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Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
- andrewclunn 5y agoI'd ask for a control to account for grad students with STDs, but what grad students have time for those?
- openknot 5y agoThe article opens with an anecdote about the experience of a philosophy PhD candidate, then moves on to explore statistics. I believe these types of analyses on the value of a graduate degree should be separated based on field. There are vastly different day-to-day schedules and expected career outcomes for a graduate student pursuing a PhD in, say, philosophy; versus economics; a life sciences field; mathematics; an engineering field; and so on.
- fatnoah 5y agoYeah, the issue isn't graduate degrees, it's graduate degrees with no plan (other than a tenure lottery ticket) for where it'll take you.
- softwarebeware 5y agoThe research into anxiety rates covered all fields though.
- openknot 5y agoThat is true, though I would assert that future career outcomes should factor in to the author's calculations of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). In specific, from the article: "It’s a bit hard to get an apples to apples comparison with the “moderate to severe” description from the survey above, but let’s be conservative and use the weights for moderate depression (0.396) and moderate anxiety (0.133). That means the average graduate student loses 0.99 disability-adjusted life years to depression, 0.34 years to anxiety, and 6.17 years to studying irrelevant coursework, writing a dissertation no one will read, wandering around looking for free food, etc." Consider an undergraduate student who then struggles in graduate school, but is likely to achieve a respected career with good pay and autonomy in the industry thanks to a PhD in a technical field, which could not have been attained without that degree. That student is set to have secured additional years with a high quality of life by achieving their dreams, after some years of struggle. Contrast this with an undergraduate student who struggles in graduate school in a non-technical field, where opportunities outside of academia open thanks to the degree are more limited. The DALYs in graduate school for this student have a lower chance of securing additional high-quality of life years after graduate school, compared to the student in the previous scenario.
- b215826 5y agoAlso worth reading: "Don't Become a Scientist!" by Jonathan Katz [1], "Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun [2], and "What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?" by Bob Henderson [3]. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181018063835/http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181018063835/http://katz.fastm... [2]: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science [3]: https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-physics-5626/ https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-phys...
- TuringNYC 5y ago>> Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Yes, but if they go to Wall St with the same credential, they make 20x that.
- loeg 5y agoWith a biology PhD?
- kurthr 5y agoWell, I know some really biologists who code really well, but you're right only pharma/medicine are likely to pay off your college debts, the first requires a lot of luck, and the other a lot more school. Biology is well known to be a terrible investment (by people in gradschool).
- guga42k 5y agoyes. with massive capital investments in bio/pharma sector some in-house expertise required to improve ROI. ps: basic python and prob theory won't hurt.
- b215826 5y agoThe essay is from 1999, so the salaries are a little off -- it's something like $50,000 +/- $15,000 for most postdoctoral positions now. Yes, you can go to Wall St with a physics PhD and have a great career. But the thing is that many students (especially in elite institutions) enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming an actual scientist, not a Wall St analyst.
- julienb_sea 5y agoHot take - graduate school is frequently treated as a "backup" option when getting a job directly out of undergraduate appears difficult or unrealistic. This is a very damaging mindset, as the post-graduate options are not always much rosier than post-undergraduate, but comes with a likely mountain of debt and years of envy watching peers have multi-year head starts in their careers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 5y agoI had the opposite view -- graduate studies in math rarely result in tenure; industry is a nice fallback for mathematicians with programming chops.
- michaelt 5y agoIt's a fallback in both directions. If you were studying creative writing and planning to go into advertising, but you graduated during a big recession and no-one was hiring? A few years of grad school might be more fun than a few years working retail, especially if mom and dad will help pay for it. If you've finished your PhD in STEM and it didn't inspire you to follow the long path to tenure? You might fall back to industry; with luck you'll make so much money it hardly counts as falling back.
- klyrs 5y agoIf your goal is money, industry is a nice fallback. If your goal is purity of intellectual pursuit... offerings in industry can be rather dismal.
- michaelt 5y agoTrue - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback! But your PhD won't just expose you to pure intellectual pursuits. You'll also see the downsides to academia. Pressure to publish or perish; anti-intellectual pressures to salami-slice your results, trade citations with friends and overstate the complexity of your work; the stilted language and awful writing of many papers; the need to go around cap in hand pursuing funding; the expectation to provide free labour to multinational publishing companies; the constant threat your competitors are fabricating or p-hacking results; and the risk you'll spend a decade 'paying your dues' in postdocs without ever earning tenure.
- senkora 5y ago> Once, for a conference, we visited a different philosophy department, at a less prestigious university, housed in a structure which had set the record for the largest poured-concrete building in the US. I’m guessing Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon University?
- aleffert 5y agoWean is large and horrible, but 1. I can't find any evidence that it was ever the largest and that never came up when I was a student (I did hear it won awards). 2. Philosophy is in the Humanities department which is in different buildings.
- freetime2 5y agoPerhaps Crosley Tower at the University of Cincinnati? https://actioncookbook.substack.com/p/the-story-of-a-terrible-building https://actioncookbook.substack.com/p/the-story-of-a-terribl...
- nathan_compton 5y agoI had a relatively bad experience with graduate school but in retrospect it was better than working. Very little oversight on how I spent my time, got to do interesting work and being a grad student in my field (physics) was relatively high status when it came to dating the people I wanted to date. I walked to work every day and walked home every night. I slept well. In comparison, literally the only good thing about "the real world" is more money. My advisor was an anti-social depressive and I often felt spectacularly dumb. But in retrospect, it was great. If I could afford to go again, I'd do it.
- jeffrallen 5y agoBut what about STDs acquired at grad school? Umm.. asking for a friend...
- annoyingnoob 5y agoIts all about choices really. My wife got her Master's in Nursing and works as a Nurse Practitioner. She had a 6 figure salary right out of school. She helps many people with their healthcare. She is still paying off the cost of school but has the means to do so.
- Victerius 5y agoI'm trying to paste the link to the "100 reasons not to go to grad school" blog but HN won't let me paste? I'm on Chrome 98 on Android 9. Pushing the paste button does nothing. No URL works. Regular text works though.
- b215826 5y agohttp://100rsns.blogspot.com/ http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
- manux 5y agoIt's quite likely some people will come out of reading this thinking we should stop sending people to grad school. Shouldn't we instead take this as a signal that it needs improvement? Grad students are one of the very few subpopulations of humanity allowed to take on extraordinary epistemological risks; a kind of immune system of our civilization. I'm not even talking about some elusive notion of "progress", just [intellectual] societal health. It would feel to me like a tremendous loss if we let go of such a component of society.
- achillesheels 5y agoYou are assuming that the institutions are making worthwhile "epistemological risks"; when, clearly, there is a lack of the facilitation of the knowledge of Fourier Mathematics (e.g. the Fourier Transform) in virtually every scientific discipline. Yet this is what most of these researchers involve themselves with everyday with their digital computations. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
- nonameiguess 5y agoThe linked study that he consulted is behind a paywall. From context, it sounds like this is specifically referring to negative mental health outcomes due to PhD studies, which is not all grad school. The title seemingly can't possibly be correct as written, given schools of public health and medicine exist and have to produce some net positive benefit. It's not like public health globally hasn't improved since we discovered the germ theory of disease and medical licensing became a thing. Making some small number of people depressed isn't nearly enough to offset all of modern medicine.
- Mawglin 5y agoI'd like to know more about your ideas of suffering offsets and why the idea total societal misery is something that can be measured or even considered. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a semi-structured, free intellectual environment that is ALSO a healthy working environment? I'm curious if you would still feel this way if you had been designated as the unhealthy minority that lies beneath our consideration as long as health outcomes continue to improve, on average?
- Mawglin 5y ago// why the idea of total
- softwarebeware 5y agoThe article seems flawed from its premise, which is that because there's X% (41 I guess) rate of moderate to severe anxiety in students attending grad school, grad school must be the cause. Classic case of correlation =/= causation. Besides, the cited research also says this: "Although this is a convenience sample in which respondents who have had a history of anxiety or depression may have been more apt to respond to the survey..."
- hirundo 5y agoAt the top of the article, in italics: > Caveats: ... “if the correlation is causal”
- unobtaniumstool 5y ago
- mjfl 5y agoEh. My PHD sucks but it's better than a real job.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- some-guy 5y agoSimilar discussion to the "The dangers of high status, low wage jobs" post from today. I do think the stress is directly correlated with their financial situation. My spouse is in a PhD program. Advantages for her are a) her mother was also a PhD with a tenured job and b) she's married to me, who makes $350k a year (and to be clear, she works a lot harder than I do). I can't imagine people putting up with the same bullshit she does as outlined in the article, _and_ dealing with financial issues. Even if she doesn't get that tenure-track job, her opportunity cost for trying is much lower than someone who doesn't have those privileges.
- pmorici 5y agoMy wife got her PhD and some of the things she would talk about that her advisors told her just struck me as nuts. They would lament that it was “sad” people would leave academia to have families ignoring the fact that the jobs paid like crap and there was massive competition for any position. They acted like it was some conspiracy to keep people out of the field when it seemed to me to be mostly explained by people making straightforward economic decisions for themselves.
- rank0 5y agoI am extremely skeptical of the authors claim that only 6% of the general population suffers “moderate to severe” anxiety or depression. How do you even quantify the intensity of a normal human emotion? It’s all relative to an individuals experience. Human beings are fucked in the head. I believe it’s always been that way and always will be.