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This is sad but true. A lot of people go into PhDs at 22 thinking they're intellectually invincible. They've gotten A's their entire life, never had any kind of

This is sad but true. A lot of people go into PhDs at 22 thinking they're intellectually invincible. They've gotten A's their entire life, never had any kind of serious setback, and fail to process the fact, when they hear PhD programs' abysmal job placement numbers, that those numbers will apply to them. This is even worse in the humanities, where the numbers are closer to 1-in-5 than 1-in-2. People who have been in the top 10% for their whole life fail to apprehend that all their classmates have been in the top 10% forever as well, and that they're counting on luck more than anything else. Five years in, the more successful PhDs have moved on or are at least in the process of finishing up, but about half of the students are long past burned out but will still be around for 2-5 years. Most careers encourage the less successful people to leave or fire them (which seems harsh, but it's less harsh than wasting peoples' time) but academia doesn't, or to whatever extent that it does, people don't get the hint. The result is that you have a lot of people who reach 29-31 when they finish their PhDs, and because they took too long they can't get great post-docs, and it's downhill from there. I think graduate school is a great way to learn a lot for people who have the ambition and ability, but the problem with it, from a career perspective, is that it's regressive rather than progressive for a lot of people. What I mean is that I'd rather be a first-year graduate student than a bottom-half investment banker, for sure, but the people in the "real world", even if they take some lumps early on, have already moved on, learned from a mix of success and failure (in most cases) and had a chance to establish themselves by 29-30. The less successful half of the graduate students haven't had this opportunity; they start out as graduate students at elite departments and, 7 years later, they're "wraiths" with nothing to show for their time. It's a really broken and unfair system. They should be given the hint much earlier (like after 1-2 years) so they can move on and do something where they have a better shot at success.

varjag 16y ago
I agree that there ought to be better exit routes for failure, and, as you say, the system just doesn't have an incentive for that. Luckily for me I was simultaneously both fulltime employee in the industry and a postgrad student, and by the 2nd year was forced to choose. In retrospect, it spared the world from another worthless dissertation. You obviously thought about it before; do you have any ideas how the situation could be improved? Sometimes I feel the whole mentor/advisor thing is flawed, and postgrad students would do better if it was abolished, but you'd think if it was that simple, it'd already be sorted out..
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  I think academia is improving, but slowly. In 1960, the student population was exploding and academia could take a certain self-segregating attitude because there'd be several times as many academic spots available in 15 years. That's not true anymore. The number of academic slots has plateaued, if it's not declining. If the average advisor has 5 graduating students in his career, that means 4 of them will need to get non-academic jobs. The problem is that many advisors have no interest in the outside and wouldn't even know how to get non-academic jobs for their students. I like a lot of academics individually, but the culture of academia is very narcissistic and insular, which means that it doesn't take in much information from the outside world. Most academics haven't a clue whether their work is useful, nor how to get their graduate students jobs outside of academia. Academics also live in a world where anything non-academic is somewhat disparaged, and people who leave have "sold out". It's similar to what you see in investment banking: changing careers means being an utter failure, as far as many are concerned. It also is too individualistic for its own good; as much as the phrase "team player" annoys me, academia could stand to have more respect for that concept. However, that's an aspect of academia that's actually doomed to get worse as the competition increases. The scarce job market leads to cutthroat competition and insane careerism, which makes the culture even more defective and insular. Academics need to get better at playing nice with the outside world, because most of the PhD graduates are going to have to work outside of the ivory tower. The advisor system that you mentioned doesn't help. Advisors tend to insist that their best students should get academic jobs and... as for the rest, who cares? They're out on their own. "If you really want to work in 'industry', go ahead, but don't expect my help." Also, having one advisor is like having one boss with all the power-- a single-point-of-failure situation. So there are definitely problems with the advisor system. On the other hand, it has some benefits: if you get a great advisor, it's awesome. Academia has an additional issue in this: it doesn't "counsel out" those who don't belong. The culture is broken, the people are cutthroat, and well-paid jobs are scarce... but you can stay a graduate student for 8-10 years, and shitty jobs (sub-40k adjunct positions, teaching unmotivated students) aren't that rare or hard to get. Most careers flush people out if they reach extreme failure; academia lets them stick around in an undead status for a long time. This creates an academic underclass of socially undeveloped people who have fallen out of proper academia and have nowhere to go: they can't even get jobs at Starbucks. By middle age, they tend to become very bitter and pretty much unemployable. Academia is a great place to learn some things, but the culture is broken and should not be emulated.

varjag 16y ago

I agree that there ought to be better exit routes for failure, and, as you say, the system just doesn't have an incentive for that. Luckily for me I was simultaneously both fulltime employee in the industry and a postgrad student, and by the 2nd year was forced to choose. In retrospect, it spared the world from another worthless dissertation. You obviously thought about it before; do you have any ideas how the situation could be improved? Sometimes I feel the whole mentor/advisor thing is flawed, and postgrad students would do better if it was abolished, but you'd think if it was that simple, it'd already be sorted out..

michaelochurch 16y ago
I think academia is improving, but slowly. In 1960, the student population was exploding and academia could take a certain self-segregating attitude because there'd be several times as many academic spots available in 15 years. That's not true anymore. The number of academic slots has plateaued, if it's not declining. If the average advisor has 5 graduating students in his career, that means 4 of them will need to get non-academic jobs. The problem is that many advisors have no interest in the outside and wouldn't even know how to get non-academic jobs for their students. I like a lot of academics individually, but the culture of academia is very narcissistic and insular, which means that it doesn't take in much information from the outside world. Most academics haven't a clue whether their work is useful, nor how to get their graduate students jobs outside of academia. Academics also live in a world where anything non-academic is somewhat disparaged, and people who leave have "sold out". It's similar to what you see in investment banking: changing careers means being an utter failure, as far as many are concerned. It also is too individualistic for its own good; as much as the phrase "team player" annoys me, academia could stand to have more respect for that concept. However, that's an aspect of academia that's actually doomed to get worse as the competition increases. The scarce job market leads to cutthroat competition and insane careerism, which makes the culture even more defective and insular. Academics need to get better at playing nice with the outside world, because most of the PhD graduates are going to have to work outside of the ivory tower. The advisor system that you mentioned doesn't help. Advisors tend to insist that their best students should get academic jobs and... as for the rest, who cares? They're out on their own. "If you really want to work in 'industry', go ahead, but don't expect my help." Also, having one advisor is like having one boss with all the power-- a single-point-of-failure situation. So there are definitely problems with the advisor system. On the other hand, it has some benefits: if you get a great advisor, it's awesome. Academia has an additional issue in this: it doesn't "counsel out" those who don't belong. The culture is broken, the people are cutthroat, and well-paid jobs are scarce... but you can stay a graduate student for 8-10 years, and shitty jobs (sub-40k adjunct positions, teaching unmotivated students) aren't that rare or hard to get. Most careers flush people out if they reach extreme failure; academia lets them stick around in an undead status for a long time. This creates an academic underclass of socially undeveloped people who have fallen out of proper academia and have nowhere to go: they can't even get jobs at Starbucks. By middle age, they tend to become very bitter and pretty much unemployable. Academia is a great place to learn some things, but the culture is broken and should not be emulated.