Are PhD Students Irrational?

In computer science, I feel that this definition of irrational only applies in the same way that doing anything that isn't maximizing my $/hour rate is irrational.

Sure, the academic job market is very competitive (though CS arguably has more opportunities than other fields), and landing a solid industry research position is no cakewalk either. But the difficulties in finding a research job don't preclude doing software engineering work to pay the bills.

It's not uncommon to decide a few years into a graduate program that you'd rather just be making more money and drop out for a more lucrative industry/industry research position. For CS PhD students, the job market only seems terrible if you have a very narrow definition of a job (which seems irrational).

Should universities not be held accountable for the fraud that they have perpetrated on their students? The tobacco companies were taken to court because their products had long-term consequences which they persistently minimized, while continuing to push product; it seems universities have done the same. If anything, the universities have better, clearer data than the tobacco companies, and the universities have far more people with clear understandings of both statistics and the observable consequences of getting a PhD. Throwing away the last years of your life because of cancer doesn't seem clearly worse than throwing away the best years of your life seeking a PhD.

You should read the article more closely. It advocates exactly holding universities accountable, and in particular, holding universities accountable for deliberately casualizing academic (ie: PhD-holding) labor by converting tenured professorships into adjunct positions, even while expanding enrollments and using the tuition money to hire more and more administrators.

It would be more accurate to say that universities are exploitative than that the existence of a self-reproducing class of professional scientists is irrational.

>But perhaps the best way to get answers is to talk to the parents of college students, the ones footing the bill. Ask whether they’d rather pay that ballooning college tuition for lazy rivers on campus, for fruit baskets and housekeepers for executive staff, and for other rising non-classroom costs; or for more top PhD talent, smaller classrooms, more one-on-one attention from faculty, more independent studies and research opportunities with faculty, and a stable faculty who won’t have to leave halfway through their student’s college career. Then you’ll get a sense of the real, unmet demand for PhDs, and the irrationality of a market that isn’t delivering.

I'd say it entirely depends on the assumption that to get a PhD means that you want to be a professor (and teach in the US at a reasonably decent school and get tenure one day). If that really is your goal, then yes, you should think very hard before you do it.

The Adjunct scam is really, truly atrocious. Adjucts and grad students can unionize now, though, and it only takes one strike in the e. coli labs for a research university to cave...

However, PhDs do have valuable (and financially rewarding) roles in nonprofit research institutions that are not subject to the same challenges as universities (though I sure hope you like writing grants),

In "real" industry positions, a PhD can be a way to bulwark yourself against "the engineer trap", where you get promoted into a project management role and become unable to actually do anything except munge Excel documents. It is a gamble.

I have an engineering background, so I can't really speak to what it is like to, e.g., have a PhD in English. But, depending on your degree, there are also really cool gigs at places like microsoft research -- they do everything from cell biology to audio, now, as well as employ "pure theory" CS folks.

From my reading it seems like the crux of the argument is this:

> We’ve presupposed a scenario in which there really is a massive oversupply of PhDs, and thus PhD students must be irrational for treading into an oversupplied labor market. But that’s simply not true. PhD “oversupply” is just a euphemistic way of talking about the fact that colleges and universities haven’t met student-generated demand with a commensurate supply of full-time, tenure-track faculty.

PhDs aren't irrational for wasting 5 years on something that won't net them a job... universities are shirking their responsibility to provide a job to those who demand them.