15 ms·

A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

301 points by lingz 8y ago

thrwaway11 8y ago
How much of this argument should apply to more theoretical areas of research like pure mathematics?
- abnry 8y ago
  I used to be in a math PhD program. Probably would still be if not for some life circumstance. I think it is worth taking a hard look at the value all of this mathematical research actually produces. I understand how number theory has been useful to cryptography. I understand how branches of pure math can have a surprising influence. But when these examples are given by pure mathematicians, it often strikes me as anecdotal and motivated reasoning. Where are the hard numbers? Where is the cool-headed evaluation? They very much want the NSF to continue giving them grants so they can keep funding their mathematical interests. Because it personally and immediately benefits them. It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost by reducing research funding. This is how I look at it: Funding mathematical research means your society is wealthy. When the vast majority aren't worried about putting food on the table, it is a privilege when you can get paid by them to pursue your mathematical hobby. A hobby that has some relatively low chance of impacting society.
  - thecleaner 8y ago
    I can't argue for pure math. But atleast in applied areas such as pde a lot of the problems are motivated by real physical problems. To solve many of these would require theoretical breakthroughs I guess (cant be sure I dont have a phd). So perhaps funding pure math may not be such a bad idea.
    - ginnungagap 8y ago
      I always find the example of PDEs interesting, depending on which mathematician you talk to PDEs could be anywhere from "as pure as it gets" to "extremely applied"
      - thecleaner 8y ago
        I believe this demonstrates the spectrum of pde research. You have people from both ends contributing. Since functional analysis gets used a lot in pdes especially when dealing with weak solutions it would make sense that it appeals to be pure math folks. But once you find ways to construct viable test functions it becomes the basis for writing numerical schemes. So that appeals to the applief guys and of course once you have the numerical solution this can be used for engineering. This demonstrates a good pipeline for "consuming" science (of course assuming this pipeline is indeed correct). However take any component out and the value creation wont be that high. Perhaps finding more such pipelines for pure math woulf help evaluate its valur.
  - CJefferson 8y ago
    Your claim we could reduce mathematics research misses one big step -- that we can tell, in advance, which mathematicians (and researchers in general) are doing the "useful" research. In my experience that is very hard to predict. Also often researchers are "standing on the shoulders of giants", so the people who look most real world useful are extending earlier, "not useful" research.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      In perhaps pithier words, accepting abnry's figures > It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost by reducing research funding. , you can probably get 80% of the return by cutting the right 80% of research; but, if you cut the wrong 80%, then you might be left with just the 20% return on the remaining 20% of work, or 4%. (Also, there're lots of ways to cut the wrong 80%, and only one way to cut the right 80%.)
      - abnry 8y ago
        Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at name state university 145. I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 25% of math PhDs who go on to get a research job in math. How much are we funding these students here? I was on the receiving end of some NSF money for a semester. Was it worth it for the NSF? I barely contributed much. Granted paying a grad student is relatively cheap. But I wouldn't hold it against the NSF if they were more stingy. It may be that we really are funding the right amount and the benefits to the whole ecosystem are great. But I want someone to give a cool-headed discussion of the numbers, not some vague persuasiveness motivated by job security.
        JadeNB 8y ago
        > Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at name state university 145. On average, maybe … but, if we just axe those at NSU 145, then we're definitely not going to be funding the proof of the bounded-gaps conjecture. Now, Zhang managed to prove it anyway (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_between_primes.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_be...), but who knows how many people at small universities have a big proof in them, if they could only get the funding to have time to explore it? (I would also argue that this is dangerously close to the point of view that big companies obviously know something about doing business successfully, so the best way to save government money spent on business is to cut out small-business loans.) > I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 25% of math PhDs who don't go on to get a research job in math. Did you flip a 'not' there? I suspect that it's the other way around, that less than 25% of math Ph.D.s do get a research job in math, or perhaps even worse. (At least, that's if by "research job in math" you mean "academic job in math with research expectations"; if you count industrial research, then maybe I believe it.)
  - leereeves 8y ago
    Cryptography is a trivial example. The entire field of computing was invented by pure mathematicians like Turing and Church working in the 1930s. At the time, no one had any idea what the applications, if any, would be. It's like any science. Some work has immediate applications. Other work is pure exploration of the unknown. And it is pure exploration of the unknown that leads to the truly revolutionary discoveries. You can't set out to discover penicillin when you don't even know it exists.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Exactly. A lot of discoveries can be viewed as useless for quite a while before someone figures out a practical application.
    - abnry 8y ago
      Something like the Fast Fourier Transform has had a much significant impact on society than a proof of the incomputability of the Busy Beaver function. Saying that Turing and Church "invented computing" is too vague of a justification. I want numbers and details. Folks like Babbage were already thinking procedurally in practical enough terms that once the technological capability (not the theoretical capabilities) caught up, algorithms like the FFT could be discovered and put to use.
      - leereeves 8y ago
        You're only thinking of the immediate practical applications of the mathematics, not the importance of that work for future work. Turing's work was so important that he, not Babbage, is generally recognized as the founder of computer science. One example of the importance of Church's work is Lisp. Church's lambda calculus is the foundation of Lisp, which pioneered nearly all the features of modern programming languages [1]. The designer of Smalltalk, Alan Kay, called it "the greatest single programming language ever designed" [2] and talked about its influence on Smalltalk quite a bit [3]. And your example, the Fourier transform, was itself a mathematical tool long before the first computer was built, and the first published FFT algorithm also dates from the 1930s. [4] 1: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html 2: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-greatest-single-programming-language-ever-designed/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-... 3: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform#History
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    Number theory is an excellent example since it was an academic curiosity until it suddenly became very very useful. While cryptography is built on number theory, that earlier research was not done with the explicit goal of developing cryptography. Instead, people took existing math and built new applications around it. Obviously, it would be nice to fund only things that are eventually useful, but this is virtually impossible to predict in advance so....we fund a bunch of things and see what works. (Also, math is shockingly cheap compared to lab sciences so it makes even more sense to spread the bets widely.)
  - ipioxu15 8y ago
    > A hobby that has some relatively low chance of impacting society. As opposed to more important pursuits, such as advertising.
  - LeanderK 8y ago
    but isn't pure math research very cheap (compared to the cost of other scientific research) and therefore could still be cost-effective?
    - abnry 8y ago
      It very well could be. I just dislike vague justifications that it actually is worth the cost. Give me numbers and details.
  - chess19 8y ago
    I imagine that a lot of people responding to this do not realize how abstract modern pure mathematics is. The number theory that makes up the basis of cryptography was established in the 1700s. For example, Euler's theorem is the basis of RSA and was proven in 1763. The theorem is a small generalization of Fermat's little theorem which was known (but not proven) in 1640. These theorems are really just simple facts about groups and other cryptosystems, such as elliptic curve cryptosystems, are essentially the same facts except the multiplicative group of integers is replaced with an elliptic curve group. These concepts could be taught to advanced high school students with no formal pure mathematical training. The "hot" areas in modern mathematics require not only an additional 4 years of undergraduate mathematics but usually ~2 years of a PhD program to begin to understand the current papers. This is extremely different from other fields such as theoretical computer science which seems to have applications almost immediately. Even professional mathematicians likely do not research in hopes of applications hundreds of years later. I will not claim that modern mathematics cannot possibly have applications. I will, however, claim that pure mathematics is an extremely poor way to allocate funds if you are simply looking for a return on investment in terms of "useful theorems proved per dollar". Mathematics research should be justified by stating that people trained in pure mathematics can be useful in industry, other applied fields or to teach mathematics.
    - abnry 8y ago
      Exactly. Modern pure math is extremely abstract. I want careful, level-headed arguments justifying research in swath of pure math fields. Give me numbers, give me details. Not just vague anecdotes. It may be worth the cost, but I don't want that taken for granted.
- deleted 8y ago
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- stvswn 8y ago
  While everyone is pointing out the practical, long-term benefits of pure mathematics, I disagree with the premise that there needs to be a practical pursuit associated with mathematics or any other theoretical fields (including the humanities). Sometimes we study things to pursue knowledge itself. If we're talking strictly about public funding, then sure, let's talk about practicality, but otherwise I'm happy that someone is getting funded by a university to devote their lives to something like the Riemann hypothesis. Expanding known human knowledge is justification itself I think. One shouldn't expect it to be easy, or to pay especially well -- it's its own privilege.
dagw 8y ago
A PhD should primarily be about learning how to do research in your chosen field, not the research itself.
- deleted 8y ago
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- auggierose 8y ago
  That's what the diploma was for once ... (at least in Germany).
- rtkwe 8y ago
  How in the world do you measure and teach them that without having them actually do research and demonstrate that they've succeeded? It also does a lot for them by building professional relationships and making sure their name is at least somewhat out there by the time they've finished the PhD.
131012 8y ago
I totally agree with the problems of academia chasing citations, but the solution sounds odd to me. There are plenty of applied master programs aimed exactly at what is proposed: engaging with the professional community and fixing simple stuff. But I still think some people should be isolated from the daily torment of humanity to push us forward. Maybe we just need less PHD.
- dagw 8y ago
  At least here in Sweden there are also PhD programs where you do your research at a company and split your time 50-50 between that company and the University.
gp7 8y ago
Bizarre. This is coming from someone presumably embedded in the grant-writing machine that is modern academia. How do grant proposals justify their cost, exactly? Academia would be healthier if some back slaps at the next conference was all it took I think
mattkrause 8y ago
Great! Except that if you stop chasing those kudos, you will promptly find yourself unemployed and thus unable to do any research at all.
- nakashimakid 8y ago
  Exactly, while imperfect, these kudos are one of the only measures of academic ability.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    That’s not even close to true. However, these “kudos” are the principle measure of academic ability/productivity used by those making hiring and funding decisions so...barring a top-down change, we are stuck with them.
JadeNB 8y ago
Great, I can play too! Corporations should be about improving the public good, as they used to be [0], not chasing monetary value. Your turn! [0] Not just "in my day"-ism. According to "We the corporations", demonstrating this was originally part of the legal requirement for many governments' approval of articles of incorporation.
- JadeNB 8y ago
  (I forgot to link to "We the corporations", which is an interesting book, and far from the screed its name suggests: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473 http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473 .)
apo 8y ago
When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave graduate school without finishing – with numbers higher at some institutions. The biggest risk factor I've found for a PhD student is lack of research experience during the undergrad degree. I've seen it over and over. A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real researchers face. When it hits them, many discover they lack the temperament to actually move a research project forward. By then, they will have sunk 2-3 years of their life (or more) and a major amount of prestige into a failed attempt. If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD, drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to join. You're going to need 2-3 years of experience actually doing research to know if it's something you'll enjoy long term. You may well discover that you don't like what you find. If so, better to know that now than when you're in your late 20s. If things do work out, you'll have a better idea of what to look for in advisors and schools.
- ginnungagap 8y ago
  In Europe the norm is to do a Master after a Bachelor, some Master programmes are heavily research oriented and can give you a taste of what's to come if you choose to keep following that path. (I definitely agree with the point you're making, just pointing out that there are different possibilities)
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - chess19 8y ago
    Its pretty standard in the US (at least in the fields I am familiar with) that if you quit a PhD program you can still leave with a Master's if you've been in the program for long enough.
deleted 8y ago
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diego898 8y ago
I think changing the PhD system is a great target, but how can you identify that as the culprit without changing the professoriate/tenure system?
- IggleSniggle 8y ago
  That system has already changed. Tenure tracks are largely phasing out as older professors retire. They are being replaced with part-time adjunct teaching positions, supplemented by big name researchers that bring in grant money and institutions can write marketing articles about. Those big names are not incentivized to stay by a tenure system, as they can easily accept positions at other institutions or in private industry to continue doing their research.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - diego898 8y ago
    Can you give me a few examples of major universities that have moved/are moving to this system?
agustinbena 8y ago
Fourier or newton did not persue improving society, and they did.
- dagw 8y ago
  Fourier and Newton's work was almost entirely of a practical and applicable nature. Fourier's main work for example was on investigating how heat propagated through different materials, with his famous transform being more of a useful biproduct of that work.
- warent 8y ago
  To my understanding, Newton was motivated by trying to decode the Bible among other occult studies which he thought would unlock some mystical knowledge of the universe for humanity. So in that respect, he did sort of pursue improving society? Albeit perhaps in a misguided way. But hey, it yielded massive benefits
jonchang 8y ago
Great idea! Pay me for improving society rather than chasing academic kudos and I'll gladly spend my time doing that instead of writing grants and papers.
mnl 8y ago
I don't understand how it's possible that a "social scientist" thinks that he has identified the great problem and its solution in every other academic discipline. Well, actually I do understand that, I've been around sociologists. I wonder if there's any chance that people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture start speaking just for themselves. Maybe he's realized that his field is organized BS, but I don't think that makes a case for destroying modern science in order to build this society where laypersons decide what is worthwhile knowledge and what's not, in the newspapers. That's a great recipe for going back to those several centuries in which the rationale of doctorates was "improving society" as well.
- drb91 8y ago
  > destroying modern science As the author points out, it’s doing a decent job destroying itself.
- delib 8y ago
  > people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture Why is this about the author's feelings? There are plenty of links in the piece to underlying data sources, and these show that the problems mentioned don't vary a lot by discipline. For instance: http://phdcompletion.org http://phdcompletion.org
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
Replace 'academic kudos' with 'the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society' and the issue becomes more apparent. >A PHD should be about improving society, not chasing the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society. It seems to be Campbell's law in action. Of course you can determine a different metric to use, or just tune the current metric some, but you'll eventually see the same problems emerge, maybe worse, maybe better. I also think this issue shouldn't be viewed in isolation of other related issues, such as how the current system discourages reproducing the research of others and of publishing trivial results (we tested to see if we found this unexpected thing and we didn't). Figuring how who is a good scientist, given that some theoretical good scientist could spend a decade chasing down an issue that ended up being nothing, is not an easy problem to solve. Tenure is one attempt to fix it, but it largely just re-frames the problem into deciding which scientists deserve tenure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law >Take my example. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term. >In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its publication. It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social media. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to congratulate me. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything that’s broken in the academy. Academics love definitions, not solutions. This feels like the pure distilled essence of Campbell's law.
DSingularity 8y ago
100%
Vivtek 8y ago
This could literally be said about any other human endeavor. I mean, Comcast should be about improving society, but I don't see articles in the Guardian shaming them.
wuliwong 8y ago
>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research I don't think this applies well to all fields of study. I have my Ph.D. in physics and there are loads of people researching problems that don't really have counterparts "in the field." I'm assuming "in the field" means industry or possibly a government service. I would think the same is true for mathematics at least. >I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. Of course in this case, contact with people in the industry makes lots of sense. In fact, I'm not sure how this research would be conducted without this contact. I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. For me, I think of academia as having the goal of advancing human understanding of the universe. Whether or not that has a social impact is probably up to some debate. I believe that one of the cool things about academia is allowing some people the ability to pursue ideas and work on problems that don't have obvious, short-term impacts.
- drb91 8y ago
  > I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. Well, there is chasing funding. In your area of the universe, does the money follow worthwhile problems?
  - chengiz 8y ago
    Funding is simple. It's all about experience and prior use. Funders fund what they did before, what the fundees did before, and did they use up the funds from last time.
    - drb91 8y ago
      My question stands. :)
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    During a PhD you don't have to chase funding- either you have funding (via a scholarship etc) at which point it normally lasts for the three or four years you're expected to finish your PhD, or you don't, in which case you probably don't start at all- unless you can pay the PhD fees and your expenses out of your own budget... in which case you don't need "funding" (in the sense of funds given to you from some source specifically to do research).
philipov 8y ago
A corporation should be about improving society, not chasing shareholder value.
- drb91 8y ago
  Well, that’d be great!
- deleted 8y ago
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expertentipp 8y ago
The Guardian?! Doesn't sound like a respectable journal, who reviewed this article even?
pastor_elm 8y ago
Maybe the solution is to allow fewer people into Phd programs?? Not everyone needs a phd.
braindongle 8y ago
Wait. Incentive structures in academia are screwed up? No. It can't be.
Nokinside 8y ago
Academic kudos should be realigned better with scientific achievement. Academic kudos translates directly to money (tenure, research funding) and power (gatekeeper positions) and that makes it microeconomics problem. Highly competitive person with high scientific achievement may not be the best person to judge and distribute kudos of others. We should find a way to quantify kudos distribution to create good incentives. Researchers should get impact factor for mentoring, accepting papers to journals or giving voting for tenure to others who produce high impact studies after they get the tenure.
warcher 8y ago
The only real rot I see in the PhD track is the dangerous imbalance of degrees to jobs in certain areas (not STEM usually, although STEM is pretty uncompromising for tenure track). IMHO in the humanities the PhD is some kind of sick ponzi scheme, where advanced degrees serve to subsidize tenured faculty's careers with little to no hope of going on to anything of their own. (I know STEM isn't much better, but it's a little better, especially with industry being willing to assume some risk.) But I've got friends $100K in debt for an art history PhD, and that's craaaaaaaaaazy given what awaits on the other side.
- Miltnoid 8y ago
  I don't know a single reputable program that makes you pay for a PhD. Typically the salaries are subsidized through the school, that gets it's money from taking a cut of stem grants, donations, masters tuition, and undergraduate tuition. Saying that most humanities professors get their salaries by doing some sort of ponzi scheme of charging their advisees is just spreading misinformation.
  - rhino369 8y ago
    That is mostly true for reputable programs. But there are a lot of unreputable Ph.D. programs. They may even graduate the bulk of PhDs. And even some reputable programs will let some people "buy their way" if they don't qualify as for a fellowship/funding.
    - overeater 8y ago
      The annoying thing, is since there are more unreputable programs out there, all the stats about PhD students are heavily skewed by those students. Basically this rhetoric about 1/1000 phd students landing a job, or phd graduates being $100,000 in debt, or 9/10 students drop out or have mental health issues, are not about the usual PhD program we think about at universities that are household names and hear about in the news.
chriskanan 8y ago
It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact. If you are doing research, the goal is to do research that matters and citations are one way to measure that people cared about the work (of course, once something becomes a measure people start optimizing for that instead of the original objective). A PhD is a degree in doing research. When students start, it is true that many think they want careers in academia. Many then realize that academia isn't what they want after a few years in and seeing how their advisors live, realizing salaries are lower, and realizing how competitive it is. There are plenty of amazing career doors that open with a PhD besides being an academic... any career that requires the ability to conduct, interpret, and/or communicate research. The comments about meeting practitioners are pretty foreign to my experiences doing a PhD (in AI) and being a scientist. If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value.
- TearsInTheRain 8y ago
  > "It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact." I think the author would agree, although he is making the distinction between impact in academic circles vs impact in society. His claim is that impact in academic circles has become out of touch with impact in society. > If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value. Is there a way to measure how much non-practical research ends up having long-term value? Intuitively, the marginal utility of a 115th definition of a circular economy doesn't seem worth the academic man power yet that is what the author is being incentivized to work on because citation culture in academia.
fhood 8y ago
Man, this view of getting a PhD, which seems fairly common, is so alien to me. Both my parents are research professors, both regularly have students, and I have never seen any of the misery or stress that people keep bringing up. Sure, if you are unprepared to do research then you shouldn't do a PhD, but my parents' students are hand picked, and it is very rare that they end up with a student that doesn't want to, or is unprepared to do research. Being a PhD student should be one of the most fun parts of an academic career. You get to focus on your research, and are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. You aren't constantly being barraged by requests to review papers or having your time used up by a myriad of other responsibilities. I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier, but my impressions of getting a PhD were always positive, and the reason I never did it was because the part after your PhD seemed like it sucked.
- shusson 8y ago
  > I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier If only there was some way to investigate your statement. Like some sort of study that went for a few years and produced a report...
- BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
  > You ... are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. This is definitely not normal in the humanities. Want to continue working next year? Win this annual contest for your subfield that 800 other people are also applying for. It will cover your costs for 5 months if you win, after you spend an entire month preparing your submission for it. Didn't win this time? I guess you'll have to spend 20 hours per week every week on course prep readings and grading essays for the next six months. Good luck getting your research done at the same time. Humanities PhDs also on average take significantly longer than STEM PhDs. 7 years post BA is normal in the humanities. 5 years post BS is normal in STEM. Guess where all that extra time goes. It's because DARPA and Dow Chemical don't drop $30 million on your advisor for Enlightenment history.
knappa 8y ago
A lot of this seems ridiculous: > Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The baseline percentage of the population which experience depression (and other mental illness) each year is known to be pretty high -- and highest in for people in their 20's. One third sounds fairly normal; at any rate, there is a burden here to show that this is an exceptional proportion. > For instance, a PhD in Germany is supposed to take three years, according to university regulations, but most students need five years to complete one. If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data collection is going to take longer than that. > In the US, meanwhile, the average completion time for a PhD in education sciences surpasses 13 years. These programs are dominated by people who are working teachers, working on PhDs part-time. > One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor. Being a professor is only one possible goal and for some fields, it isn't even the primary one.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data collection is going to take longer than that. In Germany, you need a Master's with the coursework done before starting a PhD.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Right. The first two years of our graduate program were "breadth" and "depth" courses. After that, you could exit with a Masters or do PhD research.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. Outside of the US, I don't think most PhD students take 'classes'. In Europe a PhD is purely a research degree.
moh_maya 8y ago
What are the politicians there for then? I'm not being facetious here. Politics is one of the primary avenues of bringing about social change. Ditto civil service. A PhD should be about novel contributions that increase the sum total of human knowledge.
- TearsInTheRain 8y ago
  Ok but we shouldnt pursue knowledge haphazardly for knowledge sake. There are an infinite number of interesting avenues of inquiry we could send our academics down that would be completely useless. The paths we choose should be guided by the needs of practical application. How else can we value information if not practical application?
  - nakashimakid 8y ago
    "Practical application" is the domain of the engineer, the business person, the sales department, etc. Science and pure curiosity are one and the same.
  - alexgmcm 8y ago
    If we were guided by the needs of practical application we would have devised many ingenious medical probes but never discovered the X-Ray etc. I agree that we should prioritise STEM, but within STEM the research areas should be decided by the scientists themselves.
jderick 8y ago
One thought I had about this was related to a book I was reading recently about the Math Olympiad. It was discussing how in the US the way math is taught never allows the students to struggle with any hard problems. That experience of going up against something potentially intractable is totally foreign to most students, even at the undergrad level I suspect. When you throw someone into a totally new environment where their life revolves around doing something they have never done before, it is kind of a shock. I think part of the solution here would be to introduce harder problem solving earlier into the standard curriculum. For this reason, I would be curious if PhDs in Russia or Eastern Europe, where the school systems are known for being more mathematically difficult from an early age, suffer from the same level of problems that exist in the US system.
gnicholas 8y ago
> Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to pursue a career in science, their enthusiasm typically wanes to the point that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation These seem like different questions to me. There are plenty of ways to "pursue a career in science" that don't involve academia.
bradhoffman 8y ago
You all are kind of scaring me a bit... I just finished my Bachelor's and am starting my Master's this month. I have no formal research experience, but I planned to dive in during my Master's. For anyone who has done/is doing there PhD, if there is any advice you all could give me in order to get the most out of this next year before I apply for PhD programs, that would be great.
- godelski 8y ago
  Apply straight to a PhD program. Don't pay for a graduate degree.
  - bradhoffman 8y ago
    My graduate degree is already paid for.
  - glitchc 8y ago
    I disagree. A Masters with thesis is more directed, a good way to learn how to do research, and not hinged on a novel contribution for a successful defense. My PhD went much faster and smoother because I had learnt the ropes and decided it was something worth doing. I think part of the problem is people jumping straight into PhD without any research experience. I watched quite a few students struggle when taking this road. I do agree that it's a problem if grad school costs money, but a large stipend is only really available in STEM or medicine.
    - godelski 8y ago
      In my experience PhD candidates always get paid, and Masters don't. They do sometimes, but you aren't priority and guaranteed. I do always suggest getting the Masters on the way though. 5 years is a long time, and if you decide it isn't for you, well you come out with something (and it was paid).
- andreyk 8y ago
  I did the same route as you (Master's first, then starting on my PhD right now). It's a great route! In general, the best route is to try and join an ongoing project where you can be guided/mentored by a Post doc or senior PhD. This is easiest is larger labs, though in a smaller lab the professor might interact with you more (unlikely you will meet with prof much in larger lab). For your application two things matter: recommendation letters and publications. Joining a project on which you can have mentorship and showing yourself to be resourceful and productive is the best way to attain both. If you find a lack of guidance or a bad fit in whichever lab you first end up in, don't hesitate to try and change things up. In general, also always feel free to ask for advice and guidance; PhDs and post docs have been in your shoes and are more than willing to help out, you can always just ask someone out for coffee to talk about research and ask for advice.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
To be a psychologist in Canada, you have to earn a PhD. It's neither about improving society or chasing kudos. It's just a job.
jderick 8y ago
I agree that the PhD system needs some rethinking but I don't think focusing research on more 'practical' problems is necessarily a good idea. I have seen 'practical' research going on in industry labs and I think it often falls into a no man's land of neither being practical nor advancing the state of knowledge in any meaningful way. Citation counts are problematic in some ways, but they do approximately measure what the research community thinks of as important work. I agree they seem to suffer from overly promoting "what's in fashion." OTOH, there is benefit to having a community of researchers all focusing on one topic at a time so that ideas can be exchanged and build on one another. Just like with startups, for some good ideas, it may just be that they are being proposed at the wrong time or haven't found the exact right form yet.
andreyk 8y ago
This is a rather poor essay. "Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. Yet it can often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from practice. ... This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first year (or more) reading obscure academic literature." So... do industry research? Let's be clear: a PhD is a training program for research. As such most research done during a PhD is generally not that impactful, certainly not to go beyond fellow academics and to non experts. In my experience most people who go into it don't have much of an idea of what they want to do afterward -- they mainly know they enjoy research and are interested in the topic. AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not.
- jvanderbot 8y ago
  > AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not. Exactly this. The primary skill developed during a PhD (for me, and those around me), is knowing the difference between: 1. solutions that can be pulled from literature (bake), 2. solutions that should be easy to assemble from existing solutions (buy), 3. what technology requires a small-to-medium delta above and beyond the bleeding edge (build) All those are research, but far too often (3) is what everyone targets.
  - frankling_ 8y ago
    If all three of these are research, what is engineering?
    - ThalesX 8y ago
      I guess research deals with solutions under ideal conditions while engineering deals with real life constraint solutions?
shoguning 8y ago
I disagree totally. A PhD should be about curiosity and asking the most interesting scientific questions you can think of, also known as 'basic research'. You have the rest of your career to have as much impact on society and commerce as you want. Unfortunately, the social impact factor has been creeping in, in the form of more 'applied research' funding which is not fundamental and does not move scientific knowledge forward. The government has limited role in funding applied research, since industry is better positioned to understand what applied research is important and has a strong incentive to fund it. Academia is imperfect, but the genius of the system is that letting scientists chase down interesting things does end up improving society dramatically in the long run.
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  I agree (with you). I think also it's not crystal clear what exactly 'benefits society', so what to research then? Let people research what they want to, at least they'll be passionate about it and maybe 'reach the end' when they otherwise wouldn't if that makes sense.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  I talked to Two advisers + 1 role model before deciding a PhD wasnt right for me. The professors wanted to push their own ideas rather than my own. I knew the problems I wanted to solve were highly desired as I was getting hundreds of people visiting my website a day. The two professors were pushing that the PhD process would teach me how to research, but I realized that I would be the professor's tool. I talked to someone I looked up to, while he wasnt incredibly successful, he told me that- I was ready to do something, I no longer needed school. I'm very thankful, I had a bachelors and masters degree in engineering fields with industry experience. I had products people were paying money for. The PhD didnt seem like it would be as valuable as 2-6 years of working on my website or other projects. My take- If you arent going to work, school can force you to work hard. If you are already inspired, you are ready for life, go go go.
- fullshark 8y ago
  Who is paying to support you while you explore some curiosity of yours? A PhD program is not a summer camp, it's a social tool and the public is paying money in order to grow the human knowledge base. I don't get this attitude, appreciate the fact that the public is giving you grants and funding because the alternative is you get nothing.
programminggeek 8y ago
A PhD is about getting paid, like any other job. This should be pretty obvious.
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fastaguy88 8y ago
A PhD should also be about being honest in ones arguments in the popular press. PhD's in Education may take 13 years (is that the median?) because most students are part time. In good graduate programs that provide guaranteed funding for students, 4-6 years is customary (and funding sometimes runs out at year 5). It's hard for me, as an academic, to trust an author who twists statistics to make his case. And what does it mean to improve society? Basic biomedical science rarely promises improvements, but has given us revolutionary technologies (the structure of DNA, the genetic code, cloning, transgenic animals, etc, etc). The essence of basic science is that you do not know what you are going to learn, or whether it will be useful. You cannot plan unimagined discoveries. Should graduate students start doing "research" sooner? That is certainly the standard in biomedical research, where very few courses are required. But the consequence is that students know a lot about what they have done, and very little about other disciplines. How does a graduate student in biology become a computational biologist without learning programming and algorithms? The comments about having research experience are spot-on. And many of the frustrations people describe could be reduced by learning more about one's advisor before joining the group.
wsy 8y ago
This article has some true observations, but the conclusions seem to go in a totally wrong direction. Writing a PhD is a very ambitious endeavor. You will inevitably have your downs and crises, because research is hard. This is independent of the research topic. Now asking that the PhD thesis should not only advance research, but also 'improve society' will only increase the pressure. The author also has the purpose of a PhD wrong: this is your research journeyman time, and delivering the PhD thesis is like creating your masterpiece as craftsman (in the original meaning where you create a fine piece of work which earns you the right to call yourself master of a craft). The real, unsupervised research career starts after PhD. This also means that it would be a very bad idea to start with high-risk research. Do this as PostDoc, when you have acquired all the necessary skills. Not focusing on publications is the worst advice one can give aspiring academics. Research is about advancing shared knowledge, and the only way to do this is to share your results. If you don't manage to publish, either your results are not relevant, or your work is not considered sound by your peer researchers. Successful publishing in reputable venues validates your research, and is the most effective way to disseminate new insights. I agree that the publishing system is broken. You have to work around that by choosing the right venues. This is another academic skill you need to learn. If you really want to improve society and feel insufficient if you 'only' improve your research field, then don't pursue a research career. Better go work for some non-profit organization, or found one.
fixermark 8y ago
Basically every human endeavor "should" be about putting the general good over the individual good. After all, it's in one's own selfish interests for that to be the state of affairs; there are far more people not-you doing things than people who are you doing things, so you stand to benefit more if all those not-you people are doing work that indirectly improves your quality-of-life. ;) The (sometimes literally) million-dollar question is: how do you align incentives to bring about that desired end-state? Ph.D's are not unique in struggling with this age-old conundrum; if the government is willing to pay for robotics research for drone warfare but nobody is putting up the cash to pay for nursing-care robot research, then we can make some pretty firm predictions what kind of robots we'll see mature and reliable in twenty years.
- nakashimakid 8y ago
  I posit that "one's own selfish interests", which can include pursuing a research topic for the "general good", is a major driver of scientific inquiry. The evaluation of whether "general good" is advanced when answering a scientific question is subjective. Might I remind you that our foundations of probability - a pillar of mathematics and more - was furthered with the intention of winning gambling games? Or that our understanding of the limits of human physiology - how much force a skull can withstand, time before death under hypothermia - was furthered by Nazi scientists at the expense of Jews and other minorities? While born out of sin, these two examples of science unequivocally better the "general good" - now...
modells 8y ago
The two aren’t mutex. And publish or perish. The suggestion is that academia should be utilitarian and short-term focused. This will never happen. It’s tantamount to saying “we should get rid of archeologists because they aren’t a profit-center department.”
- nakashimakid 8y ago
  ^ this guy. exactly. Measuring the utility of academia is futile. If anything should be said about utility it is that empirically, the average ROI on academia from the point of view of The State is always net positive: economically, culturally, socially, etc.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
From the comments, one of the "Guardian picks": I strongly, strongly disagree. A PhD should be about science. Not about utility for society. I am pretty sure that Max Planck did not think about the utility of computers when he proposed this completely absurd, little mathematical trick of discretising energy. Still, without quantum theory: no computer, no laser, no magnetic resonance imaging...and I could go on forever. Progress in science is necessarily chaotic - if you disallow incoherence, absurdity, non-applicability, you will kill science. The author is conceptualizing "science" (maybe he talks about engineering and not science?) only as a tool of problem solving for the society - that is actual the role of science in Orwell's "1984" and that was the role of science to a certain extent in socialism. By making science teleological, one makes science ready for totalitarian abuse. Thank you very much! By the way, comparing PhD systems from different countries is absolutely rubbish. In Germany, it is already rubbish to compare PhDs from different faculties from the same university....
j7ake 8y ago
"They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real world." By that metric, most fundamental discoveries in the last 200 years would not have been enough to finish a PhD. Even Hamming's error correcting codes took 10+ years for Bell Labs to implement it. And even then it was because they had no other alternatives and were in a bind.
yumario 8y ago
I don't understand this system at all. Only 1 in 200 Phd student ends up becoming a professor, yet in college we have classes of 200-250 students per professor. And some of the older professors have been teaching the same class for many many years, without attempting to change the material. They are just repeating the stuff the already know, over and over again. It seems for me a waste of human resources, for me, to put some of the smartest people in to such repetitive task. Instead, I think the hiring bar for academia positions should be lower, the classes should be smaller, and the student should receive more customize experience.
yalph 8y ago
The reason I completely hated my phd program: - it was incredibly political, much, much more than companies I worked at. - most students were just trying to tweak some equations and get the hell out of that place. Overall it was a very unhealthy environment and wasnt worth It.
nakashimakid 8y ago
Academia has always been, and always will be, about new knowledge. The article laments the pursuit of citations but fails to note that it is today's primary quantitative measure of new knowledge - though imperfect. "Improving society" as academia's objective will have its own set of misaligned incentives, potentially much worse than the pursuit of "academic kudos". How would this be measured?
brandonjm 8y ago
> Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses... The university where I am currently doing my PhD has a very heavy focus on the outputs of a PhD contributing something worthwhile not only to academia but also to industry or the world. It isn't a massively high ranking university but it does force academics to think practically as well as theoretically. We are required to have an industry (non-academic) advisor on our supervisory panel who helps guide the research so it can be useful and not just gather dust once finished.
guessthejuice 8y ago
No. PhD should be about truth, research and advancing knowledge. Knowledge/science shouldn't be politicized. It's such an absurd assertion when you consider that different people have different ideas on how to improve society.
pvaldes 8y ago
A PhD should be in fact about earning a decent living and secure a better life for yourself and your relatives.

301 points by lingz 8y ago

thrwaway11 8y ago

How much of this argument should apply to more theoretical areas of research like pure mathematics?

abnry 8y ago
I used to be in a math PhD program. Probably would still be if not for some life circumstance. I think it is worth taking a hard look at the value all of this mathematical research actually produces. I understand how number theory has been useful to cryptography. I understand how branches of pure math can have a surprising influence. But when these examples are given by pure mathematicians, it often strikes me as anecdotal and motivated reasoning. Where are the hard numbers? Where is the cool-headed evaluation? They very much want the NSF to continue giving them grants so they can keep funding their mathematical interests. Because it personally and immediately benefits them. It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost by reducing research funding. This is how I look at it: Funding mathematical research means your society is wealthy. When the vast majority aren't worried about putting food on the table, it is a privilege when you can get paid by them to pursue your mathematical hobby. A hobby that has some relatively low chance of impacting society.
- thecleaner 8y ago
  I can't argue for pure math. But atleast in applied areas such as pde a lot of the problems are motivated by real physical problems. To solve many of these would require theoretical breakthroughs I guess (cant be sure I dont have a phd). So perhaps funding pure math may not be such a bad idea.
  - ginnungagap 8y ago
    I always find the example of PDEs interesting, depending on which mathematician you talk to PDEs could be anywhere from "as pure as it gets" to "extremely applied"
    - thecleaner 8y ago
      I believe this demonstrates the spectrum of pde research. You have people from both ends contributing. Since functional analysis gets used a lot in pdes especially when dealing with weak solutions it would make sense that it appeals to be pure math folks. But once you find ways to construct viable test functions it becomes the basis for writing numerical schemes. So that appeals to the applief guys and of course once you have the numerical solution this can be used for engineering. This demonstrates a good pipeline for "consuming" science (of course assuming this pipeline is indeed correct). However take any component out and the value creation wont be that high. Perhaps finding more such pipelines for pure math woulf help evaluate its valur.
- CJefferson 8y ago
  Your claim we could reduce mathematics research misses one big step -- that we can tell, in advance, which mathematicians (and researchers in general) are doing the "useful" research. In my experience that is very hard to predict. Also often researchers are "standing on the shoulders of giants", so the people who look most real world useful are extending earlier, "not useful" research.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    In perhaps pithier words, accepting abnry's figures > It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost by reducing research funding. , you can probably get 80% of the return by cutting the right 80% of research; but, if you cut the wrong 80%, then you might be left with just the 20% return on the remaining 20% of work, or 4%. (Also, there're lots of ways to cut the wrong 80%, and only one way to cut the right 80%.)
    - abnry 8y ago
      Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at name state university 145. I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 25% of math PhDs who go on to get a research job in math. How much are we funding these students here? I was on the receiving end of some NSF money for a semester. Was it worth it for the NSF? I barely contributed much. Granted paying a grad student is relatively cheap. But I wouldn't hold it against the NSF if they were more stingy. It may be that we really are funding the right amount and the benefits to the whole ecosystem are great. But I want someone to give a cool-headed discussion of the numbers, not some vague persuasiveness motivated by job security.
      - JadeNB 8y ago
        > Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at name state university 145. On average, maybe … but, if we just axe those at NSU 145, then we're definitely not going to be funding the proof of the bounded-gaps conjecture. Now, Zhang managed to prove it anyway (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_between_primes.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_be...), but who knows how many people at small universities have a big proof in them, if they could only get the funding to have time to explore it? (I would also argue that this is dangerously close to the point of view that big companies obviously know something about doing business successfully, so the best way to save government money spent on business is to cut out small-business loans.) > I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 25% of math PhDs who don't go on to get a research job in math. Did you flip a 'not' there? I suspect that it's the other way around, that less than 25% of math Ph.D.s do get a research job in math, or perhaps even worse. (At least, that's if by "research job in math" you mean "academic job in math with research expectations"; if you count industrial research, then maybe I believe it.)
- leereeves 8y ago
  Cryptography is a trivial example. The entire field of computing was invented by pure mathematicians like Turing and Church working in the 1930s. At the time, no one had any idea what the applications, if any, would be. It's like any science. Some work has immediate applications. Other work is pure exploration of the unknown. And it is pure exploration of the unknown that leads to the truly revolutionary discoveries. You can't set out to discover penicillin when you don't even know it exists.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Exactly. A lot of discoveries can be viewed as useless for quite a while before someone figures out a practical application.
  - abnry 8y ago
    Something like the Fast Fourier Transform has had a much significant impact on society than a proof of the incomputability of the Busy Beaver function. Saying that Turing and Church "invented computing" is too vague of a justification. I want numbers and details. Folks like Babbage were already thinking procedurally in practical enough terms that once the technological capability (not the theoretical capabilities) caught up, algorithms like the FFT could be discovered and put to use.
    - leereeves 8y ago
      You're only thinking of the immediate practical applications of the mathematics, not the importance of that work for future work. Turing's work was so important that he, not Babbage, is generally recognized as the founder of computer science. One example of the importance of Church's work is Lisp. Church's lambda calculus is the foundation of Lisp, which pioneered nearly all the features of modern programming languages [1]. The designer of Smalltalk, Alan Kay, called it "the greatest single programming language ever designed" [2] and talked about its influence on Smalltalk quite a bit [3]. And your example, the Fourier transform, was itself a mathematical tool long before the first computer was built, and the first published FFT algorithm also dates from the 1930s. [4] 1: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html 2: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-greatest-single-programming-language-ever-designed/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-... 3: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform#History
- mattkrause 8y ago
  Number theory is an excellent example since it was an academic curiosity until it suddenly became very very useful. While cryptography is built on number theory, that earlier research was not done with the explicit goal of developing cryptography. Instead, people took existing math and built new applications around it. Obviously, it would be nice to fund only things that are eventually useful, but this is virtually impossible to predict in advance so....we fund a bunch of things and see what works. (Also, math is shockingly cheap compared to lab sciences so it makes even more sense to spread the bets widely.)
- ipioxu15 8y ago
  > A hobby that has some relatively low chance of impacting society. As opposed to more important pursuits, such as advertising.
- LeanderK 8y ago
  but isn't pure math research very cheap (compared to the cost of other scientific research) and therefore could still be cost-effective?
  - abnry 8y ago
    It very well could be. I just dislike vague justifications that it actually is worth the cost. Give me numbers and details.
- chess19 8y ago
  I imagine that a lot of people responding to this do not realize how abstract modern pure mathematics is. The number theory that makes up the basis of cryptography was established in the 1700s. For example, Euler's theorem is the basis of RSA and was proven in 1763. The theorem is a small generalization of Fermat's little theorem which was known (but not proven) in 1640. These theorems are really just simple facts about groups and other cryptosystems, such as elliptic curve cryptosystems, are essentially the same facts except the multiplicative group of integers is replaced with an elliptic curve group. These concepts could be taught to advanced high school students with no formal pure mathematical training. The "hot" areas in modern mathematics require not only an additional 4 years of undergraduate mathematics but usually ~2 years of a PhD program to begin to understand the current papers. This is extremely different from other fields such as theoretical computer science which seems to have applications almost immediately. Even professional mathematicians likely do not research in hopes of applications hundreds of years later. I will not claim that modern mathematics cannot possibly have applications. I will, however, claim that pure mathematics is an extremely poor way to allocate funds if you are simply looking for a return on investment in terms of "useful theorems proved per dollar". Mathematics research should be justified by stating that people trained in pure mathematics can be useful in industry, other applied fields or to teach mathematics.
  - abnry 8y ago
    Exactly. Modern pure math is extremely abstract. I want careful, level-headed arguments justifying research in swath of pure math fields. Give me numbers, give me details. Not just vague anecdotes. It may be worth the cost, but I don't want that taken for granted.
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stvswn 8y ago
While everyone is pointing out the practical, long-term benefits of pure mathematics, I disagree with the premise that there needs to be a practical pursuit associated with mathematics or any other theoretical fields (including the humanities). Sometimes we study things to pursue knowledge itself. If we're talking strictly about public funding, then sure, let's talk about practicality, but otherwise I'm happy that someone is getting funded by a university to devote their lives to something like the Riemann hypothesis. Expanding known human knowledge is justification itself I think. One shouldn't expect it to be easy, or to pay especially well -- it's its own privilege.

dagw 8y ago

A PhD should primarily be about learning how to do research in your chosen field, not the research itself.

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auggierose 8y ago
That's what the diploma was for once ... (at least in Germany).
rtkwe 8y ago
How in the world do you measure and teach them that without having them actually do research and demonstrate that they've succeeded? It also does a lot for them by building professional relationships and making sure their name is at least somewhat out there by the time they've finished the PhD.

131012 8y ago

I totally agree with the problems of academia chasing citations, but the solution sounds odd to me. There are plenty of applied master programs aimed exactly at what is proposed: engaging with the professional community and fixing simple stuff. But I still think some people should be isolated from the daily torment of humanity to push us forward. Maybe we just need less PHD.

dagw 8y ago
At least here in Sweden there are also PhD programs where you do your research at a company and split your time 50-50 between that company and the University.

gp7 8y ago

Bizarre. This is coming from someone presumably embedded in the grant-writing machine that is modern academia. How do grant proposals justify their cost, exactly? Academia would be healthier if some back slaps at the next conference was all it took I think

mattkrause 8y ago

Great! Except that if you stop chasing those kudos, you will promptly find yourself unemployed and thus unable to do any research at all.

nakashimakid 8y ago
Exactly, while imperfect, these kudos are one of the only measures of academic ability.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  That’s not even close to true. However, these “kudos” are the principle measure of academic ability/productivity used by those making hiring and funding decisions so...barring a top-down change, we are stuck with them.

JadeNB 8y ago

Great, I can play too! Corporations should be about improving the public good, as they used to be [0], not chasing monetary value. Your turn! [0] Not just "in my day"-ism. According to "We the corporations", demonstrating this was originally part of the legal requirement for many governments' approval of articles of incorporation.

JadeNB 8y ago
(I forgot to link to "We the corporations", which is an interesting book, and far from the screed its name suggests: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473 http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473 .)

apo 8y ago

When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave graduate school without finishing – with numbers higher at some institutions. The biggest risk factor I've found for a PhD student is lack of research experience during the undergrad degree. I've seen it over and over. A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real researchers face. When it hits them, many discover they lack the temperament to actually move a research project forward. By then, they will have sunk 2-3 years of their life (or more) and a major amount of prestige into a failed attempt. If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD, drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to join. You're going to need 2-3 years of experience actually doing research to know if it's something you'll enjoy long term. You may well discover that you don't like what you find. If so, better to know that now than when you're in your late 20s. If things do work out, you'll have a better idea of what to look for in advisors and schools.

ginnungagap 8y ago
In Europe the norm is to do a Master after a Bachelor, some Master programmes are heavily research oriented and can give you a taste of what's to come if you choose to keep following that path. (I definitely agree with the point you're making, just pointing out that there are different possibilities)
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- chess19 8y ago
  Its pretty standard in the US (at least in the fields I am familiar with) that if you quit a PhD program you can still leave with a Master's if you've been in the program for long enough.

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diego898 8y ago

I think changing the PhD system is a great target, but how can you identify that as the culprit without changing the professoriate/tenure system?

IggleSniggle 8y ago
That system has already changed. Tenure tracks are largely phasing out as older professors retire. They are being replaced with part-time adjunct teaching positions, supplemented by big name researchers that bring in grant money and institutions can write marketing articles about. Those big names are not incentivized to stay by a tenure system, as they can easily accept positions at other institutions or in private industry to continue doing their research.
- deleted 8y ago
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- diego898 8y ago
  Can you give me a few examples of major universities that have moved/are moving to this system?

agustinbena 8y ago

Fourier or newton did not persue improving society, and they did.

dagw 8y ago
Fourier and Newton's work was almost entirely of a practical and applicable nature. Fourier's main work for example was on investigating how heat propagated through different materials, with his famous transform being more of a useful biproduct of that work.
warent 8y ago
To my understanding, Newton was motivated by trying to decode the Bible among other occult studies which he thought would unlock some mystical knowledge of the universe for humanity. So in that respect, he did sort of pursue improving society? Albeit perhaps in a misguided way. But hey, it yielded massive benefits

jonchang 8y ago

Great idea! Pay me for improving society rather than chasing academic kudos and I'll gladly spend my time doing that instead of writing grants and papers.

mnl 8y ago

I don't understand how it's possible that a "social scientist" thinks that he has identified the great problem and its solution in every other academic discipline. Well, actually I do understand that, I've been around sociologists. I wonder if there's any chance that people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture start speaking just for themselves. Maybe he's realized that his field is organized BS, but I don't think that makes a case for destroying modern science in order to build this society where laypersons decide what is worthwhile knowledge and what's not, in the newspapers. That's a great recipe for going back to those several centuries in which the rationale of doctorates was "improving society" as well.

drb91 8y ago
> destroying modern science As the author points out, it’s doing a decent job destroying itself.
delib 8y ago
> people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture Why is this about the author's feelings? There are plenty of links in the piece to underlying data sources, and these show that the problems mentioned don't vary a lot by discipline. For instance: http://phdcompletion.org http://phdcompletion.org

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

Replace 'academic kudos' with 'the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society' and the issue becomes more apparent. >A PHD should be about improving society, not chasing the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society. It seems to be Campbell's law in action. Of course you can determine a different metric to use, or just tune the current metric some, but you'll eventually see the same problems emerge, maybe worse, maybe better. I also think this issue shouldn't be viewed in isolation of other related issues, such as how the current system discourages reproducing the research of others and of publishing trivial results (we tested to see if we found this unexpected thing and we didn't). Figuring how who is a good scientist, given that some theoretical good scientist could spend a decade chasing down an issue that ended up being nothing, is not an easy problem to solve. Tenure is one attempt to fix it, but it largely just re-frames the problem into deciding which scientists deserve tenure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law >Take my example. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term. >In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its publication. It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social media. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to congratulate me. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything that’s broken in the academy. Academics love definitions, not solutions. This feels like the pure distilled essence of Campbell's law.

DSingularity 8y ago

100%

Vivtek 8y ago

This could literally be said about any other human endeavor. I mean, Comcast should be about improving society, but I don't see articles in the Guardian shaming them.

wuliwong 8y ago

>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research I don't think this applies well to all fields of study. I have my Ph.D. in physics and there are loads of people researching problems that don't really have counterparts "in the field." I'm assuming "in the field" means industry or possibly a government service. I would think the same is true for mathematics at least. >I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. Of course in this case, contact with people in the industry makes lots of sense. In fact, I'm not sure how this research would be conducted without this contact. I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. For me, I think of academia as having the goal of advancing human understanding of the universe. Whether or not that has a social impact is probably up to some debate. I believe that one of the cool things about academia is allowing some people the ability to pursue ideas and work on problems that don't have obvious, short-term impacts.

drb91 8y ago
> I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. Well, there is chasing funding. In your area of the universe, does the money follow worthwhile problems?
- chengiz 8y ago
  Funding is simple. It's all about experience and prior use. Funders fund what they did before, what the fundees did before, and did they use up the funds from last time.
  - drb91 8y ago
    My question stands. :)
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  During a PhD you don't have to chase funding- either you have funding (via a scholarship etc) at which point it normally lasts for the three or four years you're expected to finish your PhD, or you don't, in which case you probably don't start at all- unless you can pay the PhD fees and your expenses out of your own budget... in which case you don't need "funding" (in the sense of funds given to you from some source specifically to do research).

philipov 8y ago

A corporation should be about improving society, not chasing shareholder value.

drb91 8y ago
Well, that’d be great!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

expertentipp 8y ago

The Guardian?! Doesn't sound like a respectable journal, who reviewed this article even?

pastor_elm 8y ago

Maybe the solution is to allow fewer people into Phd programs?? Not everyone needs a phd.

braindongle 8y ago

Wait. Incentive structures in academia are screwed up? No. It can't be.

Nokinside 8y ago

Academic kudos should be realigned better with scientific achievement. Academic kudos translates directly to money (tenure, research funding) and power (gatekeeper positions) and that makes it microeconomics problem. Highly competitive person with high scientific achievement may not be the best person to judge and distribute kudos of others. We should find a way to quantify kudos distribution to create good incentives. Researchers should get impact factor for mentoring, accepting papers to journals or giving voting for tenure to others who produce high impact studies after they get the tenure.

warcher 8y ago

The only real rot I see in the PhD track is the dangerous imbalance of degrees to jobs in certain areas (not STEM usually, although STEM is pretty uncompromising for tenure track). IMHO in the humanities the PhD is some kind of sick ponzi scheme, where advanced degrees serve to subsidize tenured faculty's careers with little to no hope of going on to anything of their own. (I know STEM isn't much better, but it's a little better, especially with industry being willing to assume some risk.) But I've got friends $100K in debt for an art history PhD, and that's craaaaaaaaaazy given what awaits on the other side.

Miltnoid 8y ago
I don't know a single reputable program that makes you pay for a PhD. Typically the salaries are subsidized through the school, that gets it's money from taking a cut of stem grants, donations, masters tuition, and undergraduate tuition. Saying that most humanities professors get their salaries by doing some sort of ponzi scheme of charging their advisees is just spreading misinformation.
- rhino369 8y ago
  That is mostly true for reputable programs. But there are a lot of unreputable Ph.D. programs. They may even graduate the bulk of PhDs. And even some reputable programs will let some people "buy their way" if they don't qualify as for a fellowship/funding.
  - overeater 8y ago
    The annoying thing, is since there are more unreputable programs out there, all the stats about PhD students are heavily skewed by those students. Basically this rhetoric about 1/1000 phd students landing a job, or phd graduates being $100,000 in debt, or 9/10 students drop out or have mental health issues, are not about the usual PhD program we think about at universities that are household names and hear about in the news.

chriskanan 8y ago

It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact. If you are doing research, the goal is to do research that matters and citations are one way to measure that people cared about the work (of course, once something becomes a measure people start optimizing for that instead of the original objective). A PhD is a degree in doing research. When students start, it is true that many think they want careers in academia. Many then realize that academia isn't what they want after a few years in and seeing how their advisors live, realizing salaries are lower, and realizing how competitive it is. There are plenty of amazing career doors that open with a PhD besides being an academic... any career that requires the ability to conduct, interpret, and/or communicate research. The comments about meeting practitioners are pretty foreign to my experiences doing a PhD (in AI) and being a scientist. If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value.

TearsInTheRain 8y ago
> "It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact." I think the author would agree, although he is making the distinction between impact in academic circles vs impact in society. His claim is that impact in academic circles has become out of touch with impact in society. > If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value. Is there a way to measure how much non-practical research ends up having long-term value? Intuitively, the marginal utility of a 115th definition of a circular economy doesn't seem worth the academic man power yet that is what the author is being incentivized to work on because citation culture in academia.

fhood 8y ago

Man, this view of getting a PhD, which seems fairly common, is so alien to me. Both my parents are research professors, both regularly have students, and I have never seen any of the misery or stress that people keep bringing up. Sure, if you are unprepared to do research then you shouldn't do a PhD, but my parents' students are hand picked, and it is very rare that they end up with a student that doesn't want to, or is unprepared to do research. Being a PhD student should be one of the most fun parts of an academic career. You get to focus on your research, and are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. You aren't constantly being barraged by requests to review papers or having your time used up by a myriad of other responsibilities. I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier, but my impressions of getting a PhD were always positive, and the reason I never did it was because the part after your PhD seemed like it sucked.

shusson 8y ago
> I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier If only there was some way to investigate your statement. Like some sort of study that went for a few years and produced a report...
BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
> You ... are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. This is definitely not normal in the humanities. Want to continue working next year? Win this annual contest for your subfield that 800 other people are also applying for. It will cover your costs for 5 months if you win, after you spend an entire month preparing your submission for it. Didn't win this time? I guess you'll have to spend 20 hours per week every week on course prep readings and grading essays for the next six months. Good luck getting your research done at the same time. Humanities PhDs also on average take significantly longer than STEM PhDs. 7 years post BA is normal in the humanities. 5 years post BS is normal in STEM. Guess where all that extra time goes. It's because DARPA and Dow Chemical don't drop $30 million on your advisor for Enlightenment history.

knappa 8y ago

A lot of this seems ridiculous: > Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The baseline percentage of the population which experience depression (and other mental illness) each year is known to be pretty high -- and highest in for people in their 20's. One third sounds fairly normal; at any rate, there is a burden here to show that this is an exceptional proportion. > For instance, a PhD in Germany is supposed to take three years, according to university regulations, but most students need five years to complete one. If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data collection is going to take longer than that. > In the US, meanwhile, the average completion time for a PhD in education sciences surpasses 13 years. These programs are dominated by people who are working teachers, working on PhDs part-time. > One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor. Being a professor is only one possible goal and for some fields, it isn't even the primary one.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data collection is going to take longer than that. In Germany, you need a Master's with the coursework done before starting a PhD.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Right. The first two years of our graduate program were "breadth" and "depth" courses. After that, you could exit with a Masters or do PhD research.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. Outside of the US, I don't think most PhD students take 'classes'. In Europe a PhD is purely a research degree.

moh_maya 8y ago

What are the politicians there for then? I'm not being facetious here. Politics is one of the primary avenues of bringing about social change. Ditto civil service. A PhD should be about novel contributions that increase the sum total of human knowledge.

TearsInTheRain 8y ago
Ok but we shouldnt pursue knowledge haphazardly for knowledge sake. There are an infinite number of interesting avenues of inquiry we could send our academics down that would be completely useless. The paths we choose should be guided by the needs of practical application. How else can we value information if not practical application?
- nakashimakid 8y ago
  "Practical application" is the domain of the engineer, the business person, the sales department, etc. Science and pure curiosity are one and the same.
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  If we were guided by the needs of practical application we would have devised many ingenious medical probes but never discovered the X-Ray etc. I agree that we should prioritise STEM, but within STEM the research areas should be decided by the scientists themselves.

jderick 8y ago

One thought I had about this was related to a book I was reading recently about the Math Olympiad. It was discussing how in the US the way math is taught never allows the students to struggle with any hard problems. That experience of going up against something potentially intractable is totally foreign to most students, even at the undergrad level I suspect. When you throw someone into a totally new environment where their life revolves around doing something they have never done before, it is kind of a shock. I think part of the solution here would be to introduce harder problem solving earlier into the standard curriculum. For this reason, I would be curious if PhDs in Russia or Eastern Europe, where the school systems are known for being more mathematically difficult from an early age, suffer from the same level of problems that exist in the US system.

gnicholas 8y ago

> Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to pursue a career in science, their enthusiasm typically wanes to the point that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation These seem like different questions to me. There are plenty of ways to "pursue a career in science" that don't involve academia.

bradhoffman 8y ago

You all are kind of scaring me a bit... I just finished my Bachelor's and am starting my Master's this month. I have no formal research experience, but I planned to dive in during my Master's. For anyone who has done/is doing there PhD, if there is any advice you all could give me in order to get the most out of this next year before I apply for PhD programs, that would be great.

godelski 8y ago
Apply straight to a PhD program. Don't pay for a graduate degree.
- bradhoffman 8y ago
  My graduate degree is already paid for.
- glitchc 8y ago
  I disagree. A Masters with thesis is more directed, a good way to learn how to do research, and not hinged on a novel contribution for a successful defense. My PhD went much faster and smoother because I had learnt the ropes and decided it was something worth doing. I think part of the problem is people jumping straight into PhD without any research experience. I watched quite a few students struggle when taking this road. I do agree that it's a problem if grad school costs money, but a large stipend is only really available in STEM or medicine.
  - godelski 8y ago
    In my experience PhD candidates always get paid, and Masters don't. They do sometimes, but you aren't priority and guaranteed. I do always suggest getting the Masters on the way though. 5 years is a long time, and if you decide it isn't for you, well you come out with something (and it was paid).
andreyk 8y ago
I did the same route as you (Master's first, then starting on my PhD right now). It's a great route! In general, the best route is to try and join an ongoing project where you can be guided/mentored by a Post doc or senior PhD. This is easiest is larger labs, though in a smaller lab the professor might interact with you more (unlikely you will meet with prof much in larger lab). For your application two things matter: recommendation letters and publications. Joining a project on which you can have mentorship and showing yourself to be resourceful and productive is the best way to attain both. If you find a lack of guidance or a bad fit in whichever lab you first end up in, don't hesitate to try and change things up. In general, also always feel free to ask for advice and guidance; PhDs and post docs have been in your shoes and are more than willing to help out, you can always just ask someone out for coffee to talk about research and ask for advice.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

To be a psychologist in Canada, you have to earn a PhD. It's neither about improving society or chasing kudos. It's just a job.

jderick 8y ago

I agree that the PhD system needs some rethinking but I don't think focusing research on more 'practical' problems is necessarily a good idea. I have seen 'practical' research going on in industry labs and I think it often falls into a no man's land of neither being practical nor advancing the state of knowledge in any meaningful way. Citation counts are problematic in some ways, but they do approximately measure what the research community thinks of as important work. I agree they seem to suffer from overly promoting "what's in fashion." OTOH, there is benefit to having a community of researchers all focusing on one topic at a time so that ideas can be exchanged and build on one another. Just like with startups, for some good ideas, it may just be that they are being proposed at the wrong time or haven't found the exact right form yet.

andreyk 8y ago

This is a rather poor essay. "Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. Yet it can often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from practice. ... This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first year (or more) reading obscure academic literature." So... do industry research? Let's be clear: a PhD is a training program for research. As such most research done during a PhD is generally not that impactful, certainly not to go beyond fellow academics and to non experts. In my experience most people who go into it don't have much of an idea of what they want to do afterward -- they mainly know they enjoy research and are interested in the topic. AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not.

jvanderbot 8y ago
> AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not. Exactly this. The primary skill developed during a PhD (for me, and those around me), is knowing the difference between: 1. solutions that can be pulled from literature (bake), 2. solutions that should be easy to assemble from existing solutions (buy), 3. what technology requires a small-to-medium delta above and beyond the bleeding edge (build) All those are research, but far too often (3) is what everyone targets.
- frankling_ 8y ago
  If all three of these are research, what is engineering?
  - ThalesX 8y ago
    I guess research deals with solutions under ideal conditions while engineering deals with real life constraint solutions?

shoguning 8y ago

I disagree totally. A PhD should be about curiosity and asking the most interesting scientific questions you can think of, also known as 'basic research'. You have the rest of your career to have as much impact on society and commerce as you want. Unfortunately, the social impact factor has been creeping in, in the form of more 'applied research' funding which is not fundamental and does not move scientific knowledge forward. The government has limited role in funding applied research, since industry is better positioned to understand what applied research is important and has a strong incentive to fund it. Academia is imperfect, but the genius of the system is that letting scientists chase down interesting things does end up improving society dramatically in the long run.

Someguywhatever 8y ago
I agree (with you). I think also it's not crystal clear what exactly 'benefits society', so what to research then? Let people research what they want to, at least they'll be passionate about it and maybe 'reach the end' when they otherwise wouldn't if that makes sense.
MrEfficiency 8y ago
I talked to Two advisers + 1 role model before deciding a PhD wasnt right for me. The professors wanted to push their own ideas rather than my own. I knew the problems I wanted to solve were highly desired as I was getting hundreds of people visiting my website a day. The two professors were pushing that the PhD process would teach me how to research, but I realized that I would be the professor's tool. I talked to someone I looked up to, while he wasnt incredibly successful, he told me that- I was ready to do something, I no longer needed school. I'm very thankful, I had a bachelors and masters degree in engineering fields with industry experience. I had products people were paying money for. The PhD didnt seem like it would be as valuable as 2-6 years of working on my website or other projects. My take- If you arent going to work, school can force you to work hard. If you are already inspired, you are ready for life, go go go.
fullshark 8y ago
Who is paying to support you while you explore some curiosity of yours? A PhD program is not a summer camp, it's a social tool and the public is paying money in order to grow the human knowledge base. I don't get this attitude, appreciate the fact that the public is giving you grants and funding because the alternative is you get nothing.

programminggeek 8y ago

A PhD is about getting paid, like any other job. This should be pretty obvious.

deleted 8y ago

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fastaguy88 8y ago

A PhD should also be about being honest in ones arguments in the popular press. PhD's in Education may take 13 years (is that the median?) because most students are part time. In good graduate programs that provide guaranteed funding for students, 4-6 years is customary (and funding sometimes runs out at year 5). It's hard for me, as an academic, to trust an author who twists statistics to make his case. And what does it mean to improve society? Basic biomedical science rarely promises improvements, but has given us revolutionary technologies (the structure of DNA, the genetic code, cloning, transgenic animals, etc, etc). The essence of basic science is that you do not know what you are going to learn, or whether it will be useful. You cannot plan unimagined discoveries. Should graduate students start doing "research" sooner? That is certainly the standard in biomedical research, where very few courses are required. But the consequence is that students know a lot about what they have done, and very little about other disciplines. How does a graduate student in biology become a computational biologist without learning programming and algorithms? The comments about having research experience are spot-on. And many of the frustrations people describe could be reduced by learning more about one's advisor before joining the group.

wsy 8y ago

This article has some true observations, but the conclusions seem to go in a totally wrong direction. Writing a PhD is a very ambitious endeavor. You will inevitably have your downs and crises, because research is hard. This is independent of the research topic. Now asking that the PhD thesis should not only advance research, but also 'improve society' will only increase the pressure. The author also has the purpose of a PhD wrong: this is your research journeyman time, and delivering the PhD thesis is like creating your masterpiece as craftsman (in the original meaning where you create a fine piece of work which earns you the right to call yourself master of a craft). The real, unsupervised research career starts after PhD. This also means that it would be a very bad idea to start with high-risk research. Do this as PostDoc, when you have acquired all the necessary skills. Not focusing on publications is the worst advice one can give aspiring academics. Research is about advancing shared knowledge, and the only way to do this is to share your results. If you don't manage to publish, either your results are not relevant, or your work is not considered sound by your peer researchers. Successful publishing in reputable venues validates your research, and is the most effective way to disseminate new insights. I agree that the publishing system is broken. You have to work around that by choosing the right venues. This is another academic skill you need to learn. If you really want to improve society and feel insufficient if you 'only' improve your research field, then don't pursue a research career. Better go work for some non-profit organization, or found one.

fixermark 8y ago

Basically every human endeavor "should" be about putting the general good over the individual good. After all, it's in one's own selfish interests for that to be the state of affairs; there are far more people not-you doing things than people who are you doing things, so you stand to benefit more if all those not-you people are doing work that indirectly improves your quality-of-life. ;) The (sometimes literally) million-dollar question is: how do you align incentives to bring about that desired end-state? Ph.D's are not unique in struggling with this age-old conundrum; if the government is willing to pay for robotics research for drone warfare but nobody is putting up the cash to pay for nursing-care robot research, then we can make some pretty firm predictions what kind of robots we'll see mature and reliable in twenty years.

nakashimakid 8y ago
I posit that "one's own selfish interests", which can include pursuing a research topic for the "general good", is a major driver of scientific inquiry. The evaluation of whether "general good" is advanced when answering a scientific question is subjective. Might I remind you that our foundations of probability - a pillar of mathematics and more - was furthered with the intention of winning gambling games? Or that our understanding of the limits of human physiology - how much force a skull can withstand, time before death under hypothermia - was furthered by Nazi scientists at the expense of Jews and other minorities? While born out of sin, these two examples of science unequivocally better the "general good" - now...

modells 8y ago

The two aren’t mutex. And publish or perish. The suggestion is that academia should be utilitarian and short-term focused. This will never happen. It’s tantamount to saying “we should get rid of archeologists because they aren’t a profit-center department.”

nakashimakid 8y ago
^ this guy. exactly. Measuring the utility of academia is futile. If anything should be said about utility it is that empirically, the average ROI on academia from the point of view of The State is always net positive: economically, culturally, socially, etc.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

From the comments, one of the "Guardian picks": I strongly, strongly disagree. A PhD should be about science. Not about utility for society. I am pretty sure that Max Planck did not think about the utility of computers when he proposed this completely absurd, little mathematical trick of discretising energy. Still, without quantum theory: no computer, no laser, no magnetic resonance imaging...and I could go on forever. Progress in science is necessarily chaotic - if you disallow incoherence, absurdity, non-applicability, you will kill science. The author is conceptualizing "science" (maybe he talks about engineering and not science?) only as a tool of problem solving for the society - that is actual the role of science in Orwell's "1984" and that was the role of science to a certain extent in socialism. By making science teleological, one makes science ready for totalitarian abuse. Thank you very much! By the way, comparing PhD systems from different countries is absolutely rubbish. In Germany, it is already rubbish to compare PhDs from different faculties from the same university....

j7ake 8y ago

"They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real world." By that metric, most fundamental discoveries in the last 200 years would not have been enough to finish a PhD. Even Hamming's error correcting codes took 10+ years for Bell Labs to implement it. And even then it was because they had no other alternatives and were in a bind.

yumario 8y ago

I don't understand this system at all. Only 1 in 200 Phd student ends up becoming a professor, yet in college we have classes of 200-250 students per professor. And some of the older professors have been teaching the same class for many many years, without attempting to change the material. They are just repeating the stuff the already know, over and over again. It seems for me a waste of human resources, for me, to put some of the smartest people in to such repetitive task. Instead, I think the hiring bar for academia positions should be lower, the classes should be smaller, and the student should receive more customize experience.

yalph 8y ago

The reason I completely hated my phd program: - it was incredibly political, much, much more than companies I worked at. - most students were just trying to tweak some equations and get the hell out of that place. Overall it was a very unhealthy environment and wasnt worth It.

nakashimakid 8y ago

Academia has always been, and always will be, about new knowledge. The article laments the pursuit of citations but fails to note that it is today's primary quantitative measure of new knowledge - though imperfect. "Improving society" as academia's objective will have its own set of misaligned incentives, potentially much worse than the pursuit of "academic kudos". How would this be measured?

brandonjm 8y ago

> Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses... The university where I am currently doing my PhD has a very heavy focus on the outputs of a PhD contributing something worthwhile not only to academia but also to industry or the world. It isn't a massively high ranking university but it does force academics to think practically as well as theoretically. We are required to have an industry (non-academic) advisor on our supervisory panel who helps guide the research so it can be useful and not just gather dust once finished.

guessthejuice 8y ago

No. PhD should be about truth, research and advancing knowledge. Knowledge/science shouldn't be politicized. It's such an absurd assertion when you consider that different people have different ideas on how to improve society.

pvaldes 8y ago

A PhD should be in fact about earning a decent living and secure a better life for yourself and your relatives.