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This also leads to a few bad outcomes for society at large. - PhD programs can become abusive of their students/workers. Paying below subsistence or even char

by lumost 4y ago

This also leads to a few bad outcomes for society at large. - PhD programs can become abusive of their students/workers. Paying below subsistence or even charging money to study. - PhD programs can become places where only those with no opportunity cost go. - PhD students will stop caring about long term careers in their field - recognizing the impossibility. - Science enters a hyper-competitive phase where scientists do not target ground breaking research. Instead focusing on small repeatable wins. - Scientists adopt anti-competitive practices to secure their small slice of research funding including review kabals, and disuading research in conflicting views. While I'm all for letting students take the risks they feel like taking, the current situation is the result of a systemic massive overproduction of PhDs through government funding. It's possible this overproduction of apprentices results in decreased productivity amongst those working in the field by introducing noise, and training costs to researchers. If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.

kergonath 4y ago
> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results. Then science would have a serious problem, because the only way to get things done is to abuse this cheap labour: it is much easier to get funding for a handful of PhD students or post-docs than for the equivalent in permanent staff. Large research universities would have a very hard time, and the way things work with funding agencies would have to change fundamentally. I am not saying it would be bad, far from it. But in the current system, it’s easier for everybody to go along, so changing things will be hard. It does not depend on individual behaviours. OTOH, I think that overall it is good to have PhDs going out and do stuff in unrelated fields. A PhD is still a wonderful way of broadening your horizons. We’d be better having more PhD politicians, for example, instead of lawyers. You can do a lot of things after a doctorate. I think the post-doc trap is much more insidious.
klyrs 4y ago
> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results. I don't know about that. A 3-10x reduction would mean grad classes of 1-2 students. In the grad classes I took, there was never "dead weight," everybody contributed in study sessions. Even those students who would go on to get tenure were learning from those who wouldn't. I'm not sure professors would even be motivated to teach such small courses. The price of graduate tuition would also go up by that 3-10x factor, so PhDs would be exclusively for the rich. Several of my coworkers have PhDs, as do I. We all bring special skills, and working together, we combine those skills to great effect. None of us are faculty. That's not the only thing you can do with a PhD. Should ta/ra/sessional positions pay a living wage? Absolutely. But don't cut the rest of us out because you don't see our value.
queuebert 4y ago
Instead of reducing the number of trainees, how about we increase the number of faculty positions? Isn't research good for society?
- lumost 4y ago
  If the latter is possible, then yes - however in a society with a declining population and modest productivity growth increasing the number of faculty positions 3-5x to account for current PhD program capacity is likely infeasible. Even a massive increase in science budgets at the federal level would likely only yield 2x the positions. While Universities could cut administrative bloat to make way for faculty... they are unlikely to do so, and there are few levers to motivate them. With a looming student loan crises, they are likely to be forced to cut budgets significantly sometime in the next 10 years either through inflation or direct cuts. The number of PhD candidates is partially based on the way the federal government cuts grants, at a roughly flat budget the only way to create more faculty positions is to cut PhD student grants. From a very rough perspective, the government could create roughly one career track research position for every ~1.5-2.5 PhD/PostDoc position grants they cut. If you doubled the science budget, then the 3-5x cut would work out as 1.5-3x, However due to the expectation on the number of students each professor has.. doubling the budget in the current system would simply yield the same problem with twice as many people involved.
  - queuebert 4y ago
    You make some good points and I agree with your ballpark figures, but you seem very stuck in a status quo mindset. The entire NIH budget is about what we are giving Ukraine in aid. High-frequency trading alone saps billions from the economy. We could easily find money to triple our science expenditures if we wanted to. And yes we'd need to evaluate faculty success differently so that we would no longer require each professor to run a lab of a half dozen grad students in order to have enough publications for tenure. But that's easily doable via a collective decision.
    - lumost 4y ago
      Fair, but we (hopefully) don’t need to fight the Ukraine war every year - and we have many more agencies than the NIH who need science funding. Choosing not to fund the military to support the NIH may directly translate to undesirable geopolitical outcomes.
lmeyerov 4y ago
Agreed with problem, not sure about solution Ex: 10X smaller enrollment. In top programs, most competitive undergraduate applicants have _already_ published top scientific papers. Making 10X more competitive will turn up the pressure even more. Ex: More funding. Competing is hard. CS PhD programs, with assuming occasional well-paid CS internships, having slightly-below-median salaries. Definitely tough for those with families, but the rest can easily come out with savings even in the highest COL areas. So the real issue is opportunity cost when competing with FAANG etc (which grad students would be able to get into). I believe > 50% of US PhDs are foreign-born because american cs undergrads know they can work in cool tech envs for more $ and less work by going direct to the great companies courting them before graduation. Competing with FAANG salaries is hard - most professor salaries are below FAANG starting salaries, which is its own problem.

by lumost 4y ago

kergonath 4y ago

> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results. Then science would have a serious problem, because the only way to get things done is to abuse this cheap labour: it is much easier to get funding for a handful of PhD students or post-docs than for the equivalent in permanent staff. Large research universities would have a very hard time, and the way things work with funding agencies would have to change fundamentally. I am not saying it would be bad, far from it. But in the current system, it’s easier for everybody to go along, so changing things will be hard. It does not depend on individual behaviours. OTOH, I think that overall it is good to have PhDs going out and do stuff in unrelated fields. A PhD is still a wonderful way of broadening your horizons. We’d be better having more PhD politicians, for example, instead of lawyers. You can do a lot of things after a doctorate. I think the post-doc trap is much more insidious.

klyrs 4y ago

> If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results. I don't know about that. A 3-10x reduction would mean grad classes of 1-2 students. In the grad classes I took, there was never "dead weight," everybody contributed in study sessions. Even those students who would go on to get tenure were learning from those who wouldn't. I'm not sure professors would even be motivated to teach such small courses. The price of graduate tuition would also go up by that 3-10x factor, so PhDs would be exclusively for the rich. Several of my coworkers have PhDs, as do I. We all bring special skills, and working together, we combine those skills to great effect. None of us are faculty. That's not the only thing you can do with a PhD. Should ta/ra/sessional positions pay a living wage? Absolutely. But don't cut the rest of us out because you don't see our value.

queuebert 4y ago

Instead of reducing the number of trainees, how about we increase the number of faculty positions? Isn't research good for society?

lumost 4y ago
If the latter is possible, then yes - however in a society with a declining population and modest productivity growth increasing the number of faculty positions 3-5x to account for current PhD program capacity is likely infeasible. Even a massive increase in science budgets at the federal level would likely only yield 2x the positions. While Universities could cut administrative bloat to make way for faculty... they are unlikely to do so, and there are few levers to motivate them. With a looming student loan crises, they are likely to be forced to cut budgets significantly sometime in the next 10 years either through inflation or direct cuts. The number of PhD candidates is partially based on the way the federal government cuts grants, at a roughly flat budget the only way to create more faculty positions is to cut PhD student grants. From a very rough perspective, the government could create roughly one career track research position for every ~1.5-2.5 PhD/PostDoc position grants they cut. If you doubled the science budget, then the 3-5x cut would work out as 1.5-3x, However due to the expectation on the number of students each professor has.. doubling the budget in the current system would simply yield the same problem with twice as many people involved.
- queuebert 4y ago
  You make some good points and I agree with your ballpark figures, but you seem very stuck in a status quo mindset. The entire NIH budget is about what we are giving Ukraine in aid. High-frequency trading alone saps billions from the economy. We could easily find money to triple our science expenditures if we wanted to. And yes we'd need to evaluate faculty success differently so that we would no longer require each professor to run a lab of a half dozen grad students in order to have enough publications for tenure. But that's easily doable via a collective decision.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Fair, but we (hopefully) don’t need to fight the Ukraine war every year - and we have many more agencies than the NIH who need science funding. Choosing not to fund the military to support the NIH may directly translate to undesirable geopolitical outcomes.

lmeyerov 4y ago

Agreed with problem, not sure about solution Ex: 10X smaller enrollment. In top programs, most competitive undergraduate applicants have _already_ published top scientific papers. Making 10X more competitive will turn up the pressure even more. Ex: More funding. Competing is hard. CS PhD programs, with assuming occasional well-paid CS internships, having slightly-below-median salaries. Definitely tough for those with families, but the rest can easily come out with savings even in the highest COL areas. So the real issue is opportunity cost when competing with FAANG etc (which grad students would be able to get into). I believe > 50% of US PhDs are foreign-born because american cs undergrads know they can work in cool tech envs for more $ and less work by going direct to the great companies courting them before graduation. Competing with FAANG salaries is hard - most professor salaries are below FAANG starting salaries, which is its own problem.