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How many PhDs does world need? Doctoral graduates outnumber academia jobs
- rus20376 1y agohttps://archive.is/VqD9K https://archive.is/VqD9K
- TMWNN 1y agoTitle edited by me from "How many PhDs does the world need? Doctoral graduates vastly outnumber jobs in academia"
- gbacon 1y agoIt was the verbatim title of the article, and it contains > A 2023 study2 of more than 4,500 PhD graduates in the United Kingdom found that over two-thirds of doctoral graduates were employed outside academia. If 67-33 isn’t a vast difference, what is?
- TMWNN 1y ago> It was the verbatim title of the article I had to shorten the title to fit HN's character limit.
- dekhn 1y agoThis happened when I was in grad school back in the late 90s. Clinton increased the budget of the NIH significantly (thanks Bill) which led to a huge increase in training grants allowing PhD programs to expand. However, faculty positions did not expand, so many PhDs had to find alternate careers (most people go into PhD program to get a faculty/researcher position). This actually worked out really well for bigtech, which hoovered these folks up. I worked with tons of ex-physicists who were great programmers especially at machine learning. It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs.
- jojobas 1y agoThat sure applies to maths/physics PhDs, not so much for arts ones, these are still competing for a handful of academic jobs and the rest go to menial jobs with huge debts.
- redczar 1y agoYou think it was a bad decision to increase NIH budget?
- dekhn 1y agoThat's a great question. To the extent that increasing the budget caused more smart people to get PhDs and more of them were able to contribute to the scientific effort (as well as help bigtech develop ML and contribute back to science), I think it was a good idea. It might have been better executed- somehow matching the increased supply of grad students with increase supply of faculty positions, or perhaps just growing it more slowly to let the inequalities equilibrate a bit more. But ultimately, I think it was a good thing, in that it increased the total science being done.
- wileydragonfly 1y agoYeah, NIH had two guys (Lauer and Collins) that tried to do all kinds of things to spread out funding to junior researchers and increase the number of jobs. The entrenched investigators fought them every step of the way and Trump has since run both off.
- redczar 1y agoThanks for the clarification.
- tptacek 1y agoMy understanding is that there are lots of industry jobs in NIH's ambit that tacitly require PhD's (very much unlike the technology industry).
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
- streptomycin 1y agoFor someone thinking about grad school who does not want to go into academia as a career, a PhD advisor with industry experience is not a bad idea. They will understand what you need to succeed in industry and have connections. Might be easier to find in engineering departments.
- azhenley 1y agoAs a professor, I believe virtually all profs should have industry experience and occasionally go back for a year or two. (I’ve bounced back and forth!)
- wombatpm 1y agoHow did that affect getting tenure? My experience watching my advisor go through that process is that an industry stint would negatively impact the process.
- raddan 1y agoThere are a lot of variables, but from personal experience it also depends on how you talk about that experience in your tenure dossier. I was able to spin a research finding into a commercial product. Due to intracompany politics, that product never shipped. But my tenure committee talked glowingly about my ability to take a research idea and polish it into something that a major software company would pay me to commercialize.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> As a professor, I believe virtually all profs should have industry experience and occasionally go back for a year or two. (I’ve bounced back and forth!) For quite some professors I imagine that going back to industry would make them a lot more arrogant. In academia, being surrounded by very smart people dampens the arrogance a lot because you realize that you may be smart, but not that smart. On the other hand, in industry you have much less people around you that can intellectually stand up against you, which easily makes you smug.
- lapcat 1y agoOne of the problems is that universities exploit graduate students as cheap labor in teaching and research while they're in school, so the universities have an incentive to admit more incoming students than can be placed in academic jobs.
- Simulacra 1y agoAnd then charge undergraduates more, making them take classes they don't need, in order to justify paying those graduate student GTAs.
- lapcat 1y agoI'm puzzled by this response to my comment about the cheapness of grad student labor. Grad students are doing work that would otherwise have to be performed by full professors, who are vastly, vastly more expensive than grad students. So in my opinion, to blame undergraduate tuition on graduate students just seems... bizarre?
- musicale 1y agoUnderpaid grad students and postdocs are the dirty-but-not-exactly-secret source of research productivity per dollar in the US. But the pyramid is unsustainable even if each PhD only trains one or two new PhDs every 5 years.
- Apreche 1y agoThis is a problem in many industries, for example animation. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/annecy-exposes-the-widening-chasm-between-student-hopes-and-industry-reality-247927.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/annecy-exposes-... I’m beginning to think we need to change academia to be driven more by employer demand than by student demand. Stop lying to people, like I was lied to. You probably can’t live your dream. You probably can’t grow up to be what you want. The vast majority of people have to do what society needs. Let various industries tell the universities what kind of labor force is needed. Then universities should set the numbers of students they accept for those majors accordingly. The time to tell people no is before they spend several years of their lives and a fortune of tuition money in training to do something that will be a dead end.
- lawlessone 1y agoPerhaps we should do the same in schools and let local industries choose the curriculums most suitable to their needs. Children in coal towns don't need to know Shakespeare and shouldn't have aspirations./s
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoShakespeare is read in middle school. It’s also available for purchase in any bookshop along with supplementary material, not to mention various free materials on YouTube, forums, study groups, etc. It’s not some sort of sacred knowledge only available to PhD students.
- lawlessone 1y ago>Shakespeare is read in middle school. Sounds wasteful. The children do not need this to serve my coffee or work in the mines. Business First.
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoYou need a lot of children in the mines to support so many Shakespeare PhDs, so I am not sure you are making a point you are trying to make.
- Simulacra 1y agoWhere there are students willing to pay, and government willing to back up their loans, there will always be schools telling students they should spend more. It seems like it used to be harder to get a Phd..
- bwfan123 1y agoEinstein did not get an academic job after his PhD. If it can happen to Einstein, it can happen to the average PhD of today. But, PhDs are over-qualified for the average job (as was Einstein when he worked as a patent clerk), and employers may be reluctant to hire over-qualified folks.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agophd programs are largely immigration backdoors
- raddan 1y agoThis is false. Many PhD graduates struggle to find jobs in the US. And even if it were true, that would be fine. These people were trained here, understand the American style of research, and want to contribute. It is a massive loss to the US to blindly turn them away.
- simianwords 1y agoHow does this work?
- jleyank 1y agoIn bupiotech/pharma, including software support for modeling, the PhD is the entry level degree. Non research degrees are usually technicians, valuable but lesser stature and pay. Unless their hands are superb in the lab. This consumes much of the production particularly with the boomer cohort actively retiring.
- rapjr9 1y agoSome grad students are finding a third path, remain a grad student. The pay is poor, but sometimes the work is interesting enough. After 8-10 years you've made enough contacts and gotten enough job interest that you have choices for doing something else. If you invent something truly new and useful that can lead to an income as well. It is quite obvious that getting a PhD is not a sustainable path to working as a professor once the number of PhD's exceeds the retirement rate of the profs.
- musicale 1y agoThis just in - pyramid schemes eventually collapse! But it seems like we still have a lot of tough, unsolved problems. Might be nice to have some smart people working to help solve them.
- musicale 1y agoSomeone opposes solving hard problems I guess.
- daft_pink 1y agoIt’s sad that in fields where doctoral degrees are needed for licensing like psychology, they haven’t greatly expanded the number of PhD’s. While working doctorates exist, having more working people with doctoral experience wouldn’t be such a bad thing.