The PhD Deluge

34 19 12 years ago

FD3SA• 12 years ago

This is an interesting problem to have. I myself have a romanticized notion of PhDs, as I consider pushing the frontier of scientific knowledge to be the most important of human endeavors.

However, the nature of technological progress has turned academia into a place where intelligent people maintain a holding pattern prior to beginning their careers. The issue with this is that, not only are they poorly paid, but they may also be contributing to a system that is looking more and more like a pyramid scheme.

At its root, this is a government funding problem. Particularly in the US, the dysfunctional state of the government has caused science funding to be cut at all levels. This may be a reflection of the American public's preferences, as it appears science is no longer a prime policy objective in Washington DC.

In my opinion, government has a few responsibilities that it needs to carry out well:

- Infrastructure (including healthcare, sanitation, power, education, etc.)

- Defense

- Upholding the Rule of Law (police, courts, etc.)

- Basic Scientific Research (Academia, research labs, etc.)

It increasingly appears that the U.S. no longer believes the last point falls within the realm of the government. This is an interesting development, as one of the key contributors to American economic success in the past century has been the massive state investment into scientific and engineering research (WWI, WWII, Manhattan, Apollo, NASA, ARPA, etc.).

Notably, most of these investments occurred during wartime. It appears that government support of scientific research surges during war, and declines in peace. This is a paradox that needs to be resolved in order to make better use of the nation's intellectual resources.

As much as I love commercial programming, I would rather be doing basic research, and I'm sure many on HN feel the same.

I honestly hope that a group of wealthy and powerful entrepreneurs such (PG, Elon Musk, Ellison, Zuck, etc.) band together and start advocating for a scientific research initiative whose funding is constant (inflation adjusted) over at least twenty years, and is focused on basic scientific breakthroughs.

A model worth studying would be Janelia Farms, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [1].

1. http://janelia.org/

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

The PhD Bubble is a fucking crime. As you noted, it's a pyramid scheme.

There used to be BA-level research positions, to get your feet wet in industrial research for a couple years, and possibly to help one get into a PhD program on advantageous terms. The problem is that those BA-level research positions, while they still exist, are now all fucking filled with PhDs.

The public sector (politicians more than bureaucrats) is short-sighted and the private-sector is worse. Basic research has been shuttered, and I think that's largely because of the anti-intellectual culture of the US. Basic research is seen as something "eggheads" do, and the mainstream distrusts people like us for, you know, believing the universe is 13.7 billion years old based on science rather than 6,000 years old based on a book.

This is sad, but accurate. Average people respond more to the carrot than the stick, but the sorts of people who tend to acquire power respond more strongly to the stick, and only an existential and violent threat can bring them to do the right thing. Societies seem to degrade until war of some kind (international, or an internal revolution) is inevitable. War is the worst way of resolving those building-up tensions and corruption, but no one has come up with anything that works better. We're about 25 years away from a violent revolution due to internal inequality in the U.S. and, while I'd love to see a reversal of course that avoids bloodshed, I feel like the odds are against it. We just suck as a species.

thesimpsons1022• 12 years ago

it's sad how often I hear, "did you know the government is wasting our tax money on researching squids?". there certainly is an anti-intellectual/anti-science populist movement in America. partly funded by the same people against global warming and evolution.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I wonder if http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition would help.

santaclaus• 12 years ago

How did Chand John go about his job search? Did he leverage industry connections that he made during internships? Did he leverage industry connections made doing tech transfer for his research? I know of absolutely 0 PhDs who did these things and failed to find a job after graduation.

domdip2• 12 years ago

Something went terribly, consistently wrong in his job search for a Stanford CS PhD in that economy to fail to land. I've always found his article to be an odd piece of self-antipromotion. He's publicly admitting he landed a ton of interviews and couldn't find common ground with a single company, which means he either doesn't know how to choose companies or can't carry a conversation for the duration of his interviews.

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

I just reread that article, and I don't agree.

I think the problem is very clear: companies are reluctant to hire a specialist for work outside his field, for the simple reason that they figure he's likely to leave when he finds a job where he can develop his specialty.

I think 'santaclaus has a point. If your PhD is in a small specialty like modeling human movement, you would be well advised to be developing industry connections throughout your time in grad school, because there are only a few jobs to be had doing that. (That's not to say that the expertise isn't valuable to the few companies who need it.)

Conversely, if your PhD is in a hot area like distributed systems or data mining, you probably don't have to worry about finding a job. It's the fact that he specialized in a small area that made it difficult.

And actually, I think he was lucky. I'm sure it was tough getting all those rejections, but in the end he found work in his field. He's probably much better off than he would have been taking some more generic software job.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

I also know of 0 PhD students who did this at all, and I am a former PhD student from a program of ~200.

Academia tends to do a poor job preparing graduate students for an actual career outside academia. I spent 2 1/2 years looking for work myself until I taught myself programming and quickly accelerated myself in a career of software engineering.

This is a poorly tapped talent pool - many of these people are some of the smartest people you will ever meet. Academia (usually) does no favors for them professionally in forming connections or informing graduate students, and industry doesn't want to hire them due to inexperience. The situation leaves them to snag whatever job they can, which is equal to a missed opportunity.

jermo• 12 years ago

What I find interesting is that the PhD-industry gap has existed for many years but more people seem to be enrolling in PhD programs, as shown in the article.

nycthbris• 12 years ago

I'd think this is because in a bad job market, people are sold the idea that getting an advanced degree will expand their opportunities later. Unfortunately not many people know that obtaining a PhD != easily finding a job afterwards.

domdip2• 12 years ago

TL;DR: blurby article from last year that confuses the academic job market in general, the private job market for an average PhD, and one person's bizarre experience looking for a private job despite graduating from an elite CS PhD program in a very good economy.

ballstothewalls2• 12 years ago

That graph is awful.

tdaltonc2• 12 years ago

Really? What makes you say that? I really like it.

ballstothewalls2• 12 years ago

I think two vertical axes with different scales is poor form. Especially when one is measured in thousands (the cumulative scale) and the other is not. My first thought looking at the graph was there was a convergence between annual and cumulative PhD's awarded--which doesn't make any sense. I think it would have been better done if it was just made into two graphs.

Create• 12 years ago

Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110302/full/471007a.html

Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-stud...

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.

This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...

The long-held but erroneous assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biomedical science has created an unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession—and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work. This is a recipe for long-term decline, and the problems cannot be solved with simplistic approaches. Instead, it is time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111

Since 1982, almost 800,000 PhDs were awarded in science and engineering (S&E) fields, whereas only about 100,000 academic faculty positions were created in those fields within the same time frame. The number of S&E PhDs awarded annually has also increased over this time frame, from ~19,000 in 1982 to ~36,000 in 2011. The number of faculty positions created each year, however, has not changed, with roughly 3,000 new positions created annually.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html

One is simply that graduate students represent the cheapest form of labor, and so graduate programs have expanded to keep researchers well supplied. The end result is that 8,000 people get a PhD in the biological sciences each year, far more than can ever hope to find faculty positions. Only about 20 percent of them end up staying in research positions, yet graduate education generally provides training in nothing but research.

The problem is that everybody who would actually implement these reforms at the institutional level won't like them. Successful researchers will have to accept smaller and more focused labs and see their smaller pool of grad students distracted by training in areas other than research. University administrators will see their departments and incoming money both shrink. You can count on many of them to resist.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/is-us-biomedical-rese...

my3681• 12 years ago

On reliable help to professors:

I work as a research engineer (MS EE) at the University of Alabama, and we have experienced a similar problem for our faculty members. The problem has been mitigated to a degree by help from professional staff (like myself) at various "centers" on campus that explore more practical applications of the research being conducted.

We do not receive a stipend for any extra work we do for a professor, but in just a few short years, our input has done wonders for building more complete students.

As for the rise in PhDs, I can confirm the our engineering college is pressuring faculty to graduate more PhDs. Our dean just had a meeting saying we need to "double our PhD output" just to stay competitive. As with most things, he admitted that it all boils down to money.

More PhD students means more potential funding. More funding means better facilities. Better facilities means better quality students, which means a better reputation. Better reputation leads to more/better grants coming your way and the wheel goes round and round...

MaysonL• 12 years ago

For those interested in Chand John's article, here's the link: http://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/2013/09/19/the-ph-d-industry-...

Why the author of the posted article couldn't link to it is beyond my understanding.

wsxcde• 12 years ago

A lot of these analyses seem to wish away the agency of graduate students. These people seem to think that we're all being tricked into joining graduate programs by professors making us false promises of unattainable faculty positions. In my case, both my masters thesis advisor and my phd advisor were open about the fact that academic jobs are hard to come by and are not even too much fun in the current funding scenario.

I chose to do a phd knowing full well that it was not the right choice in terms of maximizing my earning potential. Certainly it wasn't a guarantee of a better job because I already had a job in a group where about half my colleagues were phds from more or less the same set of universities I was applying to.

For me, the phd has been a mind-opening experience. It has let me learn things and think about things in an environment that simply doesn't exist outside of academia. An environment where there's no pressure to deliver something useful right now.

It's possible I'm misreading him, but I've certainly run into a fair number of John-types. These guys are ridiculously smart and have faced almost no failure at all. Years and years of a positive feedback loop involving success and self-esteem seems to leave these people with a vastly inflated opinion of their own abilities. And this seems to affect in two ways: (a) their ego leaves them vulnerable to misreading cautious statements about the future (b) they can't seem to reconcile themselves to the fact that they might just be mediocre and not extraordinary.

For example, if a professor says, "the market for academic jobs is very competitive but one should be attainable if your thesis has a significant impact on the field." I read it as, "you have to be among the top 10 or so among all the CS phds in the entire world graduating that year. In other words, I don't have a chance in hell unless I get very very lucky." A John-type will think they have a good chance. It's not surprising at all to me that so many of them end up so bitter.

tdaltonc2• 12 years ago

In my experience, CS faculty are more open to the idea that their PhD students probably won't be pursuing academic careers. In biology, the attitude is more like, "if you don't want to be a professor, what are you doing here?"

The PhD Deluge

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