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A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

theguardian.com

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Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#71

Post by geezerjay »

Cyph0n wrote: post #60
angersock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but you can be a researcher (doing work at least as good as most PhDs) without a PhD. Therein lies the rub.

You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other. The same appl…

> You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule.

That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands.

A PhD program is set to help the PhD candidate research a very precise and specific topic, which more often than not is entirely irrelevant to any industry, so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.

The key difference is that an engineering degree is tailored to teach marketable job skills while the PhD program is the exact opposite.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#72

Post by jhbadger »

opportune wrote: post #15
pacala wrote: post #4

The 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…

A PhD program trains one to become a researcher, not a professor. There is a large need for researchers in industry.

Also there's lots of government researchers as well. The US has its NIH, FDA, CDC, DOE, USDA, and so on, and other countries have their own versions (if generally not quite as large).

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#73

Post by stevenwoo »

limbicsystem wrote: post #49
krastanov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for). It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "po…

Right. I'm the Chair of a (neuroscience and psychology) departmental graduate school and I also sometimes sit in on departmental PhD 'scholarship' interviews. One of the questions we ask is 'Given that your chances of gaining a job in academia are only about 1 in 8, what do you think you will do when you finish graduate school?'. Then, when they arrive, we show them, a discuss, a version of this picture http://thegra…

It's laudable that the likely end results are presented so clearly and early. Have you ever done a survey immediately afterwards to see how many students goals align with the likely outcomes? It seems like if a student is in that position where they were very successful at being a student for the prior 16 years and succeeded at getting into your graduate school that they might think they are the 1 in 8 - maybe all eight of them for a given eight.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#74

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #70

The only time I have missed not getting a PhD was when lawyers have me explain to someone who has a PhD what I mean so that they can bring my testimony into an IP case by a more identifiable 'expert'. That said, there is a particularly annoying type of PhD in the tech world, it is one who assumes that the person they are talking to who doesn't have a PhD, doesn't have that degree because they were incapable of gettin…

I don't thing those kind of PhDs really exist in significant numbers, especially in research. "Ya, that guy who just got that breakthrough in machine learning? He only has a master degree" is so common it's already normalized.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#75

Post by analog31 »

If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor.

Stale, as in, 70+ years old.

I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.

I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."

I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#76

Post by analog31 »

limbicsystem wrote: post #49
krastanov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for). It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "po…

Right. I'm the Chair of a (neuroscience and psychology) departmental graduate school and I also sometimes sit in on departmental PhD 'scholarship' interviews. One of the questions we ask is 'Given that your chances of gaining a job in academia are only about 1 in 8, what do you think you will do when you finish graduate school?'. Then, when they arrive, we show them, a discuss, a version of this picture http://thegra…

When I was a grad student in the mid 80s, we got the same basic news on our first day. We were still there on day 2 too. I think the idea that we were duped into attending grad school by inflated expectations of academic employment is something we fabricate in our own minds much later. A lot of just enjoyed studying science.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#77

Post by danieltillett »

I finished a Ph.D and became a tenured professor (top of the greasy pole) and I have no regrets despite not being part of academia anymore. The experience of doing a Ph.D changed me for the better and gave me the confidence to take the risk to start my company.

We don't train too many Ph.Ds, we just undervalue them outside of academia. One thing I think would help is to not allowing someone to start a Ph.D until they had a few years work experience outside of academia. Too many students end up on the Ph.D railroad without experiencing anything outside of school.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#78

Post by yeukhon »

pm90 wrote: post #59
yeukhon wrote: post #44

I come from a city university, and in my experience many of the master students there (information system or computer science program) are not up to standard when they leave the program (i.e. they can't really program, let alone with theories). I think this is the problem with my school, but when I had this conversation with an old friend he felt that his master classes focused on theory, very little room for program…

A PhD does not guarantee good programming skills. I think you are mistaken in assuming that and hence get downvoted. I have personally found most people who finish/almost finish their PhD's to be very good in describing problems, approaching solutions from different paradigms and articulating their thinking in writing. If you're trying to hire a PhD for a programming job, in most cases you WILL be disappointed. That…

I was disappointed that he couldn't even come up with a solution for odd or even. I get it for some low-ranked schools, but if for example someone from UC Berkeley can't do any decent programming (I don't expect everyone write a transcompiler because I have no idea how to myself) I'd be very surprised.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#79

Post by Cyph0n »

geezerjay wrote: post #71
Cyph0n wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other. The same appl…

> You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule. That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands. A PhD program is…

> That's an awfully incorrect analogy.

I would say "not entirely accurate", rather than "incorrect". Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD?

> [.،.] so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.

And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field.

Given that industrial research requires you to do practically the same thing -- albeit in a more applied fashion -- a PhD is usually a good indicator when hiring for such positions. Again, there may be more suitable people for the position who don't have PhDs, but that is once again an exception to the rule.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#80

Post by yorwba »

matthewbauer wrote: post #48
opportune wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PhD program trains one to become a researcher, not a professor. There is a large need for researchers in industry.

Well, there's a need for certain kinds of researchers in industry. How large that is isn't exactly clear. The difficulty comes to PhD programs when people are able to become researchers without a PhD.

It's also not impossible to become a professor without a PhD. That doesn't make PhD programs useless for that purpose, as long as they make that career path easier to attain.
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