7 ms·

The PhD Problem: "Talk of a ‘higher education bubble’ may not be idle chatter”

96 points by cwan 16y ago

vyrotek 16y ago
"What happens when you take a degree whose main use is teaching other people who are taking degrees?" I once had a philosophy professor admit this in class. He basically told everyone not to even bother with a degree in philosophy because they would only end up competing for the same teaching jobs.
- brudgers 16y ago
  On the other hand, YC is the product of a philosophy major.
bryanh 16y ago
Bubble spotting is extremely difficult, but all the same, I have a hard time people will continue to pay the increasing costs for any degree that will be worth less and less over time (as the labor pool is inundated with people with identical degrees). I am wondering where the "wall of rationality" is for education costs, and will we stop at that wall (efficient markets prevail) or go past that wall (into a bubble)?
klbarry 16y ago
Note: I don't have a PhD, this is just based on the article and other things I have read. It seems to me that this article goes around the two main, most obvious aspects of a PhD; 1) Improve yourself (smarter, better critical thinking, etc) 2) Appearing more valuable to others (Getting grants, getting hired) So the question is, does it fulfill these goals, and if it doesn't, do prospective applicants realize it? Certainly there are better uses for your time if you want to appear more valuable to others (work experience), and there might be better ways to improve yourself for the same time and money. If the average applicant realizes this, but proceeds anyway, then it's not a bubble, as there must be other factors at play when they think about the value of their degree. If they don't, then there is a bubble that will burst when the information becomes more plain.
- mayank 16y ago
  In my experience, the PhD does makes you smarter in a sort of trial by fire. I haven't met a single (math/CS) PhD student who wasn't intimidated by the magnitude of their research field when they started, or seriously intimidated by the math in a seminal research paper in their area, but came out with a mastery of the subject (which is not to say that there aren't any crap PhDs -- there are). At the very, very least, if you finish your PhD diligently, or even get close to finishing it, you will develop a confidence that you can in fact chip away at the most abstract and difficult problems, and usually come up with a good solution, while building on the efforts of much smarter people. At a very practical CS/algorithmic level, a lot more will seem possible, and you'll reinvent the wheel a lot less. I've often seen very smart people in CS/ML who didn't have a PhD. However, they sometimes also lack the body of knowledge in advanced algorithms or statistics that comes from 5-6 years of monk-like reading and chipping away at immense intellectual problems that have been tackled by some of the smartest people in the world. So if you don't mind 5-6 years of near-poverty, intensely difficult problems, a possible lack of interest from your advisor (thankfully not in my case), peer-review rejections that sometimes seem arbitrary and disheartening, and can take 3 months to come around each time, large minds and frequently larger egos, intense orgasmic breakthrough eureka moments that come from spending months or years working on a problem, self-learning some truly amazing things, and drinking discount "St. Remy" brandy instead of Remy Martin, then by all means go in for a PhD -- you'll come out sharper if you make it.
  - javert 16y ago
    And you can actually get paid a decent stipend (e.g. not be near-poverty) as a grad student in computer science.
    - mayank 16y ago
      Um...I guess "decent" is subjective :)
      - sliverstorm 16y ago
        To some people, 'above the poverty line' is pretty hot stuff. Me, for example. If you've worked part time as a student all your life, even the poverty line seems like a cornucopia of wealth.
ebiester 16y ago
I am not a PhD student, but my partner is one (non-science) and I watch this academia issue. You have a lot of people who are really smart but are not math and science oriented. These are people very good at one thing: reading a lot and thinking a lot and writing. Other than law (and we have too many of those, too) what's the best economic use for these people?
- loganfrederick 16y ago
  Quick response with a couple ideas that popped to mind: Journalist? Political analysts? Given more thought, I'm sure I could come up with more. There's definitely value in critical thinking. Whether PhD programs are the most economically efficient way to use their skills is something I don't know.
  - ebiester 16y ago
    Political analysts are often trained by political science. Journalism and freelance writing are both places many end up, but both are also fields where there is more supply than demand.
- powellc 16y ago
  How about farming? Plenty of really smart, literate people are turning to small farms. Not everything we think needs to be turned into beautiful profit. Sometimes the work we do with our hands is okay for making a living too.
- Umalu 16y ago
  I think if you're smart and you've earned a PhD from a good program, you've proven you have the ability to dig deep into a subject and figure it out and move the ball forward a bit. This is an economically valuable skill that should be broadly transferable into many fields, even those far afield from your PhD studies. I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty. A lucky few can continue to specialize in academia, but for the rest the real world requires them to get a lot more general and interdisciplinary in order to succeed, something I fear a lot of them are unwilling to do. Hence our glut of unhappy PhDs. This is not a new problem.
poskjger 16y ago
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alanpca 16y ago
This may be true of the Liberal Arts types of degrees, but where do you think the engineering fields stand? Engineers and computer science PhD students don't typically have to rely on landing a professorship, as there are companies that hire the same individuals. But, this definitely gives me something to think about as I start my MSc next week.
- larsberg 16y ago
  Further, at least in Computer Science, most of my fellow PhD students came in explicitly not interested in professor jobs. They just wanted the freedom to work on larger problems (in a research lab or at the higher levels in a company) that a PhD affords. Now in my fourth year, I can say that there are very few of us who are even planning to do the tenure-track academic job hunt. More than there are jobs available (in the US), of course.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    I think CS is somewhat unique. Most of my professors got their MS, worked for a decade or two, then went back for their PhD and taught from there. In a way, it's great: most of my professors have fairly extensive real-world experience. Last semester my SENG prof was sick, so he got one of the CS profs to come in and talk to us about industry for a day. Here's a guy who was a software architect for some fairly large companies talking about his fuckups, and the stupid things he learned in school that he had to unlearn in the real world. I find having that kind of experience on tap to be eminently useful.
    - billswift 16y ago
      I don't think it's that unique. When I was in school, in the early 1980s, many engineering professors had similarly returned to the university after gaining professional experience. I remember hearing that that was normal for most engineering schools. And while less common, it was also true of many in the business school.
      - 16y ago
mmaunder 16y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s#t=3m24s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s#t=3m24s
kijinbear 16y ago
There would be a lot more academic jobs for Ph.D.s if colleges and universities hired as many professors as undergrads need. Unfortunately, this would cost a lot of money, so we're left with undergrads suffering gigantic classes and doctorates suffering joblessness.
- javert 16y ago
  How many professors do undergrads "need"? I think we need to revamp the system to focus more on self-learning, and decrease the emphasis on lectures. No point in having a super expert physics researcher tenured professor who hates teaching and can't teach worth shit teaching a bunch of students, when he could be doing his research and the students could be watching a recorded lecture of the same material from someone who likes teaching, over the internet (e.g. MIT's online course offerings).
  - jaxtapose 16y ago
    > I think we need to revamp the system to focus more on self-learning, and decrease the emphasis on lectures. Self learning, as a single mechanism, sucks. You get little directed guidance from people who've got an amazing amount of understanding. Lectures also suck, at least for many programs. What's the alternative? Well, that's tough and it's probably program specific. Computer Science (that's my background) could probably be saved through studio like programs. A lot less lectures, but more building wicked cool things while being mentored by teaching staff. The problem is, studio process is labour intensive. Sure, you'd still need to stand up and describe things in a lecture like format to people. However, you wouldn't need to do it for 2 - 4 hours every week. Just highly specific courses. Hell, the lecturers for that content wouldn't even have to be the course coordinators, they could be specialists who get dragged in to do that specialised content and then released after the 2 or 3 weeks covering it. I mean, think about how awesome AI class would be if the bulk of the time was building solutions for the Google AI challenge? How about instead of having someone yap on about Ubiquitous Computing over 40 hours of the semester, you actually built solutions that used it? What language, APIs, whatever do you use in your project? The lecturer doesn't care. Hell, some studios could focus on solving a problem and let the students justify their own solutions. Imagine remote collaborative computing as an example. Some kids might focus on building web apps that facilitate collaboration. Others might build tools that distribute work nicely. Others still might try to make virtual office spaces with large displays and computer vision technology. Students would actually get to experience stuff that they were deeply interested in. Sure, other programs are less likely to be able to use studio like processes. So, in those cases remote lectures are probably a much better idea. However, what happens if you're just not getting it? Who do you go see? You're still going to need face time.
dustinupdyke 16y ago
Is it truly so black and white that one might say those in the humanities do not go into "industrial jobs"?
ojbyrne 16y ago
This diagram (which I found here) probably sums up the importance and the frustration of Ph.D. programs better than I can: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ I'm ABD, Management, for what its worth.
- St-Clock 16y ago
  Although this is a good representation of a Ph.D. contribution, I don't think this is the point of the current debate. I would be perfectly happy to have made a dent in the knowledge circle and I think it would be worth the sacrifice, from a knowledge perspective. The problem is that you sacrifice a lot to make that dent and you often don't see the benefits (e.g., an interesting job). It's another story for the supervisor though...
  - Create 16y ago
    ...yeah. Who gets to keep the profit from the new territory that the student has conquered, literally risking his life? Who gets to claim ownership (in grant reports)?
NIL8 16y ago
The U.S. Occupational Outlook projections seem to say the exact opposite: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#outlook http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#outlook I would like to see a breakdown of careers to compare which occupations actually benefit from a PhD and which would benefit from a mixture of postsecondary education and some other complimentary training.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Shimers college, a great books college, had a tuition of $21,000/year in 2009–2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimer_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimer_College "Classes are exclusively small seminars in which students discuss original source material rather than read textbooks." Shimers is also rated among the top liberal arts schools in the country. IE, education involving more attention from teachers can be cheaper than what now the standard in college education. The large university today is essentially a racket which takes undergraduate tuition to pay for the capital expenses (building-booms) and then tells the undergraduates how lucky they are to be there.
rmorrison 16y ago
There's a similar problem with law. While there are attorneys who get jobs at big law and make $150k+ starting, a significant percentage of students entering law school this year will not get a positive return on investment over the course of their career. {The cost of the law degree} + {The opportunity cost of not working for three years} > {the increased salary that they'll make over the remainder of their career} EDIT: There were a bunch of articles floating around about this over the past year, here's one: http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf, or more recently http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=busln http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=bu...
- Eliezer 16y ago
  This surprises me. Citation needed?
- miloshasan 16y ago
  I would expect that an oversupply of lawyers would make them cheaper to hire and nicer to deal with. If we instead have a small group of lawyers that are expensive and unpleasant, while a lot of younger graduates cannot find jobs, I'd expect there must be some powerful artificial barriers of entry created by the group of insiders, though I have no idea what they could be...
  - dagw 16y ago
    I'm guessing it's because when you are hiring a lawyer it often means that at best millions of dollars or your entire livelihood is at stake and, at worst, your freedom or literally your life is at stake. In those situations most people aren't in a mood to bargain-hunt or take a risk with an unknown and untested product, if they have an option.
- aridiculous 16y ago
  To put it in perspective, there is now a line out the door of experienced lawyers for public defenders jobs. A friend of mine is in the top 20% of a top 20 law school and is hoping to hear back from American Samoa and rural Georgia districts. No one in his third year classes have jobs. Law school is a horrifying investment if you're not in the top 30% or so at a top 5 school. Non-dischargeable student debt is a nightmare.
miloshasan 16y ago
The premise that Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be mainly training for academic careers is wrong, at least in technical/engineering fields. It is very common for people to enter e.g. CS or EE programs with no intention of pursuing an academic career, and instead planning to find an industry job afterwards. Indeed, there were some people I met in grad school that left well-paying jobs at (say) Microsoft with the intention of getting a Ph.D. and going back to industry to work on more interesting stuff. As far as I know, they usually succeeded. Does a Ph.D. increase your expected salary, if you get an industry job afterwards? Probably not enough to be worth it. Does it raise the level of problems you will be solving, and the quality of people you will be surrounded with? Absolutely.
yason 16y ago
The PhD issue sounds like it's about gaming a system: merely trying to maximize yields from hard studying, assuming that the degrees have, or ought to have, an intrinsic value, and that value had better be somehow reflected economically and on the job/career markets. It's all talked about as if there was some absolute value of a PhD that works the same for everyone. That there was a thing that would unilaterally be a good choice for just anyone who only can take it and carry it out. But, in reality, the world has a different world for everyone. In the real world, the valuations of events and choices and lessons aren't apparent, until perhaps later. The valuations don't necessarily come in terms of mere financial survival, like getting a job or getting more money. It's all dependent on the time, the place, the person, and the circumstances leading to the choices made and the lessons learned from them. For example, for one man it might be absolutely golden to first start a PhD, then end up flunking out, internalize some of the facts of his life, and finally end up doing something different, something that is him even if it's not highly regarded in the careerwise or otherwise, in how we like to define "success". Yet, for another man, starting a PhD, finishing it, getting a top job, building a top-notch career for ten years might, in the scope of his life, be the worst possible choice that merely helped him to spend 15 years avoiding ever being challenged in his life's weak spots. The former man has gone somewhere, the latter man has gone nowhere. A PhD is can be perfect if you can channel your life, your self and your creativity through it. A PhD can be worthless if you just do it for the sake of the degree.
liedra 16y ago
There seems to be a lot of generalisation going on in these sorts of articles. The situation in the US might be bad for humanities doctorates but if you're going into academia there's almost no chance you'll be able to find a job near where you grew up. You have to have an open mind and be willing to travel or diversify by finding applications of your chosen subject. Then it's down to networking, building your portfolio (publications), and creating your own research projects (taking advantage of things like early career research grants). People who succeed in academia make their own way, they don't wait for things to be handed to them on a silver platter.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I think it's pretty certain there's a higher education bubble. Consider, most higher wage jobs require a college degree, sometimes any degree. Many people attending college are doing so merely to better their career prospects. Non-trade school colleges actually do not teach much, on average, more so for non-technical degrees. It's getting easier and easier to obtain financing for higher education. Overall we have the classic elements of a bubble. People "investing" (attending college) because of market rather than personal valuations. People investing more casually than they otherwise would because of easy financing. When people stop making investing decisions based on personal judgment and begin making investing decisions blindly based on what they think the market is doing the result is a bubble. It seems pretty clear the same thing is happening in higher education.
Create 16y ago
No it is not idle chatter: and to make matters worse, some attempts to cure the situation just make it worse. For PhD-s, at least. The European Commission is making an experiment within its FP-s (i.e. FP6) to introduce an "alternative" training after a BSc or MSc (doesn't matter which really), called Early Stage Training (EST). It is supposed to alleviate the overproduction of devaluated PhD-s, by proposing a "new and improved" alternative. EST-s get all the upsides of a PhD programme: they are scheduled to conferences in advance (i.e. ACEOLE in IEEE, CHEP etc.) and don't really get their papers rejected (their supervisors - and coauthors - tend to be on Editorial Boards). They also get full pension during the training, 500€/month for training expenses (conferences). At the end, they are not required to write a thesis, and would be formally expected to go to work in the industry. But. Already having the credentials in research (i.e. conf. attendances etc. on CV) EST-s can more easily stay in public research institutions, and if they bother to apply a dissertator (i.e. paperclip) to their 2-3 proceedings paper (which they don't need to write anyway), they can "get downgrade too", by handing it in for a PhD certificate (which committee would refuse an application containing 2-3 peer reviewed papers in a field?) It is also good for the supervisors, because FP WP-s are good money, can be turned to career benefits without the downside of inflating their own scientific grade peer pool. And the doctoral students can only watch this through (on conferences too) and are expected to suck it up. Invest several years (no pension, min. salary, min. publication budget etc.) to be advised to go to Vegas in the end.

96 points by cwan 16y ago

"What happens when you take a degree whose main use is teaching other people who are taking degrees?" I once had a philosophy professor admit this in class. He basically told everyone not to even bother with a degree in philosophy because they would only end up competing for the same teaching jobs.

brudgers 16y ago
On the other hand, YC is the product of a philosophy major.

bryanh 16y ago

Bubble spotting is extremely difficult, but all the same, I have a hard time people will continue to pay the increasing costs for any degree that will be worth less and less over time (as the labor pool is inundated with people with identical degrees). I am wondering where the "wall of rationality" is for education costs, and will we stop at that wall (efficient markets prevail) or go past that wall (into a bubble)?

klbarry 16y ago

Note: I don't have a PhD, this is just based on the article and other things I have read. It seems to me that this article goes around the two main, most obvious aspects of a PhD; 1) Improve yourself (smarter, better critical thinking, etc) 2) Appearing more valuable to others (Getting grants, getting hired) So the question is, does it fulfill these goals, and if it doesn't, do prospective applicants realize it? Certainly there are better uses for your time if you want to appear more valuable to others (work experience), and there might be better ways to improve yourself for the same time and money. If the average applicant realizes this, but proceeds anyway, then it's not a bubble, as there must be other factors at play when they think about the value of their degree. If they don't, then there is a bubble that will burst when the information becomes more plain.

mayank 16y ago
In my experience, the PhD does makes you smarter in a sort of trial by fire. I haven't met a single (math/CS) PhD student who wasn't intimidated by the magnitude of their research field when they started, or seriously intimidated by the math in a seminal research paper in their area, but came out with a mastery of the subject (which is not to say that there aren't any crap PhDs -- there are). At the very, very least, if you finish your PhD diligently, or even get close to finishing it, you will develop a confidence that you can in fact chip away at the most abstract and difficult problems, and usually come up with a good solution, while building on the efforts of much smarter people. At a very practical CS/algorithmic level, a lot more will seem possible, and you'll reinvent the wheel a lot less. I've often seen very smart people in CS/ML who didn't have a PhD. However, they sometimes also lack the body of knowledge in advanced algorithms or statistics that comes from 5-6 years of monk-like reading and chipping away at immense intellectual problems that have been tackled by some of the smartest people in the world. So if you don't mind 5-6 years of near-poverty, intensely difficult problems, a possible lack of interest from your advisor (thankfully not in my case), peer-review rejections that sometimes seem arbitrary and disheartening, and can take 3 months to come around each time, large minds and frequently larger egos, intense orgasmic breakthrough eureka moments that come from spending months or years working on a problem, self-learning some truly amazing things, and drinking discount "St. Remy" brandy instead of Remy Martin, then by all means go in for a PhD -- you'll come out sharper if you make it.
- javert 16y ago
  And you can actually get paid a decent stipend (e.g. not be near-poverty) as a grad student in computer science.
  - mayank 16y ago
    Um...I guess "decent" is subjective :)
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      To some people, 'above the poverty line' is pretty hot stuff. Me, for example. If you've worked part time as a student all your life, even the poverty line seems like a cornucopia of wealth.

ebiester 16y ago

I am not a PhD student, but my partner is one (non-science) and I watch this academia issue. You have a lot of people who are really smart but are not math and science oriented. These are people very good at one thing: reading a lot and thinking a lot and writing. Other than law (and we have too many of those, too) what's the best economic use for these people?

loganfrederick 16y ago
Quick response with a couple ideas that popped to mind: Journalist? Political analysts? Given more thought, I'm sure I could come up with more. There's definitely value in critical thinking. Whether PhD programs are the most economically efficient way to use their skills is something I don't know.
- ebiester 16y ago
  Political analysts are often trained by political science. Journalism and freelance writing are both places many end up, but both are also fields where there is more supply than demand.
powellc 16y ago
How about farming? Plenty of really smart, literate people are turning to small farms. Not everything we think needs to be turned into beautiful profit. Sometimes the work we do with our hands is okay for making a living too.
Umalu 16y ago
I think if you're smart and you've earned a PhD from a good program, you've proven you have the ability to dig deep into a subject and figure it out and move the ball forward a bit. This is an economically valuable skill that should be broadly transferable into many fields, even those far afield from your PhD studies. I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty. A lucky few can continue to specialize in academia, but for the rest the real world requires them to get a lot more general and interdisciplinary in order to succeed, something I fear a lot of them are unwilling to do. Hence our glut of unhappy PhDs. This is not a new problem.

poskjger 16y ago

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alanpca 16y ago

This may be true of the Liberal Arts types of degrees, but where do you think the engineering fields stand? Engineers and computer science PhD students don't typically have to rely on landing a professorship, as there are companies that hire the same individuals. But, this definitely gives me something to think about as I start my MSc next week.

larsberg 16y ago
Further, at least in Computer Science, most of my fellow PhD students came in explicitly not interested in professor jobs. They just wanted the freedom to work on larger problems (in a research lab or at the higher levels in a company) that a PhD affords. Now in my fourth year, I can say that there are very few of us who are even planning to do the tenure-track academic job hunt. More than there are jobs available (in the US), of course.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  I think CS is somewhat unique. Most of my professors got their MS, worked for a decade or two, then went back for their PhD and taught from there. In a way, it's great: most of my professors have fairly extensive real-world experience. Last semester my SENG prof was sick, so he got one of the CS profs to come in and talk to us about industry for a day. Here's a guy who was a software architect for some fairly large companies talking about his fuckups, and the stupid things he learned in school that he had to unlearn in the real world. I find having that kind of experience on tap to be eminently useful.
  - billswift 16y ago
    I don't think it's that unique. When I was in school, in the early 1980s, many engineering professors had similarly returned to the university after gaining professional experience. I remember hearing that that was normal for most engineering schools. And while less common, it was also true of many in the business school.
    - 16y ago

mmaunder 16y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s#t=3m24s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s#t=3m24s

kijinbear 16y ago

There would be a lot more academic jobs for Ph.D.s if colleges and universities hired as many professors as undergrads need. Unfortunately, this would cost a lot of money, so we're left with undergrads suffering gigantic classes and doctorates suffering joblessness.

javert 16y ago
How many professors do undergrads "need"? I think we need to revamp the system to focus more on self-learning, and decrease the emphasis on lectures. No point in having a super expert physics researcher tenured professor who hates teaching and can't teach worth shit teaching a bunch of students, when he could be doing his research and the students could be watching a recorded lecture of the same material from someone who likes teaching, over the internet (e.g. MIT's online course offerings).
- jaxtapose 16y ago
  > I think we need to revamp the system to focus more on self-learning, and decrease the emphasis on lectures. Self learning, as a single mechanism, sucks. You get little directed guidance from people who've got an amazing amount of understanding. Lectures also suck, at least for many programs. What's the alternative? Well, that's tough and it's probably program specific. Computer Science (that's my background) could probably be saved through studio like programs. A lot less lectures, but more building wicked cool things while being mentored by teaching staff. The problem is, studio process is labour intensive. Sure, you'd still need to stand up and describe things in a lecture like format to people. However, you wouldn't need to do it for 2 - 4 hours every week. Just highly specific courses. Hell, the lecturers for that content wouldn't even have to be the course coordinators, they could be specialists who get dragged in to do that specialised content and then released after the 2 or 3 weeks covering it. I mean, think about how awesome AI class would be if the bulk of the time was building solutions for the Google AI challenge? How about instead of having someone yap on about Ubiquitous Computing over 40 hours of the semester, you actually built solutions that used it? What language, APIs, whatever do you use in your project? The lecturer doesn't care. Hell, some studios could focus on solving a problem and let the students justify their own solutions. Imagine remote collaborative computing as an example. Some kids might focus on building web apps that facilitate collaboration. Others might build tools that distribute work nicely. Others still might try to make virtual office spaces with large displays and computer vision technology. Students would actually get to experience stuff that they were deeply interested in. Sure, other programs are less likely to be able to use studio like processes. So, in those cases remote lectures are probably a much better idea. However, what happens if you're just not getting it? Who do you go see? You're still going to need face time.

dustinupdyke 16y ago

Is it truly so black and white that one might say those in the humanities do not go into "industrial jobs"?

ojbyrne 16y ago

This diagram (which I found here) probably sums up the importance and the frustration of Ph.D. programs better than I can: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ I'm ABD, Management, for what its worth.

St-Clock 16y ago
Although this is a good representation of a Ph.D. contribution, I don't think this is the point of the current debate. I would be perfectly happy to have made a dent in the knowledge circle and I think it would be worth the sacrifice, from a knowledge perspective. The problem is that you sacrifice a lot to make that dent and you often don't see the benefits (e.g., an interesting job). It's another story for the supervisor though...
- Create 16y ago
  ...yeah. Who gets to keep the profit from the new territory that the student has conquered, literally risking his life? Who gets to claim ownership (in grant reports)?

NIL8 16y ago

The U.S. Occupational Outlook projections seem to say the exact opposite: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#outlook http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#outlook I would like to see a breakdown of careers to compare which occupations actually benefit from a PhD and which would benefit from a mixture of postsecondary education and some other complimentary training.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Shimers college, a great books college, had a tuition of $21,000/year in 2009–2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimer_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimer_College "Classes are exclusively small seminars in which students discuss original source material rather than read textbooks." Shimers is also rated among the top liberal arts schools in the country. IE, education involving more attention from teachers can be cheaper than what now the standard in college education. The large university today is essentially a racket which takes undergraduate tuition to pay for the capital expenses (building-booms) and then tells the undergraduates how lucky they are to be there.

rmorrison 16y ago

There's a similar problem with law. While there are attorneys who get jobs at big law and make $150k+ starting, a significant percentage of students entering law school this year will not get a positive return on investment over the course of their career. {The cost of the law degree} + {The opportunity cost of not working for three years} > {the increased salary that they'll make over the remainder of their career} EDIT: There were a bunch of articles floating around about this over the past year, here's one: http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf, or more recently http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=busln http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=bu...

Eliezer 16y ago
This surprises me. Citation needed?
miloshasan 16y ago
I would expect that an oversupply of lawyers would make them cheaper to hire and nicer to deal with. If we instead have a small group of lawyers that are expensive and unpleasant, while a lot of younger graduates cannot find jobs, I'd expect there must be some powerful artificial barriers of entry created by the group of insiders, though I have no idea what they could be...
- dagw 16y ago
  I'm guessing it's because when you are hiring a lawyer it often means that at best millions of dollars or your entire livelihood is at stake and, at worst, your freedom or literally your life is at stake. In those situations most people aren't in a mood to bargain-hunt or take a risk with an unknown and untested product, if they have an option.
aridiculous 16y ago
To put it in perspective, there is now a line out the door of experienced lawyers for public defenders jobs. A friend of mine is in the top 20% of a top 20 law school and is hoping to hear back from American Samoa and rural Georgia districts. No one in his third year classes have jobs. Law school is a horrifying investment if you're not in the top 30% or so at a top 5 school. Non-dischargeable student debt is a nightmare.

miloshasan 16y ago

The premise that Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be mainly training for academic careers is wrong, at least in technical/engineering fields. It is very common for people to enter e.g. CS or EE programs with no intention of pursuing an academic career, and instead planning to find an industry job afterwards. Indeed, there were some people I met in grad school that left well-paying jobs at (say) Microsoft with the intention of getting a Ph.D. and going back to industry to work on more interesting stuff. As far as I know, they usually succeeded. Does a Ph.D. increase your expected salary, if you get an industry job afterwards? Probably not enough to be worth it. Does it raise the level of problems you will be solving, and the quality of people you will be surrounded with? Absolutely.

yason 16y ago

The PhD issue sounds like it's about gaming a system: merely trying to maximize yields from hard studying, assuming that the degrees have, or ought to have, an intrinsic value, and that value had better be somehow reflected economically and on the job/career markets. It's all talked about as if there was some absolute value of a PhD that works the same for everyone. That there was a thing that would unilaterally be a good choice for just anyone who only can take it and carry it out. But, in reality, the world has a different world for everyone. In the real world, the valuations of events and choices and lessons aren't apparent, until perhaps later. The valuations don't necessarily come in terms of mere financial survival, like getting a job or getting more money. It's all dependent on the time, the place, the person, and the circumstances leading to the choices made and the lessons learned from them. For example, for one man it might be absolutely golden to first start a PhD, then end up flunking out, internalize some of the facts of his life, and finally end up doing something different, something that is him even if it's not highly regarded in the careerwise or otherwise, in how we like to define "success". Yet, for another man, starting a PhD, finishing it, getting a top job, building a top-notch career for ten years might, in the scope of his life, be the worst possible choice that merely helped him to spend 15 years avoiding ever being challenged in his life's weak spots. The former man has gone somewhere, the latter man has gone nowhere. A PhD is can be perfect if you can channel your life, your self and your creativity through it. A PhD can be worthless if you just do it for the sake of the degree.

liedra 16y ago

There seems to be a lot of generalisation going on in these sorts of articles. The situation in the US might be bad for humanities doctorates but if you're going into academia there's almost no chance you'll be able to find a job near where you grew up. You have to have an open mind and be willing to travel or diversify by finding applications of your chosen subject. Then it's down to networking, building your portfolio (publications), and creating your own research projects (taking advantage of things like early career research grants). People who succeed in academia make their own way, they don't wait for things to be handed to them on a silver platter.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I think it's pretty certain there's a higher education bubble. Consider, most higher wage jobs require a college degree, sometimes any degree. Many people attending college are doing so merely to better their career prospects. Non-trade school colleges actually do not teach much, on average, more so for non-technical degrees. It's getting easier and easier to obtain financing for higher education. Overall we have the classic elements of a bubble. People "investing" (attending college) because of market rather than personal valuations. People investing more casually than they otherwise would because of easy financing. When people stop making investing decisions based on personal judgment and begin making investing decisions blindly based on what they think the market is doing the result is a bubble. It seems pretty clear the same thing is happening in higher education.

Create 16y ago

No it is not idle chatter: and to make matters worse, some attempts to cure the situation just make it worse. For PhD-s, at least. The European Commission is making an experiment within its FP-s (i.e. FP6) to introduce an "alternative" training after a BSc or MSc (doesn't matter which really), called Early Stage Training (EST). It is supposed to alleviate the overproduction of devaluated PhD-s, by proposing a "new and improved" alternative. EST-s get all the upsides of a PhD programme: they are scheduled to conferences in advance (i.e. ACEOLE in IEEE, CHEP etc.) and don't really get their papers rejected (their supervisors - and coauthors - tend to be on Editorial Boards). They also get full pension during the training, 500€/month for training expenses (conferences). At the end, they are not required to write a thesis, and would be formally expected to go to work in the industry. But. Already having the credentials in research (i.e. conf. attendances etc. on CV) EST-s can more easily stay in public research institutions, and if they bother to apply a dissertator (i.e. paperclip) to their 2-3 proceedings paper (which they don't need to write anyway), they can "get downgrade too", by handing it in for a PhD certificate (which committee would refuse an application containing 2-3 peer reviewed papers in a field?) It is also good for the supervisors, because FP WP-s are good money, can be turned to career benefits without the downside of inflating their own scientific grade peer pool. And the doctoral students can only watch this through (on conferences too) and are expected to suck it up. Invest several years (no pension, min. salary, min. publication budget etc.) to be advised to go to Vegas in the end.