5 ms·

The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you

52 points by Mistletoe 4y ago

cwoolfe 4y ago
My wife has a PhD. She told me that universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas from other institutions, in order to avoid an institutional echo-chamber.
- clcaev 4y ago
  Being in the same department as your faculty advisor can also be politically challenging.
- AustinDev 4y ago
  That's an interesting excuse but isn't most PhD level academia at least in the United States a pretty big echo-chamber?
  - tensor 4y ago
    No, it's not. Compared to industry, it is very normal to challenge each other in academia. So much so that many people moving from academia to industry are often told they are too "mean" or "aggressive" in meetings because they tend to challenge the status quo thinking too much.
- YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
  Another factor is that if your department's area is hiring for a new position that you might be a good fit for, your P.I. or advisor is likely on the hiring committee. Thus the committee then has to be wary of nepotism and conflicts of interest. When everyone is so incredibly specialized, it turns out that the sub-field you are working in is small.
- skunkworker 4y ago
  Almost all of my CS professors had PhDs from Universities other than the one I received my degree at, but most of them had undergraduate degrees. School 1 (BS) -> School 2 (PhD) -> School 1 (Teaching).
  - tensor 4y ago
    Yes, this is considered ok. It can also be the case that you have School 1 (PhD) -> School 2 (professor) -> School 1 (Professor). But that's still fairly uncommon.
- tensor 4y ago
  I have a PhD, and yes this is exactly the reason Universities don't want to hire their own. It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.
  - jmole 4y ago
    You also don't really want to hire someone who's been completely beholden to another faculty member's whims for the past 5-6 years. That would lead to bad organizational dynamics – you want faculty who see each other as peers.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    I've been tenure track faculty and university departments are the last place I would go to look for a "diversity of thought", I've seen people excellent faculty attempted to be driven out of universities precisely because there thought was too "diverse" for the rest of the faculty. There's also too many counter examples of this I know to believe there is any truth to that statement. The few times I've seen it it's because of how perfectly aligned the candidates thought is with the department (for both good and bad).
    - tensor 4y ago
      Every department has it's own politics and issues, but individual experiences don't mean the whole is wrong and certainly doesn't mean the idea itself is wrong. For example, there was a case at the school I got my PhD at where they hired someone who did their PhD at the school. This person was employed at another school for many years between, and thus it was deemed "ok", but I can tell you that not all professors agreed with it. Unfortunately every system, no matter how well constructed or how ideal the ideas behind it are, is subject to gaming and politics. It would be wonderful to have more techniques to mitigate this sort of corruption, and certainly talking about it and bringing it to light when it happens is one of those techniques.
  - TedShiller 4y ago
    > It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it. If you think universities have diversity of thought you haven’t been to a university in the last few decades
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  This is a white lie at best. I’ve never sat on a hiring committee that cared about diversity of thought.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  MY dad who had a PHD and was a college dean said the same thing years ago. While that may be true but a lot of the universities only seem to recruit professors from a limited number of universities so the feed back loop is still there -Head of the IU econ department gets PHD from Harvard, hires new professor with PHD from Harvard, how is this different?
- cjoelrun 4y ago
  It's mostly an excuse. They're looking for reputation or monetary gain. If you have grants waiting to write a check to an institution or some high individual reputation that the university can claim as their own this excuse of cross-pollination disappears.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas Maybe in her case, but that’s just not true. The whole point of the Internet was to exchange scientific ideas, and that has actually come true - all academics I know share data/ideas online in real-time. Universities are just too cheap to hire as many PhDs as they generate.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  That sounds like the same rationalisation companies use when people quit. "It is good because we don't get inbred ideas". More often than not the person departing has expert competence in the university or company specific systems or social structures, that are of no use somewhere else, and no one recruited from the outside have it.
lowken 4y ago
It amazes me how far down a dark road folks will travel without taking the time to look around and evaluate if they are indeed heading in the correct direction.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Between the sunk-cost fallacy, and how many years both grad students and would-be grad students have spent on the ivory tower's propaganda treadmill, with little other (adult) life experience to be able to objectively judge things...
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    This sounds like a fantasy description of a post doc instead of normal real life people, so... maybe talk to some post-docs and learn what their life is really like before putting down entire groups of people for an internet point?
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  However small the number, some people believe that the correct direction isn't copying others' path to success.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  Young people are ambitious and believe the odds don't apply. Academia is no different than other highly variable status-seeking paths, such as entrepreneurship or sports. Different personal values, same basic combination of youthful idealism and hubris. The west would atrophy and die if everyone took the path of least resistance to a comfortable lifestyle. Market economies with perfectly rational actors would cannibalize themselves in a single generation.
sigstoat 4y ago
every department produces more PhDs than it has openings every year. they'll all hire the best they can. most universities don't produce the best.
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  “The best” here is measured by reputational vibes—not research value added.
  - sigstoat 4y ago
    sure. i'm not attempting to describe the metric, just asserting that they all use basically the same metric, and have the same goal. there'd be less of a "problem" if a decent fraction of schools used different metrics, or had different goals.
fein 4y ago
Similarly, the best way to get a promotion in a university is to leave for a new job for a year or two then apply for a higher level job at said university.
- smelendez 4y ago
  Best way to get a promotion in many organizations!
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
PhD students are mostly cheap labor to carry out research for faculty. It's not a feeder to a faculty job. Most of them are immigrants who view it as a way to get into the USA, and so its a worthy trade off. Its like in investment banking where analysts are hired to crunch numbers and make powerpoints. Banks hire analysts that have the proper training for those duties, knowing they don't have the potential to rise up the ranks and will be kicked out in a few years. Banking analysts/associates and Banking higher ups are then actually two separate careers. Academia is basically the same
- secabeen 4y ago
  This may be the case in the sciences and engineering, but is much less so in the humanities and the social sciences. They are very different situations.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    It's different but the same, in the sense that your primary occupation is PhDing, you aren't paid well, and the most obvious pathway to reasonable employment is joining some faculty. In the humanities, social sciences, and sometimes math, it's mostly teaching instead of research. The students are paid a bit worse (usually). The overall deal is a bit better because a TAship really can be a part-time job if you work efficiently and don't "care too much". Of course that also means the research work is unpaid. Whereas the type of research work done by most STEM PhDs is more like a 40 hr work week on top of occasional TAing, so the overall deal is worse but at least you're being paid for the thing that can get you a decent job afterwards. Different tradeoffs. It's really the applied/clinical life/health sciences, education, and a few other "professional pathway" fields that work much differently. Most people getting those degrees aren't interested in TT faculty positions and are working a full-time or part-time "grown up" job outside of the university, so the power dynamics and expectations are quite a bit different.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  The comparison to banking/consulting is bad for a few of reasons: 1. Analysts and consultants make very decent livings. Spending your mid 20s as a banking analyst/associate is a very nice life for someone in their 20s. PhD programs barely pay a living wage, and in large cities simply don't pay a living wage. 2. When deciding whether a lottery is worth playing, you are looking at both probabilities and outcomes. You covered the probability aspect well -- that's the similarity between banking and professoring. The massive difference between the two is in the outcome. Banking higher ups have won a lottery that is worth winning. Professors, on the other hand, max out just above FAANG entry-level wages. Even then, it's only after decade+ of top-decile performance. 3. You might counter #2 with things like "work-life balance", "lifestyle job", "job security", and so on. None of these are true anymore. 3a. Universities are run by middle managers who are mostly less competent and more petty than their private sector counter-parts. 3b. Moreover, tenure doesn't mean anything. At this point, it's nothing more than a gentleman's agreement with an MBA. I have literally zero doubt that over the next 20 years every single university in the US will go through a round of layoffs that target tenured faculty, and will do so without declaring financial exigency. This already happened at a lot of places during COVID, despite massive bailouts and even at places that increased enrollment without increasing spending ex-headcount. If you got into academic for the stability 30 years ago, your bet was pretty good. These days you'd have to be an idiot or have your head buried under a hundred feet of sand to make the same bet. "Tenure" now is nothing more than "continued expectation of future employment"; i.e., it's the only "normal" job in an industrial sector (edu) where the majority of employment contracts are not only at-will but even come with with your dismissal date attached (post-docs and even phd students). Can you imagine working at a software company but they tell you up-front they will have to fire you in 3 years? And also only pay $55K? LOL. When push comes to shove, in most modern faculty constracts, there isn't that much of a substantive difference between "tenure" and "at-will". 4. The glide-path out of a STEM PhD is usually at least as lucrative than out of an unsuccessful analyst position, but the scars of poverty make it feel like an insanely lucky success. I've seen 32 year olds with Mathematics PhDs cry because they get a job doing nothing related to their PhD but that pays the same amount that their students are making at their first job out of undergraduate. So, I think a PhD in a technical subject can still make sense, but there's no rational reason to be an R1 faculty member outside of a teaching track. Well, except one: "massive ego that can't play well enough with others to hack it in the private sector". And that's certainly who you'll find yourself surrounded by if you choose that route.
thebooktocome 4y ago
Higher education is just paradoxes all the way down. Public universities funded with taxpayer dollars that take primarily out-of-state and international students. Too good to recruit from local high schools. Professors hired supposedly for their merit as researchers, chained to massive teaching loads with little autonomy. Adjuncts. Just, everything about adjuncts. Journals too prestigious to give permanent access either to the public who ultimately funded the research, or the academics who did the work, or even the other academics who reviewed that work for free. It all sucks. We desperately need a new model. But the sunken cost of the current system and the perverse incentives keeping it afloat are too great.
- csh0 4y ago
  Public schools generally charge much more for non-residents (between 2x and 4x more in my experience) in part because of the reason you describe, not having contributed to the tax base which funded the school. Students whose parents maintain domicile in another state (or another country) are generally considered by the school to be residents of that place for tuition purposes and thus not able to access the, much cheaper, in-state tuition. Do you have any statistics on public schools which enroll a majority of international students? With a cursory search, the highest I found was UC Davis with 16% [0]. UC Davis charges, for undergrad, 14k~ for resident and 44k~ for non-resident. Domestic Non-Californians are eligible for loans and potentially a small number of grants via FAFSA from federal tax pools, as with anywhere else. Generally, only Californian residents are eligible for state and university need-based funding. Most non-citizens, such as those who are undocumented, are not eligible for FAFSA.[1] It seems more likely to me that these students, given how much more they pay, contribute to a reduced tax burden for tax payers on the whole. Not to mention the economic benefits from them buying housing, food, beer, etc. In the area where they live while in school. [0] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/most-international https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive... [1] https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requirements/non-us-citizens https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requiremen...
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  FYI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1 For what its worth, I've always received a favorable response when I email the author to received a private copy of their paper.
feintruled 4y ago
The title confused me - I think the 'it' is ambiguous. It refers to the school not the PhD. So I think the meaning is "The school that grants your PhD thinks that PhD is not good enough to hire you".
clcaev 4y ago
This article incorrectly asserts intent or bias. In most fields the number of graduates is much, much larger than job openings. This creates a very competitive marketplace. Consequently, most graduates will not find a faculty position; and for those that do, most will be at less prestigious institutions.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lot of money and time or you plan on going into teaching. The issue of course is there are not nearly enough teaching positions to employ all the people with PHDs. Further, while a school might have a well respected program it may not have the cache value that a department wants so the positions seem to go to graduates of schools with impressive names. It's kind of funny when a law school wouldn't hire one of their own to avoid inbreeding but the entire department is filled with people from only 3-4 schools who were taught but people from those same 3-4 schools. It's a slightly wider gene pool but inbreeding none the less
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
netfortius 4y ago
When I arrived in the US, over 30 years ago, with a PhD from an Eastern European country, I was advised to not mention it on my resume. Too much school without American experience was (still is?!?) frowned upon, by private businesses, as they were concerned about losing highly educated individuals, once they got "off the ground". Advice worked wonders, and the PhD was eventually used to just skip a few core requirements for a degree in a different field.
kiwih 4y ago
I have a Ph.D. and can build on this in the other direction. As this article accepts in its own statistics, it is entirely possible to move up university rankings, as long as you don't simply rely on the weight of your degree. I started in a non-US university, world rank >250 in CWUR (CWUR [1]). I applied for several post-docs in several universities, getting three offers, and taking one at a US R1 ranked in top 30 in CWUR. After the post-doc, my boss said that I would have been able to go to just about any of the top-top-ranked R1s in my field, but I wanted to look for opportunities outside the USA. Now I have a tenure-track offer at a leading Australian Go8 university (top 120 on CWUR). What you need to remember if you're pursing a career in this area that you need to be _visible_ - this means publishing in the best venues, collaborating with renowned academics, and networking outside your sphere. If you are only pressing for the top 10 unis in America, sure, they can be _very_ selective and can afford to choose from candidates amongst themselves. But there are a lot of universities in the world, and many that are extremely well-regarded. Also: rankings aren't everything. At the tenure-track search level of your career, you should be considering the complete package (work/life balance, salary, students, political climate, proximity to friends and family....) Also as cwoolfe says, there is actually a lot of incentive for universities to hire outside for the diversity of opinions and backgrounds, and as clcaev also said, you almost don't want to stay at the same university as your advisor for political reasons (you should be able to show you can operate outside their direct sphere of influence). [1] https://cwur.org/ https://cwur.org/
yummypaint 4y ago
If you receive a PhD from a university department, that department will think that it is too good to hire you as a faculty member. Instead, they lust after faculty hires holding degrees more prestigious than the one that they bestowed upon you. This tells me the author has no knowledge of the academic hiring processes. Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything. If you're trying for a liberal arts school, then your research needs to be compatible with involving undergrads, and they care alot about your record as an instructor. Professors all know how the PhD sausage is made, and are the group of people least likely to be impressed by prestige. They will just look up your actual thesis and critique it instead of relying on the halo effect.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I agree on the publication record. But the school you go to has a huge effect on your ability to publish. This is well documented. Go to top PhD program -> publish top journal easier -> attain tenure track job. It all comes down to prestige in the end. This is aside from very hard sciences where true ground breaking results cannot be ignored.
  - yummypaint 4y ago
    Most publications these days have many authors. Your first papers are published with your advisor and other collaborators, and that establishes your history of publishing on the topic in good journals. Also, peer reviewers don't know or care which school your degree came from.
  - yxwvut 4y ago
    Even in things like applied math, it's pretty arbitrary which assumptions and formulations become standardized when tackling similar problems (and it usually comes down to the effects of prestige on your network/ 'reach': the more prominent people you get your ideas in front of, the more likely your work is to become the 'state of the art' default approach, and the more prestigious your university (and the professors you collaborate with), the easier it is to get your ideas in front of important people.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bell-cot 4y ago
It's probably been decades since I last talked with an academic insider about the Ph.D. career track...but both the article and the responses here seem to assume that Ph.D's will graduate, get hired by $University_Name, then spend their career there. Vs. I'd heard that the ambitious and intelligent Ph.D's career track was closer to: #1) get a first job that's respectable, but mostly supports your early research efforts #2) after showing yourself a promising young researcher at that job, get serious about looking for a better job #3) iterate #2 until you have a good-enough job & security so that settling down & staying makes sense to you
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I’ve always wondered, because whenever I see people talk about PhDs they talk as if the only thing to do with them is to sit in academia for the rest of your life, but I see industry research jobs all the time that want a PhD. Why is that not an option?
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    It depends enormously on the subject you get a PhD in. Some niche corner of physics, which happens to critical for EUV chip fabrication? Vs. the plays of Sophocles (ancient Greek playwright, lived ~2,400 year ago)?
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      Or even some other niche corner of physics which happens to not be particularly useful to anyone who thinks they can use it to get either money or better weapons :)
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    It's absolutely an option in certain types of life sciences, subfields of Computer Science & Engineering that aren't overly ossified/theoretical, and some fields of Mathematics. Outside of those categories, things get bleak quickly.
YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
General note: up until 1994, there was no law barring universities requiring faculty to retire after a certain age [0], [1]. In other countries, it is not uncommon to have a mandatory retirement age for public servants. The effect of the federal ban on mandatory retirement ages for professors changed the academic job market in a pretty profound way: there used to be a greater and more reliable number of job openings in every field. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ [1] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/12/27/graying_of_us_academia_stirs_debate/ http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/12/27/gr...
greenthrow 4y ago
This is an extremely low quality anti-academic article. I've noticed this Big Think organization seems to vacillate between trying to put on a veneer of intellectual respectability and diving headfirst into pushing pure drivel like this article. Even the times they try to be better aren't very good.
tabbott 4y ago
I think this article really misunderstands the structure of academia. The paper looks to have done a bunch of data collection, which is great; but the results could be predicted without collecting any data at all. Structurally, if the average professor graduates 10 students over the course of their career, half of which go to industry, then an institution with a given prestige level will send 5x as many graduates to academia as it has slots to hire professors. So just from pure statistics, if everyone is trying to hire for new faculty jobs PhDs from the most prestigious institutions, one should expect the average PhD graduate who goes into academic to get a job at an institution about 5x less prestigious (one a percentage basis) as the one where they got their PhD. (Hiring is of course more complicated than that, but I think you don't need to make a lot of assumptions about the professor hiring process explain the data in the article). It's not exactly a pyramid scheme design; there was significant growth in the total number of professor jobs, due to population growth and increasing college attendance rates. And in many fields, there exists high demand for PhDs for work in both industry and government research labs. But these statistics mean that only top schools have the option for a large portion of PhD graduates to get professorships... And I don't think there's any realistic reform that academia could make to change this reality.
- tabbott 4y ago
  I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field. But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach. But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.
hnbear 4y ago
More focused on Arts than a lot of the discussion below, which is more STEMmy (not surprising given this is HN), but there’s a good acoup.blog post discussing the PhD process: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... Bret’s posts are on HN often enough I think his input is valuable. Particularly relevant to the discussion on hiring chances: “But what the data shows here is that outside of the top 10-or-so programs in a field, the chances of being hired are effectively nil.”
lerch 4y ago
The main argument of the articles is based on the assumption that PhD graduates are equally qualified for faculty positions regardless of their university. While I agree that a most brilliant candidate can come from a university that is not top-ranked, and that a bad candidate can come from a top-ranked university, I do believe that application profiles of faculty candidates from a prestigious university tend to look more compelling on average, and not only because of the name of the institution.

52 points by Mistletoe 4y ago

My wife has a PhD. She told me that universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas from other institutions, in order to avoid an institutional echo-chamber.

clcaev 4y ago
Being in the same department as your faculty advisor can also be politically challenging.
AustinDev 4y ago
That's an interesting excuse but isn't most PhD level academia at least in the United States a pretty big echo-chamber?
- tensor 4y ago
  No, it's not. Compared to industry, it is very normal to challenge each other in academia. So much so that many people moving from academia to industry are often told they are too "mean" or "aggressive" in meetings because they tend to challenge the status quo thinking too much.
YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
Another factor is that if your department's area is hiring for a new position that you might be a good fit for, your P.I. or advisor is likely on the hiring committee. Thus the committee then has to be wary of nepotism and conflicts of interest. When everyone is so incredibly specialized, it turns out that the sub-field you are working in is small.
skunkworker 4y ago
Almost all of my CS professors had PhDs from Universities other than the one I received my degree at, but most of them had undergraduate degrees. School 1 (BS) -> School 2 (PhD) -> School 1 (Teaching).
- tensor 4y ago
  Yes, this is considered ok. It can also be the case that you have School 1 (PhD) -> School 2 (professor) -> School 1 (Professor). But that's still fairly uncommon.
tensor 4y ago
I have a PhD, and yes this is exactly the reason Universities don't want to hire their own. It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.
- jmole 4y ago
  You also don't really want to hire someone who's been completely beholden to another faculty member's whims for the past 5-6 years. That would lead to bad organizational dynamics – you want faculty who see each other as peers.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  I've been tenure track faculty and university departments are the last place I would go to look for a "diversity of thought", I've seen people excellent faculty attempted to be driven out of universities precisely because there thought was too "diverse" for the rest of the faculty. There's also too many counter examples of this I know to believe there is any truth to that statement. The few times I've seen it it's because of how perfectly aligned the candidates thought is with the department (for both good and bad).
  - tensor 4y ago
    Every department has it's own politics and issues, but individual experiences don't mean the whole is wrong and certainly doesn't mean the idea itself is wrong. For example, there was a case at the school I got my PhD at where they hired someone who did their PhD at the school. This person was employed at another school for many years between, and thus it was deemed "ok", but I can tell you that not all professors agreed with it. Unfortunately every system, no matter how well constructed or how ideal the ideas behind it are, is subject to gaming and politics. It would be wonderful to have more techniques to mitigate this sort of corruption, and certainly talking about it and bringing it to light when it happens is one of those techniques.
- TedShiller 4y ago
  > It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it. If you think universities have diversity of thought you haven’t been to a university in the last few decades
thebooktocome 4y ago
This is a white lie at best. I’ve never sat on a hiring committee that cared about diversity of thought.
screwturner68 4y ago
MY dad who had a PHD and was a college dean said the same thing years ago. While that may be true but a lot of the universities only seem to recruit professors from a limited number of universities so the feed back loop is still there -Head of the IU econ department gets PHD from Harvard, hires new professor with PHD from Harvard, how is this different?
cjoelrun 4y ago
It's mostly an excuse. They're looking for reputation or monetary gain. If you have grants waiting to write a check to an institution or some high individual reputation that the university can claim as their own this excuse of cross-pollination disappears.
yunohn 4y ago
> universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas Maybe in her case, but that’s just not true. The whole point of the Internet was to exchange scientific ideas, and that has actually come true - all academics I know share data/ideas online in real-time. Universities are just too cheap to hire as many PhDs as they generate.
rightbyte 4y ago
That sounds like the same rationalisation companies use when people quit. "It is good because we don't get inbred ideas". More often than not the person departing has expert competence in the university or company specific systems or social structures, that are of no use somewhere else, and no one recruited from the outside have it.

lowken 4y ago

It amazes me how far down a dark road folks will travel without taking the time to look around and evaluate if they are indeed heading in the correct direction.

bell-cot 4y ago
Between the sunk-cost fallacy, and how many years both grad students and would-be grad students have spent on the ivory tower's propaganda treadmill, with little other (adult) life experience to be able to objectively judge things...
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  This sounds like a fantasy description of a post doc instead of normal real life people, so... maybe talk to some post-docs and learn what their life is really like before putting down entire groups of people for an internet point?
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
However small the number, some people believe that the correct direction isn't copying others' path to success.
thwayunion 4y ago
Young people are ambitious and believe the odds don't apply. Academia is no different than other highly variable status-seeking paths, such as entrepreneurship or sports. Different personal values, same basic combination of youthful idealism and hubris. The west would atrophy and die if everyone took the path of least resistance to a comfortable lifestyle. Market economies with perfectly rational actors would cannibalize themselves in a single generation.

sigstoat 4y ago

every department produces more PhDs than it has openings every year. they'll all hire the best they can. most universities don't produce the best.

thebooktocome 4y ago
“The best” here is measured by reputational vibes—not research value added.
- sigstoat 4y ago
  sure. i'm not attempting to describe the metric, just asserting that they all use basically the same metric, and have the same goal. there'd be less of a "problem" if a decent fraction of schools used different metrics, or had different goals.

fein 4y ago

Similarly, the best way to get a promotion in a university is to leave for a new job for a year or two then apply for a higher level job at said university.

smelendez 4y ago
Best way to get a promotion in many organizations!

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

PhD students are mostly cheap labor to carry out research for faculty. It's not a feeder to a faculty job. Most of them are immigrants who view it as a way to get into the USA, and so its a worthy trade off. Its like in investment banking where analysts are hired to crunch numbers and make powerpoints. Banks hire analysts that have the proper training for those duties, knowing they don't have the potential to rise up the ranks and will be kicked out in a few years. Banking analysts/associates and Banking higher ups are then actually two separate careers. Academia is basically the same

secabeen 4y ago
This may be the case in the sciences and engineering, but is much less so in the humanities and the social sciences. They are very different situations.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  It's different but the same, in the sense that your primary occupation is PhDing, you aren't paid well, and the most obvious pathway to reasonable employment is joining some faculty. In the humanities, social sciences, and sometimes math, it's mostly teaching instead of research. The students are paid a bit worse (usually). The overall deal is a bit better because a TAship really can be a part-time job if you work efficiently and don't "care too much". Of course that also means the research work is unpaid. Whereas the type of research work done by most STEM PhDs is more like a 40 hr work week on top of occasional TAing, so the overall deal is worse but at least you're being paid for the thing that can get you a decent job afterwards. Different tradeoffs. It's really the applied/clinical life/health sciences, education, and a few other "professional pathway" fields that work much differently. Most people getting those degrees aren't interested in TT faculty positions and are working a full-time or part-time "grown up" job outside of the university, so the power dynamics and expectations are quite a bit different.
thwayunion 4y ago
The comparison to banking/consulting is bad for a few of reasons: 1. Analysts and consultants make very decent livings. Spending your mid 20s as a banking analyst/associate is a very nice life for someone in their 20s. PhD programs barely pay a living wage, and in large cities simply don't pay a living wage. 2. When deciding whether a lottery is worth playing, you are looking at both probabilities and outcomes. You covered the probability aspect well -- that's the similarity between banking and professoring. The massive difference between the two is in the outcome. Banking higher ups have won a lottery that is worth winning. Professors, on the other hand, max out just above FAANG entry-level wages. Even then, it's only after decade+ of top-decile performance. 3. You might counter #2 with things like "work-life balance", "lifestyle job", "job security", and so on. None of these are true anymore. 3a. Universities are run by middle managers who are mostly less competent and more petty than their private sector counter-parts. 3b. Moreover, tenure doesn't mean anything. At this point, it's nothing more than a gentleman's agreement with an MBA. I have literally zero doubt that over the next 20 years every single university in the US will go through a round of layoffs that target tenured faculty, and will do so without declaring financial exigency. This already happened at a lot of places during COVID, despite massive bailouts and even at places that increased enrollment without increasing spending ex-headcount. If you got into academic for the stability 30 years ago, your bet was pretty good. These days you'd have to be an idiot or have your head buried under a hundred feet of sand to make the same bet. "Tenure" now is nothing more than "continued expectation of future employment"; i.e., it's the only "normal" job in an industrial sector (edu) where the majority of employment contracts are not only at-will but even come with with your dismissal date attached (post-docs and even phd students). Can you imagine working at a software company but they tell you up-front they will have to fire you in 3 years? And also only pay $55K? LOL. When push comes to shove, in most modern faculty constracts, there isn't that much of a substantive difference between "tenure" and "at-will". 4. The glide-path out of a STEM PhD is usually at least as lucrative than out of an unsuccessful analyst position, but the scars of poverty make it feel like an insanely lucky success. I've seen 32 year olds with Mathematics PhDs cry because they get a job doing nothing related to their PhD but that pays the same amount that their students are making at their first job out of undergraduate. So, I think a PhD in a technical subject can still make sense, but there's no rational reason to be an R1 faculty member outside of a teaching track. Well, except one: "massive ego that can't play well enough with others to hack it in the private sector". And that's certainly who you'll find yourself surrounded by if you choose that route.

thebooktocome 4y ago

Higher education is just paradoxes all the way down. Public universities funded with taxpayer dollars that take primarily out-of-state and international students. Too good to recruit from local high schools. Professors hired supposedly for their merit as researchers, chained to massive teaching loads with little autonomy. Adjuncts. Just, everything about adjuncts. Journals too prestigious to give permanent access either to the public who ultimately funded the research, or the academics who did the work, or even the other academics who reviewed that work for free. It all sucks. We desperately need a new model. But the sunken cost of the current system and the perverse incentives keeping it afloat are too great.

csh0 4y ago
Public schools generally charge much more for non-residents (between 2x and 4x more in my experience) in part because of the reason you describe, not having contributed to the tax base which funded the school. Students whose parents maintain domicile in another state (or another country) are generally considered by the school to be residents of that place for tuition purposes and thus not able to access the, much cheaper, in-state tuition. Do you have any statistics on public schools which enroll a majority of international students? With a cursory search, the highest I found was UC Davis with 16% [0]. UC Davis charges, for undergrad, 14k~ for resident and 44k~ for non-resident. Domestic Non-Californians are eligible for loans and potentially a small number of grants via FAFSA from federal tax pools, as with anywhere else. Generally, only Californian residents are eligible for state and university need-based funding. Most non-citizens, such as those who are undocumented, are not eligible for FAFSA.[1] It seems more likely to me that these students, given how much more they pay, contribute to a reduced tax burden for tax payers on the whole. Not to mention the economic benefits from them buying housing, food, beer, etc. In the area where they live while in school. [0] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/most-international https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive... [1] https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requirements/non-us-citizens https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requiremen...
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
FYI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1 For what its worth, I've always received a favorable response when I email the author to received a private copy of their paper.

feintruled 4y ago

The title confused me - I think the 'it' is ambiguous. It refers to the school not the PhD. So I think the meaning is "The school that grants your PhD thinks that PhD is not good enough to hire you".

clcaev 4y ago

This article incorrectly asserts intent or bias. In most fields the number of graduates is much, much larger than job openings. This creates a very competitive marketplace. Consequently, most graduates will not find a faculty position; and for those that do, most will be at less prestigious institutions.

screwturner68 4y ago
It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lot of money and time or you plan on going into teaching. The issue of course is there are not nearly enough teaching positions to employ all the people with PHDs. Further, while a school might have a well respected program it may not have the cache value that a department wants so the positions seem to go to graduates of schools with impressive names. It's kind of funny when a law school wouldn't hire one of their own to avoid inbreeding but the entire department is filled with people from only 3-4 schools who were taught but people from those same 3-4 schools. It's a slightly wider gene pool but inbreeding none the less
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

netfortius 4y ago

When I arrived in the US, over 30 years ago, with a PhD from an Eastern European country, I was advised to not mention it on my resume. Too much school without American experience was (still is?!?) frowned upon, by private businesses, as they were concerned about losing highly educated individuals, once they got "off the ground". Advice worked wonders, and the PhD was eventually used to just skip a few core requirements for a degree in a different field.

kiwih 4y ago

I have a Ph.D. and can build on this in the other direction. As this article accepts in its own statistics, it is entirely possible to move up university rankings, as long as you don't simply rely on the weight of your degree. I started in a non-US university, world rank >250 in CWUR (CWUR [1]). I applied for several post-docs in several universities, getting three offers, and taking one at a US R1 ranked in top 30 in CWUR. After the post-doc, my boss said that I would have been able to go to just about any of the top-top-ranked R1s in my field, but I wanted to look for opportunities outside the USA. Now I have a tenure-track offer at a leading Australian Go8 university (top 120 on CWUR). What you need to remember if you're pursing a career in this area that you need to be _visible_ - this means publishing in the best venues, collaborating with renowned academics, and networking outside your sphere. If you are only pressing for the top 10 unis in America, sure, they can be _very_ selective and can afford to choose from candidates amongst themselves. But there are a lot of universities in the world, and many that are extremely well-regarded. Also: rankings aren't everything. At the tenure-track search level of your career, you should be considering the complete package (work/life balance, salary, students, political climate, proximity to friends and family....) Also as cwoolfe says, there is actually a lot of incentive for universities to hire outside for the diversity of opinions and backgrounds, and as clcaev also said, you almost don't want to stay at the same university as your advisor for political reasons (you should be able to show you can operate outside their direct sphere of influence). [1] https://cwur.org/ https://cwur.org/

yummypaint 4y ago

If you receive a PhD from a university department, that department will think that it is too good to hire you as a faculty member. Instead, they lust after faculty hires holding degrees more prestigious than the one that they bestowed upon you. This tells me the author has no knowledge of the academic hiring processes. Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything. If you're trying for a liberal arts school, then your research needs to be compatible with involving undergrads, and they care alot about your record as an instructor. Professors all know how the PhD sausage is made, and are the group of people least likely to be impressed by prestige. They will just look up your actual thesis and critique it instead of relying on the halo effect.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I agree on the publication record. But the school you go to has a huge effect on your ability to publish. This is well documented. Go to top PhD program -> publish top journal easier -> attain tenure track job. It all comes down to prestige in the end. This is aside from very hard sciences where true ground breaking results cannot be ignored.
- yummypaint 4y ago
  Most publications these days have many authors. Your first papers are published with your advisor and other collaborators, and that establishes your history of publishing on the topic in good journals. Also, peer reviewers don't know or care which school your degree came from.
- yxwvut 4y ago
  Even in things like applied math, it's pretty arbitrary which assumptions and formulations become standardized when tackling similar problems (and it usually comes down to the effects of prestige on your network/ 'reach': the more prominent people you get your ideas in front of, the more likely your work is to become the 'state of the art' default approach, and the more prestigious your university (and the professors you collaborate with), the easier it is to get your ideas in front of important people.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bell-cot 4y ago

It's probably been decades since I last talked with an academic insider about the Ph.D. career track...but both the article and the responses here seem to assume that Ph.D's will graduate, get hired by $University_Name, then spend their career there. Vs. I'd heard that the ambitious and intelligent Ph.D's career track was closer to: #1) get a first job that's respectable, but mostly supports your early research efforts #2) after showing yourself a promising young researcher at that job, get serious about looking for a better job #3) iterate #2 until you have a good-enough job & security so that settling down & staying makes sense to you

the_only_law 4y ago
I’ve always wondered, because whenever I see people talk about PhDs they talk as if the only thing to do with them is to sit in academia for the rest of your life, but I see industry research jobs all the time that want a PhD. Why is that not an option?
- bell-cot 4y ago
  It depends enormously on the subject you get a PhD in. Some niche corner of physics, which happens to critical for EUV chip fabrication? Vs. the plays of Sophocles (ancient Greek playwright, lived ~2,400 year ago)?
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    Or even some other niche corner of physics which happens to not be particularly useful to anyone who thinks they can use it to get either money or better weapons :)
- thwayunion 4y ago
  It's absolutely an option in certain types of life sciences, subfields of Computer Science & Engineering that aren't overly ossified/theoretical, and some fields of Mathematics. Outside of those categories, things get bleak quickly.

YossarianFrPrez 4y ago

General note: up until 1994, there was no law barring universities requiring faculty to retire after a certain age [0], [1]. In other countries, it is not uncommon to have a mandatory retirement age for public servants. The effect of the federal ban on mandatory retirement ages for professors changed the academic job market in a pretty profound way: there used to be a greater and more reliable number of job openings in every field. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ [1] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/12/27/graying_of_us_academia_stirs_debate/ http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/12/27/gr...

greenthrow 4y ago

This is an extremely low quality anti-academic article. I've noticed this Big Think organization seems to vacillate between trying to put on a veneer of intellectual respectability and diving headfirst into pushing pure drivel like this article. Even the times they try to be better aren't very good.

tabbott 4y ago

I think this article really misunderstands the structure of academia. The paper looks to have done a bunch of data collection, which is great; but the results could be predicted without collecting any data at all. Structurally, if the average professor graduates 10 students over the course of their career, half of which go to industry, then an institution with a given prestige level will send 5x as many graduates to academia as it has slots to hire professors. So just from pure statistics, if everyone is trying to hire for new faculty jobs PhDs from the most prestigious institutions, one should expect the average PhD graduate who goes into academic to get a job at an institution about 5x less prestigious (one a percentage basis) as the one where they got their PhD. (Hiring is of course more complicated than that, but I think you don't need to make a lot of assumptions about the professor hiring process explain the data in the article). It's not exactly a pyramid scheme design; there was significant growth in the total number of professor jobs, due to population growth and increasing college attendance rates. And in many fields, there exists high demand for PhDs for work in both industry and government research labs. But these statistics mean that only top schools have the option for a large portion of PhD graduates to get professorships... And I don't think there's any realistic reform that academia could make to change this reality.

tabbott 4y ago
I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field. But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach. But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.

hnbear 4y ago

More focused on Arts than a lot of the discussion below, which is more STEMmy (not surprising given this is HN), but there’s a good acoup.blog post discussing the PhD process: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... Bret’s posts are on HN often enough I think his input is valuable. Particularly relevant to the discussion on hiring chances: “But what the data shows here is that outside of the top 10-or-so programs in a field, the chances of being hired are effectively nil.”

lerch 4y ago

The main argument of the articles is based on the assumption that PhD graduates are equally qualified for faculty positions regardless of their university. While I agree that a most brilliant candidate can come from a university that is not top-ranked, and that a bad candidate can come from a top-ranked university, I do believe that application profiles of faculty candidates from a prestigious university tend to look more compelling on average, and not only because of the name of the institution.