9 ms·

The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5,

by pacala 9y ago

The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears solvable for a period of time. Edit: It is pretty well known that there is exactly "One True Path" for a research career. See [0] or [1] [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/careers-not-just-jobs-for-phds-outside-the-academy/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/care... [1] http://ethicsandscience.scientopia.org/2008/11/20/excuses-for-discounting-people/ http://ethicsandscience.scientopia.org/2008/11/20/excuses-fo...

chrisseaton 9y ago
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher without being a professor.
- whyever 9y ago
  In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?
    - jccooper 9y ago
      As the first step on the path to understanding, first consider: "in what fields do people get doctorates?" As a second step, consider for each of those "what industry will employ them?" If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".
- mikebenfield 9y ago
  For many (I would go out on a limb and guess most) fields people may study in graduate school, there is no research outside of academia.
- angersock 9y ago
  Ah, but you can be a researcher (doing work at least as good as most PhDs) without a PhD. Therein lies the rub.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other. The same applies to PhDs and research. A PhD proves that the person has followed through with and understood a very precise topic of research for 2-3 years.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands. A PhD program is set to help the PhD candidate research a very precise and specific topic, which more often than not is entirely irrelevant to any industry, so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury. The key difference is that an engineering degree is tailored to teach marketable job skills while the PhD program is the exact opposite.
      - Cyph0n 9y ago
        > That's an awfully incorrect analogy. I would say "not entirely accurate", rather than "incorrect". Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD? > [.،.] so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury. And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field. Given that industrial research requires you to do practically the same thing -- albeit in a more applied fashion -- a PhD is usually a good indicator when hiring for such positions. Again, there may be more suitable people for the position who don't have PhDs, but that is once again an exception to the rule.
- dnautics 9y ago
  I mean, yes, it is possible for me to do biochemistry in my garage without a professorship (and I do), but will people actually take you seriously? Will you get money to do your research? Where will you publish? Not all of us can be Peter Mitchell, and arguably it's harder now that government funded research has a near monopoly on the research industrial complex.
  - self_assembly 9y ago
    I guess it comes down to why are you doing the research in the first place. Is it for your own curiosity and self-fulfillment or is it for "people to take you seriously"? I'll admit your point about resources is completely fair and oftentimes you need the prestige to obtain the necessary resources. However there is plenty or research that can be done without insane amounts of resources (<15k). As someone who does research professionally in an area that requires minimal resources (a start up cost of 10k and reoccurring costs that are much less). I do about as little as I can get away with in terms of disseminating my work. I do the work for my own personal motivations and am not concerned about being taken seriously. There are actually some benefits to this approach in that I don't have to work on "safe projects" that are deemed "serious research" by the community. It is actually quite liberating to work on things that others might scoff at and call you a "quack" or "wack job". And even if I am a "quack" I can honestly tell you that I am happy and feel fulfilled. Just my two cents. Life is too short to worry about everyone else.
dv_dt 9y ago
I think this is more of an indictment of how little real investment goes into R&D at private industry - even as the companies merge into megopolies who should have the finances to best justify it, they seem to become even less inclined to invest in fundamental research.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  The big (and some even not-so-big) companies hire lots of PhDs -- roughly 8% of Google's employees have doctorates.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    That doesn't imply that all those people needed a PhD for their job, though. I worked with multiple people at Amazon who had PhDs who were doing the exact same job I was.
    - laichzeit0 9y ago
      Some people do their PhD while they're working. You might want to change career paths, e.g. specialize in some machine learning subfield. I'm pretty sure Doctors specialize further, whilst working, as well?
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    Google is exceptional, and also in area of "growth capture". How about large companies in more mature industries? For example, do any of the telecom companies maintain the equivalent of Bell Labs today?
  - toyg 9y ago
    Google is infamous for valuing academic achievement over practical skills in interviews, 8% is actually much lower than what previously reported - I guess they lowered their standards of late. If google is at 8%, everyone else of comparable size will probably be around 3% at best.
krastanov 9y ago
Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for). It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "postdoc positions have those requirements", "the chances for getting a permanent research/teaching position is so and so". While there are people who are dishonest with their students, it is borderline offensive to lump them up with all the rest. All the people I have worked with have been honest about job prospects and have worked hard to give me the best tools to work in those jobs.
- mikebenfield 9y ago
  I think this varies somewhat by field, but I promise you, in many fields essentially the only reason to get a PhD is for a career in academia. The idea of a someone in graduate school not aspiring to become a professor still sounds odd to me. And while I never had anyone outright lie to me or tell me job prospects were great, there were also few people who gave me a really clear picture of just how bad they were.
  - Bjartr 9y ago
    Depending on field, private sector R&D positions can require PhDs
  - steev 9y ago
    Certainly it varies by field, I don't know a whole lot of English PhDs in industry, but are a multitude of industry jobs require STEM PhDs (e.g, research positions, quant positions in finance, etc.). Whether you agree those positions should require a PhD is a separate argument.
  - anon946 9y ago
    I'd say it varies more than somewhat, but rather a lot, by field (and maybe by school).
opportune 9y ago
A PhD program trains one to become a researcher, not a professor. There is a large need for researchers in industry.
- matthewbauer 9y ago
  Well, there's a need for certain kinds of researchers in industry. How large that is isn't exactly clear. The difficulty comes to PhD programs when people are able to become researchers without a PhD.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    It's also not impossible to become a professor without a PhD. That doesn't make PhD programs useless for that purpose, as long as they make that career path easier to attain.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      It's pretty unlikely. In one case there was a tech where I went to grad school, who performed so well that tptb decided she should be a professor. But before they could do that, they felt the pressure to give her a PhD (and where I went to grad school was very much on the "unconventional" end of the spectrum), so they enrolled her in the PhD program, made her take classes, and gave her a degree after she had finished enough classes to cya in the eyes of the accreditors, made her staple her papers together for a thesis, gave her a PhD, and then promoted her to professor. Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.
- jhbadger 9y ago
  Also there's lots of government researchers as well. The US has its NIH, FDA, CDC, DOE, USDA, and so on, and other countries have their own versions (if generally not quite as large).
alexasmyths 9y ago
"The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme." "It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job." Assuming that PhD's are 'smart' people, I would gather they understand all of this. And of course 'prof' is only one role for PhD's in the world.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Well... there's intellectual understanding and then there's emotional understanding. These are people who were the very top in their high school and the very top as undergrads. They've always made the cut when most everyone else didn't, so why should a tenure track position be any different?
  - paultopia 9y ago
    This. Plus psychological investment in identity as a scholar. Makes it very hard for some people to hear “it’s not a good idea” and harder to see when it’s time to cut losses.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    "So why should a tenure track position be any different" Economics and reality come into play as we are adults. There's basically no excuse for 'the smartest among us' to not have a basic grasp of the dynamics of how their education will play out into their careers.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      But they've always been the smartest in a group of the smartest people. It's not that they're not being smart or not being adult. It's that they feel this is just another step in a road they've been traveling since they were kids.
nether 9y ago
We could build new universities. Take up the slack in all the excess PhD's, increasing the supply of good secondary education, and help stave off exploding tuition costs. Build it from scratch like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, or Olin. Who is "we"? I dunno, some rich guy maybe.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  and each department at said university will employ what, 20-30 PhDs in each department? who themselves will then go on to produce a pile of new PhDs in their career? at what rate would new universities have to be constructed in order for this to do anything meaningful about the issue?
bjd2385 9y ago
More like the entire higher education system. This is what happens when businessmen run an education system and not True academics.
- throw-away-8 9y ago
  What does an education system have to do with academics? It makes way more sense when educators provide education and education managers run the system.
- dnautics 9y ago
  There's a strong opposite argument, you should probably familiarize yourself with it to have something to think about. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science
beambot 9y ago
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. You are grossly misinformed. PhDs programs are training for a career in research. Professorships are only one possible path... and just like you intuited, it's not even the dominant career path.
- freyir 9y ago
  It’s not the dominant career path because there are too many applicants for too few jobs. In many fields, academia is the option for a career in research, and a viable career in academic research means a professorship.
gh02t 9y ago
Few PhDs in my field go into academia, most go on to laboratory jobs. It's a relatively small area though (nuclear engineering) and demand is fairly high for PhDs. A large portion of PhD students are working on projects jointly with national labs, so there is a lot of preparation for jobs beyond being a professor. A significant portion also go into unrelated areas, e.g. someone I know just took a job at Github.
teekert 9y ago
Maybe in the US, here in the Netherlands you get a reasonable wage and usually finish withing 4 years during which you learn to write papers, keep yourself busy and determine the direction of a research project by yourself (at least more and more over the 4 years). Afterwards you can make the step to industry, quite comfortably. During my first year I was already told, 1 of the 100 of you will become professor so I had no illusions.
blahedo 9y ago
> The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. In the US at least, a substantial proportion of professors teach at institutions that are undergrad-only or where only some departments have graduate programs. I am a tenured professor of computer science and have not supervised any graduate-level research (nor will I be expected to do so). ...which is not to say that the numbers aren't all messed up. They are. And I've had many lucky breaks (and also some unlucky ones) to get where I am. But your Ponzi claim presumes that the only outcome of a PhD is an R1 professor position, which is not the case.

by pacala 9y ago

chrisseaton 9y ago

> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher without being a professor.

whyever 9y ago
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?
  - jccooper 9y ago
    As the first step on the path to understanding, first consider: "in what fields do people get doctorates?" As a second step, consider for each of those "what industry will employ them?" If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".
mikebenfield 9y ago
For many (I would go out on a limb and guess most) fields people may study in graduate school, there is no research outside of academia.
angersock 9y ago
Ah, but you can be a researcher (doing work at least as good as most PhDs) without a PhD. Therein lies the rub.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other. The same applies to PhDs and research. A PhD proves that the person has followed through with and understood a very precise topic of research for 2-3 years.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands. A PhD program is set to help the PhD candidate research a very precise and specific topic, which more often than not is entirely irrelevant to any industry, so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury. The key difference is that an engineering degree is tailored to teach marketable job skills while the PhD program is the exact opposite.
    - Cyph0n 9y ago
      > That's an awfully incorrect analogy. I would say "not entirely accurate", rather than "incorrect". Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD? > [.،.] so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury. And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field. Given that industrial research requires you to do practically the same thing -- albeit in a more applied fashion -- a PhD is usually a good indicator when hiring for such positions. Again, there may be more suitable people for the position who don't have PhDs, but that is once again an exception to the rule.
dnautics 9y ago
I mean, yes, it is possible for me to do biochemistry in my garage without a professorship (and I do), but will people actually take you seriously? Will you get money to do your research? Where will you publish? Not all of us can be Peter Mitchell, and arguably it's harder now that government funded research has a near monopoly on the research industrial complex.
- self_assembly 9y ago
  I guess it comes down to why are you doing the research in the first place. Is it for your own curiosity and self-fulfillment or is it for "people to take you seriously"? I'll admit your point about resources is completely fair and oftentimes you need the prestige to obtain the necessary resources. However there is plenty or research that can be done without insane amounts of resources (<15k). As someone who does research professionally in an area that requires minimal resources (a start up cost of 10k and reoccurring costs that are much less). I do about as little as I can get away with in terms of disseminating my work. I do the work for my own personal motivations and am not concerned about being taken seriously. There are actually some benefits to this approach in that I don't have to work on "safe projects" that are deemed "serious research" by the community. It is actually quite liberating to work on things that others might scoff at and call you a "quack" or "wack job". And even if I am a "quack" I can honestly tell you that I am happy and feel fulfilled. Just my two cents. Life is too short to worry about everyone else.

dv_dt 9y ago

I think this is more of an indictment of how little real investment goes into R&D at private industry - even as the companies merge into megopolies who should have the finances to best justify it, they seem to become even less inclined to invest in fundamental research.

santaclaus 9y ago
The big (and some even not-so-big) companies hire lots of PhDs -- roughly 8% of Google's employees have doctorates.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  That doesn't imply that all those people needed a PhD for their job, though. I worked with multiple people at Amazon who had PhDs who were doing the exact same job I was.
  - laichzeit0 9y ago
    Some people do their PhD while they're working. You might want to change career paths, e.g. specialize in some machine learning subfield. I'm pretty sure Doctors specialize further, whilst working, as well?
- dv_dt 9y ago
  Google is exceptional, and also in area of "growth capture". How about large companies in more mature industries? For example, do any of the telecom companies maintain the equivalent of Bell Labs today?
- toyg 9y ago
  Google is infamous for valuing academic achievement over practical skills in interviews, 8% is actually much lower than what previously reported - I guess they lowered their standards of late. If google is at 8%, everyone else of comparable size will probably be around 3% at best.

krastanov 9y ago

Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for). It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "postdoc positions have those requirements", "the chances for getting a permanent research/teaching position is so and so". While there are people who are dishonest with their students, it is borderline offensive to lump them up with all the rest. All the people I have worked with have been honest about job prospects and have worked hard to give me the best tools to work in those jobs.

mikebenfield 9y ago
I think this varies somewhat by field, but I promise you, in many fields essentially the only reason to get a PhD is for a career in academia. The idea of a someone in graduate school not aspiring to become a professor still sounds odd to me. And while I never had anyone outright lie to me or tell me job prospects were great, there were also few people who gave me a really clear picture of just how bad they were.
- Bjartr 9y ago
  Depending on field, private sector R&D positions can require PhDs
- steev 9y ago
  Certainly it varies by field, I don't know a whole lot of English PhDs in industry, but are a multitude of industry jobs require STEM PhDs (e.g, research positions, quant positions in finance, etc.). Whether you agree those positions should require a PhD is a separate argument.
- anon946 9y ago
  I'd say it varies more than somewhat, but rather a lot, by field (and maybe by school).

opportune 9y ago

A PhD program trains one to become a researcher, not a professor. There is a large need for researchers in industry.

matthewbauer 9y ago
Well, there's a need for certain kinds of researchers in industry. How large that is isn't exactly clear. The difficulty comes to PhD programs when people are able to become researchers without a PhD.
- yorwba 9y ago
  It's also not impossible to become a professor without a PhD. That doesn't make PhD programs useless for that purpose, as long as they make that career path easier to attain.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    It's pretty unlikely. In one case there was a tech where I went to grad school, who performed so well that tptb decided she should be a professor. But before they could do that, they felt the pressure to give her a PhD (and where I went to grad school was very much on the "unconventional" end of the spectrum), so they enrolled her in the PhD program, made her take classes, and gave her a degree after she had finished enough classes to cya in the eyes of the accreditors, made her staple her papers together for a thesis, gave her a PhD, and then promoted her to professor. Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.
jhbadger 9y ago
Also there's lots of government researchers as well. The US has its NIH, FDA, CDC, DOE, USDA, and so on, and other countries have their own versions (if generally not quite as large).

alexasmyths 9y ago

"The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme." "It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job." Assuming that PhD's are 'smart' people, I would gather they understand all of this. And of course 'prof' is only one role for PhD's in the world.

gozur88 9y ago
Well... there's intellectual understanding and then there's emotional understanding. These are people who were the very top in their high school and the very top as undergrads. They've always made the cut when most everyone else didn't, so why should a tenure track position be any different?
- paultopia 9y ago
  This. Plus psychological investment in identity as a scholar. Makes it very hard for some people to hear “it’s not a good idea” and harder to see when it’s time to cut losses.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  "So why should a tenure track position be any different" Economics and reality come into play as we are adults. There's basically no excuse for 'the smartest among us' to not have a basic grasp of the dynamics of how their education will play out into their careers.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    But they've always been the smartest in a group of the smartest people. It's not that they're not being smart or not being adult. It's that they feel this is just another step in a road they've been traveling since they were kids.

nether 9y ago

We could build new universities. Take up the slack in all the excess PhD's, increasing the supply of good secondary education, and help stave off exploding tuition costs. Build it from scratch like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, or Olin. Who is "we"? I dunno, some rich guy maybe.

sigstoat 9y ago
and each department at said university will employ what, 20-30 PhDs in each department? who themselves will then go on to produce a pile of new PhDs in their career? at what rate would new universities have to be constructed in order for this to do anything meaningful about the issue?

bjd2385 9y ago

More like the entire higher education system. This is what happens when businessmen run an education system and not True academics.

throw-away-8 9y ago
What does an education system have to do with academics? It makes way more sense when educators provide education and education managers run the system.
dnautics 9y ago
There's a strong opposite argument, you should probably familiarize yourself with it to have something to think about. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science

beambot 9y ago

> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. You are grossly misinformed. PhDs programs are training for a career in research. Professorships are only one possible path... and just like you intuited, it's not even the dominant career path.

freyir 9y ago
It’s not the dominant career path because there are too many applicants for too few jobs. In many fields, academia is the option for a career in research, and a viable career in academic research means a professorship.

gh02t 9y ago

Few PhDs in my field go into academia, most go on to laboratory jobs. It's a relatively small area though (nuclear engineering) and demand is fairly high for PhDs. A large portion of PhD students are working on projects jointly with national labs, so there is a lot of preparation for jobs beyond being a professor. A significant portion also go into unrelated areas, e.g. someone I know just took a job at Github.

teekert 9y ago

Maybe in the US, here in the Netherlands you get a reasonable wage and usually finish withing 4 years during which you learn to write papers, keep yourself busy and determine the direction of a research project by yourself (at least more and more over the 4 years). Afterwards you can make the step to industry, quite comfortably. During my first year I was already told, 1 of the 100 of you will become professor so I had no illusions.

blahedo 9y ago

> The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. In the US at least, a substantial proportion of professors teach at institutions that are undergrad-only or where only some departments have graduate programs. I am a tenured professor of computer science and have not supervised any graduate-level research (nor will I be expected to do so). ...which is not to say that the numbers aren't all messed up. They are. And I've had many lucky breaks (and also some unlucky ones) to get where I am. But your Ponzi claim presumes that the only outcome of a PhD is an R1 professor position, which is not the case.