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So you're blaming the semblance of market reforms for the overproduction of PhDs? The reason we have too many PhDs, and too many students is the same: our dumb

So you're blaming the semblance of market reforms for the overproduction of PhDs? The reason we have too many PhDs, and too many students is the same: our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children. Without the state artificially funding this no one in their right mind would do it. Our parents demanded it, and we got it. Turns out its a scam. Hardly anything to "McKinsey"ificaiton

alpineidyll3 6y ago
It's not just about phds. Undergraduate education is significantly compromised because universities literally focus on customer service metrics, and are directed by the business school. At prestigious institutions this is literally a revolving door with mckinsey which can be followed through key appointments but I was using the word to make a more abstract illusion.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Are you sure its customer service metrics and not the oversupply of students? Are you sure it isnt that students who couldnt complete an entrance exam 30yrs ago are being given $50k - $100k loans to get a degree they derive no value from? The average IQ of an undergrad 30 years ago was over 120, now it is 105. University doesn't "educate" you. At best it trains you in a discipline that you have to, on arrival, have an aptitude for. The (pseudo-)educational experience isnt transformative, it doesn't take a person who cannot learn complex topics independently and turn them into a person who can. It facilitates. That means c. 10% of the current population of students are actually suitable for university. Everything else is a bubble created by "aspirational" parents demanding $100k loans for their children.
  - alpineidyll3 6y ago
    If this is the case, (and I'm not disagreeing outright) I think the fault lies with primary Ed, and the oft true perception that education is unnecessary because the stamp of intelligence can be bought. Cough, kushner, cough.
  - begemotz 6y ago
    you speak as if it has to be either or.. from the inside looking out, I can say its both. To deny that the modern (US) university is driven by customer satisfaction and B-school world views is hard to defend if you know how universities function. To say that the financial aid market and sheer number of mediocre Unis teaching mediocre students doesn't perpetuate the institution is also going to be hard to defend. But they are not independent and certainly not contradictory. If there was no demand, there would be no market.. and what the demand is for is not education but a diploma. And the larger markets insist of college degrees for the most mediocre of jobs, and have off-loaded training to be subsidized, ultimately by the students getting a degree (and then complain because they are not being 'taught' skills necessary for the workplace).
chrisseaton 6y ago
> The reason we have too many PhDs In what sense do we have too many PhDs? The market for PhDs is pretty competitive.
- laingc 6y ago
  We graduate an order of magnitude more PhDs than anyone has a real use for. Even ignoring arts and humanities PhDs which are obvious cases, in fields like biology a newly minted average PhD has roughly zero people competing for them. They’ll be lucky to find a job even close to their field. You have biology PhDs working as Clinical Research Associates, for heaven’s sake.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I don't understand - you can do thousands of jobs with a PhD. You can be a high-school teacher in your subject for example.- I don't think we have a shortage of teachers! Or you can work in industry. Not everyone does a PhD in order to get onto a tenure track at a college, which is what I think you meant.
    - laingc 6y ago
      As someone with a PhD who works in industry, that’s certainly not what I meant. There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. We can argue about the magnitude of the oversupply, but the reasonable range of discussion is between “huge” and “gigantic”.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        > There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. There clearly isn't - since there's such huge competition to hire them. If there was a massive oversupply they'd be unemployed.
        laingc 6y ago
        There is almost no competition to hire them, as far as I can see. Maybe top-flight CS PhDs from Stanford, I’d believe that. But your average biology or chemistry PhD? Every single one of them that I know struggled mightily in the job market.
throwawaygh 6y ago
> our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children. 100% wrong. The vast majority of STEM PhDs are foreign born. The reason we have a ton of PhDs in certain fields is because of how our immigration system works. TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math). > The reason we have too many PhDs We really don't, at least in certain fields. We might have too many PhDs who want to be faculty at top 10 universities. But, at least in CS, we have a pretty significant shortage of PhDs. My first post-PhD job offers were in the 300K - 500K range. I had zero days of work experience outside phd school. That indicates a significant labor shortage; I'm not that special, I promise, but I was the only person in my particular niche on the market they year, and there were 5 companies with deep pockets who wanted my expertise. Hedge funds and tech monopolies over-paying for talent is, I guess, not the worst thing in the world. But good luck hiring a PhD to be a professor at your small cash-strapped branch campus when you can pay $60K/yr, your governor is constantly shit-talking lazy academics who in fact work 80 hour weeks, and the competing offers in industry are well into the mid six figures with better work/life balance and better job security.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Err... I think you're taking an extremely narrow job market view of a PhD... ie., one which is actually useful for a job market. Sure, in some research-driven and high-complexity industrial areas there's a very severe shortage of talent in general. You don't get programmers being paid 200k without a real-terms shortage, let alone programmers with PhDs in, eg., algorithmic research. My point was about the university system, as a closed system. That is what the OP comment is talking about. The only use of a cultural criticsm PhD is a job teaching that subject. There aren't any. Last time I checked there were TWO job openings in the entirety of the united kingdom for a postdoc job requiring a philosophy PhD. The university is, at this point, just a scam. For almost all students. The 1-5% who get some use out of it, and who always got some use out of it, should continue to go.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    That's why I said: >> TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math). But, tbh, this isn't even about fields, it's about spending 5 years developing hard-to-find research skills vs. spending 5 years indulging one's curiosity/taste. CS has its own version of "useless phd in Great Books/crit theory", and I've worked with philosophy PhDs who wrote more code for their dissertation than the average CS phd student.
majormajor 6y ago
The state funds it less now than they did in my parent's day. Debt is not state funding. This is an absurd take for other reasons too, though. "Past generations = dumb" is silly wishful thinking, as is "bad results indicate malice or a scam". The world changes faster than people update their priors, so this sort of wrongful optimization is a common failing that we should really introspect about more deeply. Education level alone was more important in the past, and then everyone realized this and "competed" themselves into a new, overall-worse, equilibrium. That happens EVERYWHERE so if you're upset about it you need to both push for flexible, adaptable systems, and continuous rapid feedback loops.

alpineidyll3 6y ago

It's not just about phds. Undergraduate education is significantly compromised because universities literally focus on customer service metrics, and are directed by the business school. At prestigious institutions this is literally a revolving door with mckinsey which can be followed through key appointments but I was using the word to make a more abstract illusion.

mjburgess 6y ago
Are you sure its customer service metrics and not the oversupply of students? Are you sure it isnt that students who couldnt complete an entrance exam 30yrs ago are being given $50k - $100k loans to get a degree they derive no value from? The average IQ of an undergrad 30 years ago was over 120, now it is 105. University doesn't "educate" you. At best it trains you in a discipline that you have to, on arrival, have an aptitude for. The (pseudo-)educational experience isnt transformative, it doesn't take a person who cannot learn complex topics independently and turn them into a person who can. It facilitates. That means c. 10% of the current population of students are actually suitable for university. Everything else is a bubble created by "aspirational" parents demanding $100k loans for their children.
- alpineidyll3 6y ago
  If this is the case, (and I'm not disagreeing outright) I think the fault lies with primary Ed, and the oft true perception that education is unnecessary because the stamp of intelligence can be bought. Cough, kushner, cough.
- begemotz 6y ago
  you speak as if it has to be either or.. from the inside looking out, I can say its both. To deny that the modern (US) university is driven by customer satisfaction and B-school world views is hard to defend if you know how universities function. To say that the financial aid market and sheer number of mediocre Unis teaching mediocre students doesn't perpetuate the institution is also going to be hard to defend. But they are not independent and certainly not contradictory. If there was no demand, there would be no market.. and what the demand is for is not education but a diploma. And the larger markets insist of college degrees for the most mediocre of jobs, and have off-loaded training to be subsidized, ultimately by the students getting a degree (and then complain because they are not being 'taught' skills necessary for the workplace).

chrisseaton 6y ago

> The reason we have too many PhDs In what sense do we have too many PhDs? The market for PhDs is pretty competitive.

laingc 6y ago
We graduate an order of magnitude more PhDs than anyone has a real use for. Even ignoring arts and humanities PhDs which are obvious cases, in fields like biology a newly minted average PhD has roughly zero people competing for them. They’ll be lucky to find a job even close to their field. You have biology PhDs working as Clinical Research Associates, for heaven’s sake.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I don't understand - you can do thousands of jobs with a PhD. You can be a high-school teacher in your subject for example.- I don't think we have a shortage of teachers! Or you can work in industry. Not everyone does a PhD in order to get onto a tenure track at a college, which is what I think you meant.
  - laingc 6y ago
    As someone with a PhD who works in industry, that’s certainly not what I meant. There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. We can argue about the magnitude of the oversupply, but the reasonable range of discussion is between “huge” and “gigantic”.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. There clearly isn't - since there's such huge competition to hire them. If there was a massive oversupply they'd be unemployed.
      - laingc 6y ago
        There is almost no competition to hire them, as far as I can see. Maybe top-flight CS PhDs from Stanford, I’d believe that. But your average biology or chemistry PhD? Every single one of them that I know struggled mightily in the job market.

throwawaygh 6y ago

> our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children. 100% wrong. The vast majority of STEM PhDs are foreign born. The reason we have a ton of PhDs in certain fields is because of how our immigration system works. TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math). > The reason we have too many PhDs We really don't, at least in certain fields. We might have too many PhDs who want to be faculty at top 10 universities. But, at least in CS, we have a pretty significant shortage of PhDs. My first post-PhD job offers were in the 300K - 500K range. I had zero days of work experience outside phd school. That indicates a significant labor shortage; I'm not that special, I promise, but I was the only person in my particular niche on the market they year, and there were 5 companies with deep pockets who wanted my expertise. Hedge funds and tech monopolies over-paying for talent is, I guess, not the worst thing in the world. But good luck hiring a PhD to be a professor at your small cash-strapped branch campus when you can pay $60K/yr, your governor is constantly shit-talking lazy academics who in fact work 80 hour weeks, and the competing offers in industry are well into the mid six figures with better work/life balance and better job security.

mjburgess 6y ago
Err... I think you're taking an extremely narrow job market view of a PhD... ie., one which is actually useful for a job market. Sure, in some research-driven and high-complexity industrial areas there's a very severe shortage of talent in general. You don't get programmers being paid 200k without a real-terms shortage, let alone programmers with PhDs in, eg., algorithmic research. My point was about the university system, as a closed system. That is what the OP comment is talking about. The only use of a cultural criticsm PhD is a job teaching that subject. There aren't any. Last time I checked there were TWO job openings in the entirety of the united kingdom for a postdoc job requiring a philosophy PhD. The university is, at this point, just a scam. For almost all students. The 1-5% who get some use out of it, and who always got some use out of it, should continue to go.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  That's why I said: >> TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math). But, tbh, this isn't even about fields, it's about spending 5 years developing hard-to-find research skills vs. spending 5 years indulging one's curiosity/taste. CS has its own version of "useless phd in Great Books/crit theory", and I've worked with philosophy PhDs who wrote more code for their dissertation than the average CS phd student.

majormajor 6y ago

The state funds it less now than they did in my parent's day. Debt is not state funding. This is an absurd take for other reasons too, though. "Past generations = dumb" is silly wishful thinking, as is "bad results indicate malice or a scam". The world changes faster than people update their priors, so this sort of wrongful optimization is a common failing that we should really introspect about more deeply. Education level alone was more important in the past, and then everyone realized this and "competed" themselves into a new, overall-worse, equilibrium. That happens EVERYWHERE so if you're upset about it you need to both push for flexible, adaptable systems, and continuous rapid feedback loops.