I'm not sure we have a glut of PhD's at all. At least not in fields where there is actual research in industry. I work in industry on a team where almost everyone has a PhD and those that don't have a Master's degree (or two). The team I'm on publishes research, reads papers regularly, attends research conferences, has visiting professors and researchers give talks, but also ships product. Maybe CS and AI is an outlier in terms of having huge demand in industry (relative to the work available, there is a huge shortfall of AI PhD's), but I wouldn't be surprised if much of industry is like this. Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry in a research-oriented role. The claim that we would be better off with a less educated society is so extraordinary it requires extraordinary evidence. A handful of cherry-picked data points and a skewed interpretation is very unconvincing. Yes there is a cost in an investment of time. But for many PhD students these are happy years they remember fondly for the rest of their lives, even if they end up outside academia. If we have an actual genuine glut, show me a survey with good methodology showing that most PhD graduates regret doing their PhD's. We don't have anything close to that.
A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
21–30 of 173 posts
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#22I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research. In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and lifetime tenure awaits them at the end o…
Do you have a source for this tale of successful deception of poor grad students by universities other than your own imagination? When I went to grad school in the sciences in the 1990s we were all well aware of the job market, because students were constantly finishing and we'd know what jobs they got.
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#23Why does everyone think PhDs want or need to go into academia? I never planned to be an academic when I decided to start my PhD. I think that's fairly common.
Probably because, outside of a STEM discipline and a few other exceptions, there isn't a distinct non-academia/teaching career path.
Combine this with both a larger social push for higher education, declining state support for local public institutions that in turn drive a need for higher enrollments to cover costs without (even larger) tuition increases. And add to that a k-12 educational pipeline that has failed in (fully) addressing the need for quality STEM education.
This, of course, oversimplifies the situation to a large degree. But the above factors contribute strongly. Intelligent and driven students, coming into the Higher Ed community with an interest in advanced degrees but relatively weaker STEM backgrounds, are disproportionately represented in humanities & social sciences programs.
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK it is rare that PhD students are funded to do their research.
This thread is full of bizarre mis-information. I have never heard of a PhD student in the UK who was not funded. Most get around £13k tax-free and don't have to pay tuition. I didn't even have to teach, and I had a company fund my last year as an employee even.
I second the above. I'm about to finish my PhD and within the entire department, I only know of one guy who was self funded. The rest of us all have grants that cover both tuition fees and a tax free stipend which, unless you live in London, is ok.
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#25I'm surprised this article doesn't try to address the reasons this is happening. It mentions that the employers (universities) benefit from students funding themselves, and I'm not super familiar with the UK's academic system, but this seems to be an oversight by the author/editor since most PhD students (in the US, at least) are funded to do their research. I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs w…
> A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of professors
It's also worth pointing out that this is pretty necessary from the lab's point of view, especially in some of the more high-end labs: PIs (in my experience, anyway) are frequently spending >90% of their time just writing grant proposals and dealing with the funding side of things.
There's very little time for them to do anything besides the funding circuit, and so the actual research part falls to graduate students and postdocs: People who obviously have less experience as professional researchers (and thus many more of them are required).
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#26I'm surprised this article doesn't try to address the reasons this is happening. It mentions that the employers (universities) benefit from students funding themselves, and I'm not super familiar with the UK's academic system, but this seems to be an oversight by the author/editor since most PhD students (in the US, at least) are funded to do their research. I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs w…
no. 2 sounds sufficient, if we want to roll it all into one. If we take PHD to be a, apprenticeship for the academic trade, you can't have that apprentices- tradesmen ratio. ..not unless people are going to be apprentices for a long time.
Universities decide this ratio. It's self contained. We can either have a different ratio, the current issues, or an exponential professor crisis that'd make brontitall look like childsplay
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#27The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears s…
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher without being a professor.
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#28I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research. In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and lifetime tenure awaits them at the end o…
Well, yes & no. It is an oddly contradictory system in this way, especially when you consider Teacher Ed. programs that certify their graduates to teach below the college level. Implicit therein is a recognition that teaching is a specialized profession requiring specialized skills. Yet faculty in higher ed are not expected to have any specialized training in this area, and all learning of it is "on the job".
The result is an educational environment where the most visible job requirement for faculty is to teach courses in their field. But that is the portion of their responsibilities for which, from an incentives perspective, they are least accountable. Instead, to obtain a tenure-track position and ultimately earn tenure itself, primary requirements are research and publishing output, with double++ good to eleventy for bringing research grants to their institution. Teaching and advising/mentoring, not quite an afterthought, is much lower in priority & weighting in tenure review.
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher without being a professor.
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?
Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
#30I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research. In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and lifetime tenure awaits them at the end o…
Universities just need to do a better job of separating teaching and research in my opinion. Someone with a PhD in algebraic graph theory isn't going to want to teach 20 year olds what a group is, or grade their tests, and they shouldn't have to. For every undergraduate class, there are probably more than enough 25 year olds with degrees in that subject capable of teaching that class better than that professor might. But, whoever teaches the class should first and foremost be a good teacher who actually wants to teach, and not whichever professor/grad student could be drafted into duty.
The main problem with universities these days is that they are given the duty of both teaching and research, but they force people to teach that don't want to (some professors, grad students). In addition many people view universities more as job training than learning about a specific subject. If you go to college to get a degree in CS, but all you want to do is get a job at Google, you don't need CS experts to teach you intro to data structures or how to write SQL.
I think the long term solution is to entirely separate the realms of research and teaching, or to make teaching as a research professor entirely "opt-in" outside of discipline specific classes (the algebraic graph theory professor should probably be the one teaching algebraic graph theory). My university has been relying more and more on teaching-only professors to teach CS classes and I think it's a wonderful solution. The teaching-only professors are much more personable and engaged in the actual teaching, and the research professors get to focus on what they're good at.