One of the problems with CS PhD graduates at least is the lack of broad familiarity with their and related fields. Outside of a handful of top US schools the r

One of the problems with CS PhD graduates at least is the lack of broad familiarity with their and related fields. Outside of a handful of top US schools the resources (i.e. high level graduate courses taught by people who actually understand what they are talking about) are simply not available. Indeed even there one needs to make an effort to take classes from other departments. Somewhere like UK with no course work requirements at all, it is not as easy to find a PhD student with an understanding of the proverbial bigger picture (of course there are exceptions etc). It is the broad understanding of the relations between methods employed in different fields that makes a PhD useful in an industry setting and not the narrow topic of their research (for example someone familiar with ideas used in numerical computing can do research level work in many fields).