Reform the PhD system

[bigbadwolf]

An article by Mark Taylor at Columbia:

The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.

... The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them.

This article on the PhD factory, cited by Taylor, also is interesting reading.

 

[myampol]

There are very few ACADEMIC jobs.

So, people with a PhD in a relevant (quant) field will just have to console themselves with joining a hedge fund or other financial institution, while giggling all the way to the bank.

 

[Joy Pathak]

It depends on the field. For most fields, it holds true, but for PhD Finance and PhD Accounting it is mostly the opposite. There are more academic positions than graduates usually.

 

[bigbadwolf]

A four-month-old article on PhDs in The Economist, along similar lines.

And the Simpsons on grad students:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0

 

[AWilliams]

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/

 

[bigbadwolf]

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/

From the article:

Obviously, the “pyramid paradigm can’t continue forever,” says Susan Gerbi, chair of molecular biology at Brown University and one of the relatively small number of scientists who have expressed serious concern about the situation. Like any Ponzi scheme, she fears, this one will collapse when it runs out of suckers — a stage that appears to be approaching. “We need to have solutions for some new steady-state model” that will limit the production of new scientists and offer them better career prospects, she adds. At this point, however, the policy options become slim. There has been relatively little attention given to possible solutions for the scientist glut — in no small part because the scientific establishment has been busy promoting the idea that the U.S. has a shortage of science students.

 

[Barny]

It's true, it's why I avoided experimental/theoretical physics like the plague and instead I'm starting a PhD in high performance computing and modelling - skills which will actually serve me well for a technical career in the future. I also chose a PhD with an industry top-up so that my salary is actually ~10k higher than the average graduate starting salary in the UK, because living in poverty sucks. I've witnesses first hand the misery that top institutions put their PhD students through - basically using them as 14 hour-a-day lab rats doing menial work without any guidance or supervision apart from other students. It's frankly despicable, and I feel sorry for those that fall into this path thinking it would be better than it really is.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

What a waste of time reading that article. Who gives a rat's ass that there are no positions in academia? Academia doesn't innovate anymore--companies like Google do. Hell, want to work for an uber research lab?

D.E. Shaw Research, people! How much more of a pure research think tank do you get? Granted, it's not exactly Bell Labs yet, but...

 

[DominiConnor]

Before I start, I have to disclose that my sampling has a serious bias to it because I talk to people who have chosen to leave.

I talk to lots of PhDs, it's possible that no one in this industry talks to as many as I do, and their view on academia is remarkably similar to people I know who come from a shit country, where religious/socialist/fascist/stupid populations allow crap people to lead them. They have a strong emotional bond to that country, but don't want to live there, many want to go back.

Many people I speak to have actually got jobs in academia as opposed to fixed term insecure postdoc positions, and they complain bitterly about the way academia is run with more bureaucracy, politics and stark intransigence amongst "support" staff.
I deal with a wide range of people, and pretty much the most useless, obstructive and worthless people I encounter work in the non-academic support functions at universities. Some are very good of course, but many are as bad as the careers office at Imperial College London.

We are near the end of a period of high inflation in terms of the qualifications required to enter the finance industry, and that limit is only being reached because currently there is no generally recognized qualification beyond the PhD. However when I talk to hiring managers who are offering some of the most attractive jobs I see the inflationary pressure is still there. Working at CERN and/or an internship at a top bank now performs much the same role as PhD++

Unless you are lucky and/or obsessive about working in finance, between 60 and 95% of most PhDs has no utility in finance, and most PhDs have terrible holes in finance skills that they have to work at plugging.

There is a clear separation between what the industry says it wants, and what it really ought to get.

What it really needs is an ordering function that allows it to look at the cohort of people in their 20s and say "this guy is smarter than this one", ie Joe is the 1,302 nd best applied mathematician, and Yang is the 1,301 st
That degree of precision is of course unrealistic, and we might settle for using percentiles.

There is a catch-22 here.
Problem is of course that no rational person will spend real money to take an exam unless they are sure that the result has value to their career, and employers won't take it seriously unless a serious number of grads take it.
The universities will hate it a lot since it will provide an objective measure of the quality of their output.
So it's very hard to start it.

 

[cgorac]

D.E. Shaw Research, people!

OT, but gotta say +1 for mentioning these guys: I don't know of any research position more elite than working there. On the other side, their existence is based in having money thrown from hedge fund earnings into what they are doing - it may all pay off someday, but certainly this is not a typical position for a research organization.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Who gives a rat's ass that there are no positions in academia?

The suckers who spent several years earning a meretricious doctorate do. A friend of mine earnt his first degree from CalTech, then spent nine years on his PhD at Harvard. Now he's in a line of work that doesn't really require anything more than a basic degree. As I see it, the nine years were spent in vain. Derman talks about the frustrations of being a grad student in his own autobio. There must be truckloads of forum readers here with grad degrees in physics, math, engineering who, because of the paucity of jobs in their own field, are seeking to make a transfer to quant finance. As with lawyers, one can ask of science/engineering PhDs: Why produce so many when the jobs aren't there? There are brilliant mathematicians and physicists out there, flitting from one post-doc to another. To me it seems a phenomenal waste of human talent.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

Blah! When I was applying for PhDs (didn't get into any, might apply again someday), I really wasn't thinking about academic positions. I was just thinking about learning how to do research so that I could take that background and go to work in the private sector working on interesting problems at Google/RenTec/DesCo (or DesRes)/etc./etc./etc....

I suppose that's why I was rejected...because I don't want to stay in academia with a PhD...

 

[DominiConnor]

It's not the job of universities to produce people in the ratio that markets currently want.

I see education as like a book. Would the world be a better place if a given textbook was only allowed to be read by a certian number of people ?

Do you think universities are capable of judging the demand for their output ?

I don't think the system is broken, the users of it are.

The facts about PhDs are there for all to see, the numbers, the lifestyle and the pay, yes there's some bullshit, but no more than in any other life choice.
Even if you're an arts major, or even an evangelical you can't be so dumb and unaware that you can reasonably claim that it is the systems' fault not yours.
You decide to do a PhD at an age that in every country counts you a full adult for all legal purposes, it's not like some of the shit choices I made as a teenager.

Universities sell PhD programs for the same reason McDonalds sells burgers, people buy them.

 

[bigbadwolf]

It's not the job of universities to produce people in the ratio that markets currently want.

Do you think universities are capable of judging the demand for their output ?

I don't think the system is broken, the users of it are.

The point is the universities don't care about the fate of the PhDs they produce: all they see is a cheap, docile body of grad students, many of whom get poor supervision and end up spending unnecessary years upon years on their PhD (if they don't drop out in disgust).

Of course the system is broken. That's why indigenous students are staying away from grad work in the sciences and the grad students tend to be Chinese and Indian -- essentially serf labor -- who want a US degree for its cachet (regardless of subsequent job opportunities) and/or want to get a foothold in the US job market.

And there's an interesting social question (for those of us who believe there is such a thing as society): Western post-industrial countries like the UK and US apparently do not know what to do with their best and brightest. The best and brightest are left to fend for themselves and those who do opt for serious academic training find they're playing a game of musical chairs with their peers. To me it seems a colossal waste of human talent. At the same time, twits like Obama and Tom Friedman keep repeating there's a shortage of scientists and engineers.

Merely my opinion.

 

[Andy D.]

I deal with a wide range of people, and pretty much the most useless, obstructive and worthless people I encounter work in the non-academic support functions at universities

Oh dear, I have been applying for a position in a support staff role at a US Ivy League. Dominic - do you see this as counting against me in the long run?

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

I really don't get it...what is all this talk about gloom and doom when...

https://www.renfund.com/vm/research_programming.vm
https://careers.deshawresearch.com/recruit/JoiningDepartment.html

HELLO?

If you would have a good shot at landing such kind of a position after getting a PhD that you could feasibly hack...uhhh...why wouldn't you do it? Am I missing something here? It seems like the best jobs for nerds in this country are reserved for PhD-only status (EG Goldman quant, Rentec, DESCo/DESRes, Google, and the list just goes on).

I mean do these opportunities not exist? Who cares that universities don't have jobs? Doesn't the private sector always have a place for those brighter people willing to be intellectual mercenaries/prostitutes (depending on how you see it)?

 

[AWilliams]

I really don't get it...what is all this talk about gloom and doom when...

https://www.renfund.com/vm/research_programming.vm
https://careers.deshawresearch.com/recruit/JoiningDepartment.html

HELLO?

If you would have a good shot at landing such kind of a position after getting a PhD that you could feasibly hack...uhhh...why wouldn't you do it? Am I missing something here? It seems like the best jobs for nerds in this country are reserved for PhD-only status (EG Goldman quant, Rentec, DESCo/DESRes, Google, and the list just goes on).

I mean do these opportunities not exist? Who cares that universities don't have jobs? Doesn't the private sector always have a place for those brighter people willing to be intellectual mercenaries/prostitutes (depending on how you see it)?

Posting a link about a research position in Renaissance technology as the reason why there's nothing wrong with the PhD infrastructure is comparable to me giving you facebook links of two people who have won the mega millions lottery of an odds of 1 in 176million as the reason why you should play. It makes no sense; It refutes nothing.

 

[AWilliams]

It's not the job of universities to produce people in the ratio that markets currently want.

I see education as like a book. Would the world be a better place if a given textbook was only allowed to be read by a certian number of people ?

Do you think universities are capable of judging the demand for their output ?

I don't think the system is broken, the users of it are.

The facts about PhDs are there for all to see, the numbers, the lifestyle and the pay, yes there's some bullshit, but no more than in any other life choice.
Even if you're an arts major, or even an evangelical you can't be so dumb and unaware that you can reasonably claim that it is the systems' fault not yours.
You decide to do a PhD at an age that in every country counts you a full adult for all legal purposes, it's not like some of the shit choices I made as a teenager.

Universities sell PhD programs for the same reason McDonalds sells burgers, people buy them.

McDonalds products are not funded by governments.

We know that when governments provides a subsidy towards a specific industry or product, what occurs is an "overproduction" of that product. To me, this is by far the biggest reasons why they're more PhDs then jobs to satisfy and/or justify them.

 

[Barny]

When I was trying to decide on which PhD to take from my offers, I spoke to some grad students in the Cambridge group I got an offer from. Two of them were 4.5 years in with no idea of how much longer they'd be going on for. Both absolutely hated their lives, their supervisor was away for 6 months a year at another uni, everything they'd learnt was from other students, and because their supervisor was never there to teach them how to be a real physicist i.e. how to be independent and look for interesting physics by themselves, they were simply slaves to do whatever he told them to, most of them going up endless blind alleys. I spoke to another student in this group who was given electronic structure calculations to do without any experience whatsoever and nobody in the group who could help - when he didn't produce the results they wanted they went to a theorist in Princeton who gave them what they were after - when the student finally got to grips with CASTEP and started producing the results they wanted they simply ignored him and he had to fight incredibly hard to even get included in the papers they were publishing.

Another Prof. I spoke to told me that one of his students spent 6 years on his PhD on the measurement problem in QM only to produce a thesis which foxed his examiners. He said this very proudly, because the student was unsupervised. When I suggested that taking 6 years to do something on a problem which nobody in quantum information gives a damn about anymore the look on his face was priceless. In another group, not a single PhD graduate in one year carried on in physics. I actually managed to hunt one of them down and emailed him - I suspected it was because of the tough job market for postdocs etc. He said he actually had several offers from institutions across the world (Caltech was one of them) but he turned them all down because his PhD experience in theoretical physics was so, so horrible that he couldn't bear the thought of continuing, and now he's working as an auditor at a Big 4 accountancy firm.

The problem with the big institutions is that the profs do not have any time for you - they don't want to supervise you, and they absolutely cannot relate to the situation you're in because they're the ones who made it - they went through the same process but found it liberating/easy. Unfortunately they don't have the emotional intelligence to realise that not every student is like them and so many go suffering in silence. My advice is: if you want to do a PhD, go to a mid-ranked school which is still respected but where the Profs have time for you. Of course this is supervisor dependent, but there is no way in hell you're going to get a "mentor" at Oxbridge, only a sadistic master who hands down orders and expects you to get on with it, and if you can't, then you have a long-hellish road to travel before you can even get out of the situation you're in, nevermind prosper/excel.