor.

Professors all know how the PhD sausage is made, and are the group of people least likely to be impressed by prestige. They will just look up your actual thesis and critique it instead of relying on the halo effect.

fdgsdfogijq4• 4 years ago

I agree on the publication record. But the school you go to has a huge effect on your ability to publish. This is well documented.

Go to top PhD program -> publish top journal easier -> attain tenure track job.

It all comes down to prestige in the end. This is aside from very hard sciences where true ground breaking results cannot be ignored.

yummypaint2• 4 years ago

Most publications these days have many authors. Your first papers are published with your advisor and other collaborators, and that establishes your history of publishing on the topic in good journals. Also, peer reviewers don't know or care which school your degree came from.

yxwvut• 4 years ago

Even in things like applied math, it's pretty arbitrary which assumptions and formulations become standardized when tackling similar problems (and it usually comes down to the effects of prestige on your network/ 'reach': the more prominent people you get your ideas in front of, the more likely your work is to become the 'state of the art' default approach, and the more prestigious your university (and the professors you collaborate with), the easier it is to get your ideas in front of important people.

gh02t• 4 years ago

I'm not saying that universities aren't using PhD students as cheap labor and then cutting them loose (they absolutely are), but a more charitable side to it is not that universities want to "hire up", it's that they want diversity of thought/background. Hiring your own graduates, who have been "raised" in the same culture, can lead to isolation and groupthink plus it reinforces the existing specialties within your department. The degree to which so-called academic incest is a factor varies from school to school and department to department, but I don't think it's wholly unreasonable as part of faculty hiring considerations.

Victerius• 4 years ago

Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything

If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.

thomasahle• 4 years ago

They will just look up your actual thesis and critique it

Actually reading your thesis is probably a bit too much work. But they will certainly look up your publication list and count the number of papers at the top conferences/journals they care about.

valarauko2• 4 years ago

This tells me the author has no knowledge of the academic hiring processes. Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything.

While this may be true, the fact remains that most academic hires are from the top universities, even for jobs at state universities. If professors are the least susceptible to prestige, then why do we have the situation we do?

yunohn3• 4 years ago

professors are the group of people least likely to be impressed by prestige.

Not true, academia is dominated by posturing, prestige, and networking just as much as any other profession.

your publication record is everything

This is literally a form of prestige. The content of research rarely matters - the value proffered by the publication and your research group have much larger bearing.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

It's probably been decades since I last talked with an academic insider about the Ph.D. career track...but both the article and the responses here seem to assume that Ph.D's will graduate, get hired by $University_Name, then spend their career there. Vs. I'd heard that the ambitious and intelligent Ph.D's career track was closer to:

#1) get a first job that's respectable, but mostly supports your early research efforts

#2) after showing yourself a promising young researcher at that job, get serious about looking for a better job

#3) iterate #2 until you have a good-enough job & security so that settling down & staying makes sense to you

the_only_law• 4 years ago

I’ve always wondered, because whenever I see people talk about PhDs they talk as if the only thing to do with them is to sit in academia for the rest of your life, but I see industry research jobs all the time that want a PhD. Why is that not an option?

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

It depends enormously on the subject you get a PhD in. Some niche corner of physics, which happens to critical for EUV chip fabrication? Vs. the plays of Sophocles (ancient Greek playwright, lived ~2,400 year ago)?

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

It's absolutely an option in certain types of life sciences, subfields of Computer Science & Engineering that aren't overly ossified/theoretical, and some fields of Mathematics.

Outside of those categories, things get bleak quickly.

YossarianFrPrez2• 4 years ago

General note: up until 1994, there was no law barring universities requiring faculty to retire after a certain age [0], [1]. In other countries, it is not uncommon to have a mandatory retirement age for public servants. The effect of the federal ban on mandatory retirement ages for professors changed the academic job market in a pretty profound way: there used to be a greater and more reliable number of job openings in every field.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ [1] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/12/27/gr...

greenthrow• 4 years ago

This is an extremely low quality anti-academic article. I've noticed this Big Think organization seems to vacillate between trying to put on a veneer of intellectual respectability and diving headfirst into pushing pure drivel like this article. Even the times they try to be better aren't very good.

tabbott2• 4 years ago

I think this article really misunderstands the structure of academia. The paper looks to have done a bunch of data collection, which is great; but the results could be predicted without collecting any data at all.

Structurally, if the average professor graduates 10 students over the course of their career, half of which go to industry, then an institution with a given prestige level will send 5x as many graduates to academia as it has slots to hire professors.

So just from pure statistics, if everyone is trying to hire for new faculty jobs PhDs from the most prestigious institutions, one should expect the average PhD graduate who goes into academic to get a job at an institution about 5x less prestigious (one a percentage basis) as the one where they got their PhD. (Hiring is of course more complicated than that, but I think you don't need to make a lot of assumptions about the professor hiring process explain the data in the article).

It's not exactly a pyramid scheme design; there was significant growth in the total number of professor jobs, due to population growth and increasing college attendance rates. And in many fields, there exists high demand for PhDs for work in both industry and government research labs. But these statistics mean that only top schools have the option for a large portion of PhD graduates to get professorships... And I don't think there's any realistic reform that academia could make to change this reality.

tabbott2• 4 years ago

I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field.

But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach.

But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.

alexwasserman• 4 years ago

More focused on Arts than a lot of the discussion below, which is more STEMmy (not surprising given this is HN), but there’s a good acoup.blog post discussing the PhD process: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...

Bret’s posts are on HN often enough I think his input is valuable.

Particularly relevant to the discussion on hiring chances:

“But what the data shows here is that outside of the top 10-or-so programs in a field, the chances of being hired are effectively nil.”

lerch• 4 years ago

The main argument of the articles is based on the assumption that PhD graduates are equally qualified for faculty positions regardless of their university. While I agree that a most brilliant candidate can come from a university that is not top-ranked, and that a bad candidate can come from a top-ranked university, I do believe that application profiles of faculty candidates from a prestigious university tend to look more compelling on average, and not only because of the name of the institution.

The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you

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