17 ms·

Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

• zkmon 2y ago
  What's the point in advancing thinking-based skills, when thinking has been successfully outsourced? What's the point of colleges, universities and research?
• WhatsName 2y ago
  Blaming "High living costs" is like blaming the victim of a theft for carrying something of value in the first place. Come on use the words that are actually plaguing PhD programs, exploitation of cheap labor and minimum pay for working endless hours
  • varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
  • nh23423fefe 2y ago
    "entering into a work contract is theft" what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything
    • smallmancontrov 2y ago
      > it isn't valuable Science is the quintessential example of high-value work with poor value-capture characteristics, and is often used in econ classes as an example of where the "captured value = value" approximation breaks down.
• kome 2y ago
  it's a huge waste of life time, family life and money; but it can be fun if you are a no-life, or a Billy no-mates on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  The simple answer is they have low market value and aren’t a good investment for anyone - the student or the nation. Yes we need some researchers but not as many as we train.
  • spamizbad 2y ago
    They have a high market value outside of academia. Inside academia though they are all underpaid and overworked, and the modern version of “tenure” might carry prestige but it doesn’t carry the privilege it once did.
  • krisbolton 2y ago
    I think it is valuable to the nation, some subjects are arguably more or less valuable, but its about talent at a macro level. If a nation doesn't invest in talent through PhD funding, talented people can and do go elsewhere, work in a diferent economy, contribute to a different society. Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.
  • rhines 2y ago
    I think there is some inherent value to PhDs in general. Even the ones commonly looked down upon as frivolous here, even the ones with little to no economic benefit. The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding. So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different. Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.
• asabjorn 2y ago
  If you are high skill enough to do a PhD in anything meaningful, why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted? An american has even less incentive, as the reward of a work permit is not on the other side. Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
  • novia 2y ago
    Often private companies list a PhD as a requirement for research roles
    • rs186 2y ago
      There are very few of such roles. Of course PhD is often an advantage when it comes to job application and promotion, but outside very specific roles (think about OpenAI looking for a PhD in LLMs, or Intel looking for a PhD in certain engineering fields), it's more often a nice-to-have.
      • juniperus 2y ago
        maybe in CS, but if you have a PhD in a STEM field, you're not going to be looking at a wasteland in private industry for jobs that demand a PhD. Good luck getting a job running a big firm's private research lab without a PhD, and tens of thousands of companies demand that PhD. Chemistry PhD? what company doesn't need one of them, if not dozens. Materials science? yeah, you are going to be finding lots of companies that want their product development team run by someone holding a PhD at least. BioTech and Pharma aren't being run by people who just have a bachelor's, and there are over 10,000 private pharmaceutical research labs. Even your Wonder Bread has more than one food science PhD behind the scenes working on it. Any random big agribusiness alone is going to expect you have a PhD in crop science to conduct trials for pesticide development, and they're going to want a chemistry PhD to help develop the formulation, and an entomology PhD to investigate the effect their product has on insect biology, a soil science PhD to study the effect on soil, biochem PhD, biotech PhD, all sorts of engineering PhDs, probably some statistics/math PhDs... Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.
• _hark 2y ago
  Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious. Very few true eccentrics left.
  • rhines 2y ago
    I can't speak for other fields, but this does seem true of computer science. I worked in a university lab for a couple years and knew many PhD students, and most of them were most interested in leveraging the PhD to make more money in industry. I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.
    • glial 2y ago
      > industry setting unrealistic requirements for education This sounds like a market dynamic to me. If it were difficult to find qualified candidates, requirements would be lowered. Just leaving this here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
      • tomrod 2y ago
        Fantastic thought. Though I think economic signaling theory shows the bottoms-up motivator. Certainly in the US, the GI Bill lead to a decreased value for high school diplomas for the median graduate. This doesn't mean it wasn't the right idea for the time, just that it's caused a lot of crowding out. I feel like the Elite Overproduction is a good post hoc descriptive theory but missing the why.
      • derbOac 2y ago
        Overproduction is relative to the system under consideration. If you set up a system in a certain way, almost all labor can be overproduced. To take an extreme rhetorical example: if slavery is allowed, human capitol becomes ridiculously cheap and you can say labor is overproduced.
• Empact 2y ago
  Distinctions only hold esteem over time if they are worthy of it. The last two PhD’s that crossed my feed had dissertations on “The Architecture of Whiteness” https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377 https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377 And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561 https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561 If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.
  • croissants 2y ago
    > If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off Also, circulating particularly weird dissertations for the express purpose of angering people has gotten a lot more rewarding
    • Empact 2y ago
      “Pay no attention to that canary, this coal mine is perfectly fine”
      • bowsamic 2y ago
        The canaries you posted are thriving
  • brendoelfrendo 2y ago
    That Politics of Smell thesis is actually pretty great, I'm sorry you couldn't get past the title. Frankly, dragging Dr. Louks, who's already explained her thesis and how it was written after it blew up in certain online circles, tells me you didn't actually think that deeply on what she was trying to say. Probably means that the Architecture of Whiteness paper is worth a look, though, so thanks for the unintentional recommendation.
    • Empact 2y ago
      What did you learn from the Politics of Smell thesis?
• blululu 2y ago
  The article cites a trend without providing any real facts or information for understanding the topic. I.E. which field are seeing growth and which are seeing contraction. It's a bunch of vague guesses at the cause like 'cost of living' without ever to find and present any facts that could validate whether such hypotheses are actually true. Consider the most common phd is in education, we could easily see a decline in doctors of education and not realize that chemistry phds rose 4%. The effect of the change are very different in this scenario than 4% reduction in fundamental research.
• searine 2y ago
  Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves. PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs. The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.
  • Gimpei 2y ago
    Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you know there is nothing for them at the end of the tunnel.
    • searine 2y ago
      >According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862 It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.
      • some_random 2y ago
• comrade1234 2y ago
  Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program. Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
  • mp05 2y ago
    > Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program. > Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists. So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part
    • damiante 2y ago
      Correlation does not imply causation (but it does stare at it from across the room and suggestively waggle its eyebrows)
  • vvpan 2y ago
    Renaissance Technologies is a very successful hedge fund that almost exclusively hires PhD's to do the coding, no matter what field.
    • WorkerBee28474 2y ago
      I believe RenTech only hires from highly numerical fields. E.g. math, physics, compsci. They also employ <100 PhDs. The entire company is small. Might not be worth mentioning as an employed because the chance of getting in is miniscule.
  • currymj 2y ago
    their collapse didn't have anything to do with computer systems failing though. they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.
    • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• jszymborski 2y ago
  As is typical on HN, most comments are about how PhDs are of little value or how academia is not what it once was, whereas the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > how PhDs are of little value I see this as being the same as > the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments. Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position. Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.
    • jszymborski 2y ago
      Even if we define "value" strictly in monetary terms (which is a deeply bleak outlook, but nevertheless) PhDs can be at once of great value and also out of reach for those without the access to the debt instruments required to pay for it. Of course, much like life has value outside of the monetary, PhDs are a great way to enrich your life if you don't have to financially bury yourself in debt. Notably, this is the case for people who have the good fortune of being born in places with low tuition, like much of Europe and Canada. I pay $4K in tuition and make, after tax, not much less than I was making as a junior machine learning dev.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I meant value as in not being able to achieve other life goals due to the pursuit of a PhD, of which many could be due to insufficient funds due to prospects of low pay and high volatility.
  • pjc50 2y ago
• jlarocco 2y ago
  As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it. It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit. On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
  • belval 2y ago
    > I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit. I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap. It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.
  • mateo411 2y ago
    > Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out My sense is you might get paid when you start what an undergraduate makes after one year and a pay raise. Your career will probably develop faster than the person who started working after undergrad. Your ceiling is likely hire. I don't have a PhD, but this is what I've observed.
  • nluken 2y ago
    A PhD isn't like a MBA which is meant mostly for the credential and associated pay bump. It's a research degree that you get if you want to work in academia or in a private research lab. If you're evaluating it purely by its economic value, of course it's not going to make sense, but that assessment misses why people pursue these degrees in the first place.
    • sweeter 2y ago
      It also dismisses the effect it has on society entirely. In a sane world, we would enable anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in hopes in advancing things like medical science or our understanding of the world. The fact that people really can only care about the economic value education can bring, and the fact we all act like that's normal, is very radicalizing to me.
• romesmoke 2y ago
  There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective. I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers). Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways. It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me. At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
  • daft_pink 2y ago
    Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.
    • 2y ago
• dakiol 2y ago
  I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years
  • dgacmu 2y ago
    Prior to the new administration I would have pointed out that US CS and engineering Ph.D.s are generally paid with a stipend that's "just enough to live on". There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students. You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.
    • Palomides 2y ago
      I get what you're saying, but "in some places, in some disciplines, you could be at a livable level of poverty" is not a very persuasive point
      • dgacmu 2y ago
        Grad school is a money loser in CS for people from the US. There's no argument. But I did end up having my net worth increase over the course of it, and it was a fantastic experience. In Boston, even - a pretty HCOL area. And in the end, being "rich but less rich than my FAANG friends" isn't the worst outcome. :)
    • naniwaduni 2y ago
• leecarraher 2y ago
  From my experience, there has been a noticeable decline in PhD positions available within academia, likely due to tenure and career longevity, and reduced retirement benefits. As a result, many PhDs are forced into the private sector. However, many organizations have removed middle management layers, making merit based advancement less likely, and instead time becomes the dominating factor. So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.
• jccalhoun 2y ago
  As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.
  • interludead 2y ago
    I totally get the "just hanging on" mindset. A lot of people I know in academia say the same
  • runeblaze 2y ago
    In the US, note that for many foreign students, PhD is a (in many cases, much faster) pathway to permanent residency compared to your standard PERM/H1B things
• morelandjs 2y ago
  The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug. Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
  • BeetleB 2y ago
    I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...? My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
    • whatshisface 2y ago
      Sometimes what you need is less precision, much faster. Carmack's famous inverse square root falls into this category. If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)
      • cjbgkagh 2y ago
        I think Carmack credits someone else as the origin - possibly some magazine entry. These days I think the reciprocal square root intrinsic is the fastest where precision is not that important. I think there was a bit twiddling hack for pop count which was consistently faster than the equivalent cpu intrinsic due to some weird pipelining effect, so sometimes it is possible to beat the compilers and intrinsics with clever hacks.
      • 2y ago
• seanwilson 2y ago
  There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison. Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.
  • Blackthorn 2y ago
    There were tons and tons of distractions during mine. Pressure to publish doesn't just start at postdoc.
  • mccoyb 2y ago
    This is exactly why I decided to go do a PhD from industry.
• axus 2y ago
  The article mentions Australia, Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Were there any counter-examples where the cost of living was supported and PhDs were doing well? I did not register to continue the article.
• neonate 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/3ZtAs https://archive.ph/3ZtAs
• codingwagie 2y ago
  Phds are a scheme for immigration
  • greenchair 2y ago
    and stealing secrets for their home country
  • grandempire 2y ago
    Is nobody going to entertain this? Immigration opportunity is a major motivator for foreign students to get PhDs. And the university likes the cheap and captive labor. What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.
• janalsncm 2y ago
  I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but: 1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks. 2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data. 3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars. 4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
  • marklar423 2y ago
    What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters? Everyone I talk to seems to say a Masters in CompSci is useless, and that you may as well do a PhD instead.
    • vkou 2y ago
      > What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.
      • seangrogg 2y ago
        This cuts so much deeper than it has any right to.
      • esafak 2y ago
        By the time you get the degree, you could be promoted to L4 and saved money along the way, so you're saying it's a bad idea.
    • roland35 2y ago
      I believe a masters has helped me stand out as a candidate at least. Plus, I learned a great deal about computer engineering! The fundamentals have come in handy.
    • janalsncm 2y ago
• hk1337 2y ago
  I feel like the only places a doctorate is useful is in the research field or academics and generally neither actually pay that well for the doctorate to be worth it.
• vonneumannstan 2y ago
  In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    There are many research jobs at Microsoft, Google, etc., that require a STEM PhD.
    • ericmay 2y ago
      True, but how competitive are those jobs to get? If one goes to a lesser-known university that has a PhD program and does related research are they getting an interview, or are these research jobs intended for specific university pipelines (Harvard, MIT, the usuals, etc.)?
      • b3ing 2y ago
        Exactly, they will be H-1B visa worker over someone with a PHD from a non-Ivy League/non-big-name college
      • davidgay 2y ago
        The interview process for a place like Microsoft Research is essentially the same as for a faculty position - give a talk on your research, spend the day talking to researchers about your research, their research, convince them you have an interesting research agenda. Have dinner with more researchers, for a notionally more relaxed discussion :) [Tried, failed ;)] As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...
        • grandempire 2y ago
• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  A lot of people will point out the utility of a doctoral degree is low, but there's another angle. Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees. I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need
• yodsanklai 2y ago
  As usual, lot of PhD bashing in the comments. My experience was generally positive. The good things 1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great. 2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places 3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives. 4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too). The bad things 1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell 2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless. 3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough). Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.
  • parpfish 2y ago
    I had a ton of fun in my PhD. It probably wasn’t the best route if I was trying to maximize total lifetime earnings, but I’m happy with the route I took. In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going
    • nolamark 2y ago
      I agree that it can be fun. I also devised a retirement plan as a graduate student, figuring out what sum of money I would need to live the rest of my life living the graduate student lifestyle without the hassle of being enrolled. Less than a decade after finishing my PhD I was able to walk away from my career into that lifestyle. Certainly not for everyone, but if it floats your boat, it is certainly an achievable plan.
    • gyomu 2y ago
      > my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.
• fujinghg 2y ago
  I was going to do a mathematics PhD years ago but I’ll be honest and I’m not bashing the process or the outcome here. I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.
• xyst 2y ago
  Yup. Forget college or post-graduate degrees. This is no longer a meritocracy. We are in a grinding and grifting mindset. This is a jokers/jesters economy. Forget pricey degrees. Just start streaming, become controversial af, gain an audience of young followers, sell them on quasi-legal gambling platforms, rake in that cheddar. Or become a “political talking head” that doesn’t contribute to the conversation but instead provokes audiences with click baity material. Or if you are traditionally attractive, start teasing the waters with “Just Chatting” streams and potentially switch up to selling OF subs. Nothing wrong with it, got to make that cheddar. Right? I’m calling it now. The alignment with neoliberal economic policy is the downfall of not just the United States but the end of capitalism itself.
  • seydor 2y ago
    Conversely, if you are doing a PhD, network with other scientists. Organize conferences and workshops, try again and again until you publish in a high impact journal, do minor contributions and insist on adding yourself to other people's papers, post on twitter and linkedin, talk to local newspapers, make yourself known. Apply for grants early , and add them to your CV so you get more grants later. It doesn't matter if your science is trivial or useless, you will have made it, get more grants, get invited to give talks, get to join committees and publish even more of the same. Bonus points if you belong in a protected minority. Academia has been gamified
• ATechGuy 2y ago
  The choice is simple: work for next Nvidia or pursue academia?
  • fooker 2y ago
    The former if you have a crystal ball to predict the future. In which case you might not have to work anyway. The later if you love working in a particular field and want a reasonably straightforward path to success.
• mkoubaa 2y ago
  Please if you do get a PhD, don't feel bitter if you don't get paid much more than people without one after you graduate. This is a toxic mentality that (anecdotally) I find quite common in the computational sciences specifically.
  • esafak 2y ago
    In the likely event you won't use your specialized knowledge much either, how could one not feel bitter?
    • mkoubaa 2y ago
      By realizing that life is not fair and you aren't that special
• ckrapu 2y ago
  The PhD is has become the de facto replacement for the advanced workforce training programs (apprenticeship, guilds, corporate talent development programs) that many civilizations used to use. For some fields, you really do need to bang your head against a small number of problems without anyone holding your hand before you become proficient. Not all PhD graduates get there; many just skate by because no one wants to fail them. They are an essential part of the modern labor force, though.
  • saturn8601 2y ago
    That may not be entirely true. Just look at all these people working in semiconductor fabs that China is trying to copy. A lot of that knowledge is institutional knowledge gathered from decades of specializing in one tiny area of the chain. That knowledge may be in a PHD program somewhere but more likely it is only on the job training.
    • ckrapu 2y ago
      That’s an interesting counter example. I agree to an extent, but I also point out that only in semiconductor work is it normal to have factory shifts of technicians who have PhDs.
• ckrapu 2y ago
  Anecdotally, a prestigious consulting firm (one of McKinsey/Bain/BCG) essentially stopped hiring MBAs and instead hired several friends from my PhD cohort despite the B-School ranking hire than most of our graduate programs. I've always wondered what signal they were acting on. Perhaps the value of the MBA has been watered down, or it was just too easy to game the admissions.
• jenny91 2y ago
  People seem to be getting stuck on the PhD opportunity cost piece for STEM. The matter of fact is that Americans don't do PhDs in STEM: if you look at the top schools and top departments, they are 70-90% international students. The PhD then is a phenomenal deal: by and large people are coming from places where FAANG jobs don't just fall on your lap at SF salaries. You get a free education in the US, and can jump straight into the job market as top-educated talent. Also I think from NSF stats STEM PhDs are on a slow and upward trend, unlike the countries mentioned in the article.
  • avs733 2y ago
    Your numbers are way off…number of American citizen or permanent resident divided by number of doctorates awarded: 35,566 / 57862 = 61.5% (overall) 26,622 / 45,533 = 58.5% (stem PhDs) Survey of earned doctorates, national center for educational statistics, 2023 data…very useful, as are many of the data products the federal government collects, for however long this is up https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data
    • jenny91 2y ago
      I'd say it's not that off: for computer science the numbers are 686/1150, so only about 40% are US citizens or PRs. This is even more scewed at top schools in my experience. Also thanks for finding this data, didn't know it existed!
• seydor 2y ago
  > Financial insecurity is also one of the chief concerns for doctoral students in Japan I question the premise that low pay caused this drop. PhD research was never about financial security , instead it pays in prestige and expertise of notoriously ramen-eating overworking geniuses. Prestige has certainly gone down since they became so commodified, and expertise can end with a Master's. Most PhDs are not even computer science and related fields (where the most interesting research roles are in companies). We should rethink the duration and archaic formulation of the doctoral programs. Our times are faster
  • KPGv2 2y ago
    > PhD research was never about financial security You're looking at this wrong. PhD was always about financial security for the vast majority of PhDs. You think all those Chinese and Korean etc. students are coming to study engineering to get invited to the good parties back home? No, they're doing it because it provides financial security. Same for places all over the world. Europe, everywhere. It's basically upper and upper middle class white Americans who pursue PhDs for the social prestige, because they already have actual capital, so they're pursuing social capital. Everyone else does it for a combination of money and love for the subject matter.
    • seydor 2y ago
      i believe you re talking about financial secutiry after the Phd, not during
      • KPGv2 2y ago
        Yes, I was. I suspect most PhD candidates who are considering a future career in academia are thinking about financial security after, not during. So if we're talking about why are there fewer PhD candidates...
    • ckemere 2y ago
      Universities have been offering doctoral degrees for at least 800 years. It’s unclear to me that they have ever been linked to powerful/ultra-wealth careers. I think that completely discounting the “prestige” factor would fail to capture a large number of academics. Especially in fields like Philosophy (from whence the Ph gets it’s abbreviation).
• CJefferson 2y ago
  One of the extra problems in the UK is that PhDs in STEM were massively centralised into “Doctoral Training Centers”. It used to be whenever I applied for a grant I would add funding for a PhD. Now that’s forbidden, and instead most universities have little PhD funding, and a few have far too much. This means most students don’t get to be integrated into a research group, and many supervisors get very little funding for students as their university doesn’t have the funding.
• xanderlewis 2y ago
  From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research. It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here. The obsession with the ‘STEM’ acronym (well, really the grouping rather than the name) also winds me up, but I better not go there…
  • declan_roberts 2y ago
    The only difference between a PhD and a hobby is money, or the presumption of it indirectly (certain jobs, etc) Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that. If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.
    • pinko 2y ago
      In many disciplines, it is almost impossible to get oneself into an environment anywhere remotely as rich in collective expertise, resources, and academic-social interaction as a proper graduate research program. There are exceptions (e.g., aspects of tech where money can be made, aspects of social science that intersect with public policy or activism, etc.) but they are rare.
      • DrFalkyn 2y ago
        In my experience Academia lacks the resources that corporations can give you. This has been a big problem in AI. The transformers guys probably could not have pulled that off at a university.
      • xanderlewis 2y ago
        You're exactly right. The ill-informed commenters here seem to think everything is about 'AI' and 'tech'. Of course you don't need a PhD to publish bullshit experiments on language models and unwarranted pontification — but try becoming a serious pure mathematician without a PhD. But I guess the retort of the average tech bro HNer will be something like: 'we don't need pure mathematicians — just learn Rust and you'll make way more money'.
• Liebmann5 2y ago
  I got caught cheating in my very last college course so can never get my PhD. I use to be atrocious at school bc I had adhd and was about to drop but did a complete 180 and finally learned how to learn which changed everything. I discovered my love for Math and my immediate and only goal from that point forward was to get my PhD. My temple became the library and would go there immediately after class and every weekend at 8am. I graduated at the brink of COVID so could no longer go to my favorite and on my very last final of my college career couldn’t take the noise of my roommates cheering me on and also just wanted to be done to used chegg on a small part of my test and got caught. Do I deserve to get my PhD? No. Why? I showed my academic integrity can’t be trusted. Do I still want my PhD? 1000% Yes. Do I regret my decision? No. My school told me I could either not be awarded my degree or receive it with the exception that “cheater” be branded everywhere on it. I originally wanted to go with no degree at all but figured I’d own up to my mistake and use the label to rebrand myself as someone who learned their lesson and won’t make the same mistake again. During COVID I obviously couldn’t find work so utilized my spare time to pick up a new hobby and landed on tinkering. That lead into my discovery of software and the rest is history. I fell in love with software engineering and have been doing it for the past 4+ years. I’m extremely proud of myself and all that I’ve accomplished because with absolutely no incentive or motivations or even help I managed to learn a new subject completely on my own. A cheater can post code that isn’t theirs’ to their GitHub over the course of 4 years however a cheater can’t show you 4 years worth of work. Also if you think a tech job might’ve been my motivation, I did try to obviously get a job but failed at yet another goal and quit several months ago. I’m working construction but still learning and coding each and every day. A PhD is becoming an expert in a specified subject and then thinking up an idea no one has ever had before and backing up your ideas with proof. In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen. I think (big emphasis on think) I can do that completely on my own. If I’m being honest I’ve actually already begun and don’t know if it’ll work out, come to fruition, or even be read but at least I tried. If I try the only cost is my time but if you’re in a program it costs time and money.
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    >In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen. Did you ignore almost every other comment in this thread when you wrote this?
• tcascais 2y ago
  Honestly, from the stories I hear... Obviously,the money is one factor, but even if people got a little bit more money, they would still go for a PhD (at least in europe, where you don't need to go under debt so much, if you need to). The problem is that a lot of people don't even receive more money than people with Msc or even less. That's just too bad (even if in some countries this is not only illegal, but people actually follow the law - which is not something you should take for granted). But even after the money consideration... you still have all the "lost credibility" in the system, because the institutions are not properly funded, and also because science is very dependent on grants,politics, and stupid criteria + nepotism and corruption inside the institutions, etc. That goes beyond PhD applications to even "who can sell the coffee in campus". On PhD apps, I will never forget when one of my housemate just said to me that he would leave the country because one teacher said to him in advance that he would not enter on PhD, because everything was bought out. I think this is only the ""beginning"" of at least 10+ years of colleges having a hard time/ losing credibility year after year (sometimes because they are failing, and other times because they dare to have opinions different than people like Musk, which is not fair for academia). Either way, should I feel sorry for them? For the institutions, sure. But for the people who rule the institutions right now? My only fear is that they will be substituted by even worse individuals.
• ocschwar 2y ago
  Good. Academia is done growing. We're in a steady state, which means if you're in grad school, look at your advisor. Look at the other grad students who have him. Look at the work of the grad students who came before you, with this advisor. Think about the ones that will come after. Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking. If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work and getting the education, go for it. If you have to make the PhD pencil out financially, think long and hard before enrolling. And if your ambition is to be a full professor, reread the first paragraph.
  • sangnoir 2y ago
    Instructors ⊂ Academia
  • musicale 2y ago
    > Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking The academic pyramid was never sustainable. However, for some fields (science and engineering being good examples) there are decent jobs outside of academia.
    • lthornberry 2y ago
      Most academics teach in departments that don’t grant phds. They’re at liberal arts Colleges or regional state universities. True that statistically only a small percentage of grad students will go on to have their own PhD students, but that doesn’t mean there are no jobs for the rest.
      • analog31 2y ago
        That may have been true in the past, but at this point even the smaller colleges are flooded with applicants for faculty jobs.
        • chefandy 2y ago
          A billion applicants for 2 full-time faculty jobs, but they’ve always got a billion adjunct openings that pay shit, offer no benefits, and have no job security.
• FigurativeVoid 2y ago
  My younger brother has his phd in engineering from a top tier university and I often worry about what it will mean for his career long term. He’s at a consulting firm now, but I’m not really sure where he’ll go next. He’s incredibly intelligent and hard working, but I’m unsure what firms are looking for engineers that have the phd price tag. I also have many friends with humanities phds that I really hope figure something out. They are all extremely intelligent. But one is literally getting a phd in Shakespeare. Cool. I love it. But there’s like 3 openings a year and they aren’t even at a top tier school. It’s all a mess.
• firstlunchables 2y ago
  [dead]
• amir734jj 2y ago
  As a software engineer, PhD is worth it if you know what you are getting into. Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. It's a long journey but it's worth it if you know what you are doing.
  • antegamisou 2y ago
    > Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. While we all can agree to that, reducing the PhD to just the new MSc comments is a bit worrisome. But then take a look at so many ML PhD theses and one can truly see this is the case. So much unregulated garbage on ICML, NeurIPS as well.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• nektro 2y ago
  because higher education is too expensive to consider it
• GPerson 2y ago
  My Professor dreams died years ago. I’m just trying to survive this hell.
• adampwells 2y ago
  I got a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1994. I was a researcher for a few years and converted to software in 2000. The degree turned out to have a lot of transferable skills - especially in researching and solving problems. Just 25 years later I am a Principal Engineer in the Oz Telco industry writing Rust! I don't regret the degree for a moment - although when I went through the degree was free, even at a top tier Australian university.
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    I’m not sure this pathway exists now at least in the US.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Odd that, based on the comments, so many HN'ers are fixated on the opportunity cost of doing a PhD, as if the reason for doing a PhD was to earn more money.
• interludead 2y ago
  Not surprising at all. The PhD pipeline has been broken for years: low stipends, ridiculous workloads, a shrinking number of stable academic jobs. Who wants to spend 5-7 years in a grueling program only to end up in postdoc purgatory or fighting for adjunct gigs? And the irony is that academia needs PhDs...
• zeroq 2y ago
  In Elbonia people have to play a game to stay in academia. Every year you have to accumulate enough points. The main source of points are publications. But they're not valued based on the gravitas of your writing, rather than which publisher is willing to publish. And these valuation seems to be random. Senior people will often offer to open doors to younger reserchers in exchange for their name to be put in their papers. Stealing someones ideas is not even the goal as is getting more points. I have no idea how this translates to other countries, but as someone who - with one or two different choices in my youth - could easily end up as a sociology scholar, and who has a lot of friends who chose that path, I'm deeply flabbergasted. A young naive version of me seen academia as polar opposite of working for evil bigco, but the reality that the amount of politics and backroom scheming is just mind boggling.
  • jajko 2y ago
    Its as if one can't escape human nature when environment has wrong goals set for rewards. The fact that 'more noble' goals may be pursued doesn't matter that much in long run.
• InfinityByTen 2y ago
  I was this close to picking up the PhD route in applied mathematics for science and engineering. I took up a job in a map company, "just for the time being" and not commit to the "Finite Element Method" or something around "Port Hamiltonian Systems" for 4-5 years straight, without knowing if it will find any applications in the real world. 8 years on, I'm still in the same map company along with 3-4 others who have joined after or mid-way their PhDs (and some more who didn't bother) and we do routing for hundreds of customers and basically have everything a PhD group has, including Seasonal Seminars on Routing Algorithms. Finite element Method is not as exciting as AI (I used to think at some point that it would) and Port Hamiltonian Systems is something not a lot of people talk about, except maybe Dr. Volker Mehrmann and his group :) Academia is not for the faint hearted and a PhD isn't just about research anymore. It's just a low paying job now, sadly. I still say things like "if I ever happen to go back to academia", as if I did a lot there. But I am an academic at heart, just that pursuing a PhD didn't certify it any better or seem to provide more freedom for exploring my passion for studies or a particular topic.
• mnky9800n 2y ago
  Incidentally if you are interested in doing a PhD the University of oslo has 64 open phd and postdoc positions currently. PhDs will get a competitive salary (typically something like 50-55k USD/year, this is much higher than anything in USA for example), free healthcare, pension, in the first year you qualify for cheap student housing if you have moved from abroad, and tbh, Norway is kind of nice to live in in my opinion as long as you pick up a winter sport and don't mind the darkness. https://www.mn.uio.no/english/about/vacancies/index.html https://www.mn.uio.no/english/about/vacancies/index.html
  • MzxgckZtNqX5i 2y ago
    As someone who moved to Norway (not Oslo) to pursue a PhD in computer science, I highly suggest everyone who might be interested to give it a chance. High quality of life and supportive system and society. Vacancies for University of Bergen: https://www.uib.no/en/about/84777/vacant-positions-uib https://www.uib.no/en/about/84777/vacant-positions-uib.
    • fransje26 2y ago
      > University of Bergen Don't forget to bring your rain gear!
  • w-hn 2y ago
    > don't mind the darkness This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :) What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)
    • viraptor 2y ago
      > This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :) And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.
• Tycho 2y ago
  Anyone considered doing a PhD after retiring early from their primary career? Seems like it would be a good option if you were financially set for retirement and had “a few years to kill” before accessing your savings/investments. It would reduce the stress of doing it (no great fear of failure, more perspective), cover living expenses, and give you a socially respectable occupation. On the other hand, maybe it would be kind of awkward being a grad student at like 45+ years old?
  • juniperus 2y ago
    You can't just wander into a PhD program, it's pretty competitive to get into a funded position. You're going to be up against a lot of fresh-faced undergraduates who may already have a publication under their belt. They also have a 3.8+ GPA, are in leadership positions in numerous clubs, have done study abroad and worked 3-4 different research jobs each summer of their undergraduate degree, and probably during the school year too. Thus, they know all the other lab heads (PIs) who could be their advisor, and when funding is available, they're the first ones to know to apply, and they're the most interesting for the advisor because they can be vouched for by other labs as being strong workers, or easy to train, or whatever. If you are just cold applying to labs you have no relationship with, that's harder. If you are just cold applying to a school, and just hoping to get placed in whatever lab has funding, that's even harder, and chances are you can end up working for a tyrant of a PI, which is why they have no students. Some advisors are so bad that people quit their degree, and it ruins them. This, aside from the expectation you work 40+ hours a week, you only get paid for 20 of those hours, usually around $30k/year, and you are bound to research whatever the lab you were lucky enough to get a position in is currently researching. So the next 4 years of your life could be spent on nematode gene editing or formulating lipid nanoparticles or whatever the lab is doing. You're basically never going to be able to just randomly pick a project because it interests you. Though maybe if you're doing a history PhD or something, you do exactly that. But that type of PhD is a deadend where you are competing for like the 75 jobs in the country that expect a history PhD. All-in-all, it's not really a retirement hobby. If you're really rich and can self-fund your graduate studies, then you can probably go to all types of schools and work in all sorts of labs. A self-funded rich student would be great for most labs. Many schools will accept all types of people, but if you're not getting an acceptance letter with an offer of funding, it's basically like a rejection letter. I've heard of people in retirement becoming a student for the healthcare benefits some schools offer though. They maintain enough credits to have the right status so they aren't paying a boatload, but can still be on a student healthcare plan that gives great benefits.
• FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Am I out of loop. This is supply / demand. There were just a bunch of articles about 'not enough' positions for PhD's. So, now there are fewer enrolled. Doesn't this happen in every field. There are two many people for the jobs, so people stop perusing those fields. Then the cycle kind of moves around, to, now we don't have enough people.
• m2has 2y ago
  My supervisor once told me that if you want maximize your career earnings, only a masters is worth it. Of course he said this in regards to engineering, but I found it interesting at the time.
• AdobiWanKenobi 2y ago
  I mean £21k student stipend and job prospects of £26k-£42k (assuming not finance or AI) can you blame them.