6 ms·

I would love PhDs to be thought of as something you dive into when you have something to pursue, perhaps many years later in life rather than a follow on immedi

I would love PhDs to be thought of as something you dive into when you have something to pursue, perhaps many years later in life rather than a follow on immediately after study. As a comparison imagine if VC funding only went to the highest scoring new grads and the business proposal was asked for after the invitation to take on VC funding. That's pretty much what's been happening with PhDs. You get the marks, you get invited to take on a PhD and then you look for projects. A totally inorganic process that leads to a gross misallocation of resources.

chrisseaton 4y ago
PhD is an apprenticeship to do research. If we left it until later in life, we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  There are way more PhD's then there are research positions, so we are very far from the deficit you fear.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Pray tell, where is this Elysium?
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        I have never heard of a PhD student in computing struggling to find a job.
        jobs_throwaway 4y ago
        now do every other field
    - Rayhem 4y ago
      Job != research. Many people see a PhD as an indicator of "really smart person" (good for jobs!...maybe...until you have too many of them and they get bored or act like divas), but it's more an indicator of an ability to do independent research (good for a very specific type of job). We are producing vastly more PhDs than we need for jobs that require the latter.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        Research job openings. Big tech can’t hoover them up fast enough.
    - hadlock 4y ago
      Link to a graph of open tenure-track phd positions over time? I can't find one but from what I've been reading it would indicate there are not enough positions open to fill demand.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        Why is tenure the be-all in your mind? I never wanted tenure after my PhD - I think that’s pretty typical.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        The last 30-40 years has seen massive expansion on the post-WWII model of PhD-as-industry-expert model. It's not uncommon to see PhDs after five to seven years in industry in the C-suite. That is less common for MBAs, from my view.
    - zahllos 4y ago
      There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well). For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university). For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up. At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.
      - Someone 4y ago
        As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
  - queuebert 4y ago
    In my area of academia, we train about 4 mediocre PhDs for every good PhD that can do excellent, independent research. If we had more good researchers, we could create more positions for them. But right now most of our graduates don't want to do research or suck at it and go into industry. Not to mention the pay differential. I also sit on a graduate admissions committee, and it's hard to find good students. We have work enough for easily 10x as many STEM students in the US.
    - sampo 4y ago
      You make 5 people to go through long and demanding training, knowing that 4 out of 5 will have to change careers afterward, as the training wasn't a good fit for them. Just so that you can weed out that 1 out of 5 to hire. Doesn't this sound a bit exploitative to you? > it's hard to find good students Maybe because you provide such a bad deal for the majority of your students?
      - queuebert 4y ago
        We don't make anybody do anything.
- bumby 4y ago
  >we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research Can you explain this further? I don't follow how, for example, if I wait 10 years to begin a PhD there is somehow no research being conducted. Even if everyone suddenly waited 10 years, there would only be a lag for the first generation.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    If you do a PhD at 21, you’ve got 40 years of productive research ahead of you. If you do one at 40 you’ve only got 21 years. Less time to research, so missed opportunity.
    - bumby 4y ago
      Thanks for replying. I think I would push back a bit on the idea that research generally only commences after a PhD. Maybe in academia, but in industry (engineering at least, I don't know on the CS side), an awful lot of research is done at masters or even bachelors levels. The people I know who've gone for a PhD later in life were already doing research and generally took the path because the credential opened professional doors (e.g., to become a supervisor or director), not necessarily facilitated greater amounts of research. To play devil's advocate, you could in theory increase the amount of research by opening avenues for non-traditional PhDs. There will still be those who start a program at 21, plus those starting at 40 who would normally not engage in a program.
      - wombatpm 4y ago
        PhD programs exist to create new faculty members at other institutions. Other people hiring PhDs is a side benefit that has nothing to do with the purpose of the programs.
        bumby 4y ago
        I disagree. I'm curious what you base this conclusion on? I've heard professors say similar, but it always seemed that it was because they were in an academic bubble. If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. There will be a glut of PhDs compared to faculty positions. One of the reasons so many PhDs are disgruntled is because of the false expectation that every PhD is on track for a professorship. I picked a random public school to see if their program states the intent is to produce faculty[1]. It seems like research is the other half of the goal along with teaching. Lots of research is done outside of faculty positions. "The doctoral degree, i.e. the Ph.D., is primarily intended for students desiring a career in research and/or collegiate teaching." [1]https://cse.engin.umich.edu/academics/graduate/phd-in-cse/ https://cse.engin.umich.edu/academics/graduate/phd-in-cse/
- pvaldes 4y ago
  We still can learn from people that died 200 years ago. Bibliography solves this problem.
selimthegrim 4y ago
If you or your PI have a grant the proposal and the VC funding should be taken care of and linked
radus 4y ago
This doesn't make sense for careers that require the additional training before you can be useful in your field.
- AnotherGoodName 4y ago
  Masters degrees are the way to learn something that exists in depth though. This is different to a PhD.
  - tarentel 4y ago
    Sort of. From my experience a master's degree was like getting an accelerated undergrad degree without a lot of the hand holding or extra courses. While I did learn a lot I don't think I learned a whole lot in depth. I studied one thing somewhat in depth but that was really the tip of the iceberg for the whole sub-field/topic really. People would likely get a PhD in something way more specific that I probably never even learned about in said field.
balsam 4y ago
You got it. I don’t know how things worked in the old days before people started to think that becoming Einstein or Witten was a plausible career path, and academia oriented itself to deal with the demand. But. To imagine that culture-fit might allocate resources better than test-driven meritocracy! quantamagazine needs to start featuring more representative career paths like OP’s.
dahart 4y ago
It’d be pretty cool if we had a real path for later-in-life research time. I’m not sure that’s very realistic, but I’d love it too. Big problems are that kids and jobs lock you into needing to make enough money. I actually tried to join a PhD program after 5 years of industry experience, and they offered the top fellowship they had, which was not enough to cover only the health insurance for my family, not to mention rent or food. It simply wasn’t feasible, and so we would need a systemic change to education funding to enable late-in-life study opportunities for everyone. I dislike the comparison to VC funding. VC funding is essentially gambling and already a gross misallocation of resources. VC funding already goes to something analogous to the highest scoring grads who speculate wildly that they have a viable business model, and the real business model only shows up long after the funds, even in the small ~5-10% of successful startups. The ~90% of failures is proof enough. Also, research requires taking risks with resources. If we don’t take risks, we won’t make progress. Thinking of research in narrow immediate economic terms is short sighted. We often don’t understand the ROI of research until long after the initial investment, meaning there will never be a time that allocation of resources can be predicted or approximated in advance.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It'd be interesting to see someone with industry experience bring industry problems to academia and explore them there. As a bonus, they might be accomplished enough professionally that they aren't interested in the publication rat race, so they're more likely to produce meaningful results (or nothing, but that's ok!) than a pointless paper.
  - sally_glance 4y ago
    In most faculties this is already happening, mainly because solving a problem that big corp is interested in will make it more likely to secure funding (by big corp), and in general you probably want to discuss (or even evaluate) the practical applications of your (maybe theoretical) research. They will still be part of the rat race though. Actually it's been interesting to observe the opposite, I know some PhD students who quit because big corp offered them a nice position in their innovation branch with much more freedom (and financial security) to work on their favourite problem... A bit of luck involved to have your field of research align with big corps' goals though.

chrisseaton 4y ago

PhD is an apprenticeship to do research. If we left it until later in life, we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research.

im3w1l 4y ago
There are way more PhD's then there are research positions, so we are very far from the deficit you fear.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Pray tell, where is this Elysium?
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      I have never heard of a PhD student in computing struggling to find a job.
      - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
        now do every other field
  - Rayhem 4y ago
    Job != research. Many people see a PhD as an indicator of "really smart person" (good for jobs!...maybe...until you have too many of them and they get bored or act like divas), but it's more an indicator of an ability to do independent research (good for a very specific type of job). We are producing vastly more PhDs than we need for jobs that require the latter.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Research job openings. Big tech can’t hoover them up fast enough.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    Link to a graph of open tenure-track phd positions over time? I can't find one but from what I've been reading it would indicate there are not enough positions open to fill demand.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Why is tenure the be-all in your mind? I never wanted tenure after my PhD - I think that’s pretty typical.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      The last 30-40 years has seen massive expansion on the post-WWII model of PhD-as-industry-expert model. It's not uncommon to see PhDs after five to seven years in industry in the C-suite. That is less common for MBAs, from my view.
  - zahllos 4y ago
    There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well). For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university). For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up. At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.
    - Someone 4y ago
      As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
- queuebert 4y ago
  In my area of academia, we train about 4 mediocre PhDs for every good PhD that can do excellent, independent research. If we had more good researchers, we could create more positions for them. But right now most of our graduates don't want to do research or suck at it and go into industry. Not to mention the pay differential. I also sit on a graduate admissions committee, and it's hard to find good students. We have work enough for easily 10x as many STEM students in the US.
  - sampo 4y ago
    You make 5 people to go through long and demanding training, knowing that 4 out of 5 will have to change careers afterward, as the training wasn't a good fit for them. Just so that you can weed out that 1 out of 5 to hire. Doesn't this sound a bit exploitative to you? > it's hard to find good students Maybe because you provide such a bad deal for the majority of your students?
    - queuebert 4y ago
      We don't make anybody do anything.
bumby 4y ago
>we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research Can you explain this further? I don't follow how, for example, if I wait 10 years to begin a PhD there is somehow no research being conducted. Even if everyone suddenly waited 10 years, there would only be a lag for the first generation.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  If you do a PhD at 21, you’ve got 40 years of productive research ahead of you. If you do one at 40 you’ve only got 21 years. Less time to research, so missed opportunity.
  - bumby 4y ago
    Thanks for replying. I think I would push back a bit on the idea that research generally only commences after a PhD. Maybe in academia, but in industry (engineering at least, I don't know on the CS side), an awful lot of research is done at masters or even bachelors levels. The people I know who've gone for a PhD later in life were already doing research and generally took the path because the credential opened professional doors (e.g., to become a supervisor or director), not necessarily facilitated greater amounts of research. To play devil's advocate, you could in theory increase the amount of research by opening avenues for non-traditional PhDs. There will still be those who start a program at 21, plus those starting at 40 who would normally not engage in a program.
    - wombatpm 4y ago
      PhD programs exist to create new faculty members at other institutions. Other people hiring PhDs is a side benefit that has nothing to do with the purpose of the programs.
      - bumby 4y ago
        I disagree. I'm curious what you base this conclusion on? I've heard professors say similar, but it always seemed that it was because they were in an academic bubble. If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. There will be a glut of PhDs compared to faculty positions. One of the reasons so many PhDs are disgruntled is because of the false expectation that every PhD is on track for a professorship. I picked a random public school to see if their program states the intent is to produce faculty[1]. It seems like research is the other half of the goal along with teaching. Lots of research is done outside of faculty positions. "The doctoral degree, i.e. the Ph.D., is primarily intended for students desiring a career in research and/or collegiate teaching." [1]https://cse.engin.umich.edu/academics/graduate/phd-in-cse/ https://cse.engin.umich.edu/academics/graduate/phd-in-cse/
pvaldes 4y ago
We still can learn from people that died 200 years ago. Bibliography solves this problem.

selimthegrim 4y ago

If you or your PI have a grant the proposal and the VC funding should be taken care of and linked

radus 4y ago

This doesn't make sense for careers that require the additional training before you can be useful in your field.

AnotherGoodName 4y ago
Masters degrees are the way to learn something that exists in depth though. This is different to a PhD.
- tarentel 4y ago
  Sort of. From my experience a master's degree was like getting an accelerated undergrad degree without a lot of the hand holding or extra courses. While I did learn a lot I don't think I learned a whole lot in depth. I studied one thing somewhat in depth but that was really the tip of the iceberg for the whole sub-field/topic really. People would likely get a PhD in something way more specific that I probably never even learned about in said field.

balsam 4y ago

You got it. I don’t know how things worked in the old days before people started to think that becoming Einstein or Witten was a plausible career path, and academia oriented itself to deal with the demand. But. To imagine that culture-fit might allocate resources better than test-driven meritocracy! quantamagazine needs to start featuring more representative career paths like OP’s.

dahart 4y ago

It’d be pretty cool if we had a real path for later-in-life research time. I’m not sure that’s very realistic, but I’d love it too. Big problems are that kids and jobs lock you into needing to make enough money. I actually tried to join a PhD program after 5 years of industry experience, and they offered the top fellowship they had, which was not enough to cover only the health insurance for my family, not to mention rent or food. It simply wasn’t feasible, and so we would need a systemic change to education funding to enable late-in-life study opportunities for everyone. I dislike the comparison to VC funding. VC funding is essentially gambling and already a gross misallocation of resources. VC funding already goes to something analogous to the highest scoring grads who speculate wildly that they have a viable business model, and the real business model only shows up long after the funds, even in the small ~5-10% of successful startups. The ~90% of failures is proof enough. Also, research requires taking risks with resources. If we don’t take risks, we won’t make progress. Thinking of research in narrow immediate economic terms is short sighted. We often don’t understand the ROI of research until long after the initial investment, meaning there will never be a time that allocation of resources can be predicted or approximated in advance.

dehrmann 4y ago
It'd be interesting to see someone with industry experience bring industry problems to academia and explore them there. As a bonus, they might be accomplished enough professionally that they aren't interested in the publication rat race, so they're more likely to produce meaningful results (or nothing, but that's ok!) than a pointless paper.
- sally_glance 4y ago
  In most faculties this is already happening, mainly because solving a problem that big corp is interested in will make it more likely to secure funding (by big corp), and in general you probably want to discuss (or even evaluate) the practical applications of your (maybe theoretical) research. They will still be part of the rat race though. Actually it's been interesting to observe the opposite, I know some PhD students who quit because big corp offered them a nice position in their innovation branch with much more freedom (and financial security) to work on their favourite problem... A bit of luck involved to have your field of research align with big corps' goals though.