A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by hliyan » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:02 AM UTC

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…

By the time of the induction lecture, won't most students be too invested already to be able to go back?

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

#102

Post by dabockster » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:08 AM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #86

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…

Your interview questions sound like bullshit. What are these interviews for, how did you arrive at those questions, and what leads you to believe they have a strong correlation with success?

This. I haven't even heard the word palindrome outside of either college or outsourced coding challenges (further driving home the bullshit point).

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

#103

Post by RhodesianHunter » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:16 AM UTC

cinquemb wrote: post #93

krastanov wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in STEM, tuition is practically free and PhD students are paid for their research work and teaching. There are even PhD student labor unions in most public and some private universities. (Whether the pay is good and whether unionizing makes sense are separate topics). You will not get paid well as a PhD student, but there is no massive amount of debt involved either (and again, whether there are opportunity…

Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's. I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.

I think you meant to imply that it was difficult to so, but you said "can't".

You absolutely can get a paid for ba and ma in the US. It isn't easy, but thousands do so.

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

#104

Post by krastanov » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:20 AM UTC

cinquemb wrote: post #93

krastanov wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in STEM, tuition is practically free and PhD students are paid for their research work and teaching. There are even PhD student labor unions in most public and some private universities. (Whether the pay is good and whether unionizing makes sense are separate topics). You will not get paid well as a PhD student, but there is no massive amount of debt involved either (and again, whether there are opportunity…

Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's. I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.

Yes, but this is a problem unrelated to PhD programs (the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).

Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees). They did pay for books though...

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

#105

Post by gh02t » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:23 AM UTC

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…

Few PhDs in my field go into academia, most go on to laboratory jobs. It's a relatively small area though (nuclear engineering) and demand is fairly high for PhDs. A large portion of PhD students are working on projects jointly with national labs, so there is a lot of preparation for jobs beyond being a professor. A significant portion also go into unrelated areas, e.g. someone I know just took a job at Github.

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

#106

Post by krastanov » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:27 AM UTC

cucuuc wrote: post #85

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…

A PhD is literally )as in that’s what the abbreviation stands for ) a license to teach. It’s origins are exactly in training people to pass the torch of knowledge. Look at the Greats, or even professors until the 50s, they only had at most 6 grad students their entire career. Many modern professors have as many students a year.

Plenty has changed since the word was created. Similarly, philosophy used to mean all of science which is certainly not the case today.

In other words, PhD does not mean "a license to teach" and it has not for at least a century.

I am not saying all these changes are for the good, but the premise in your comment is not true.

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

#107

Post by dnautics » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:29 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #80

matthewbauer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's pretty unlikely. In one case there was a tech where I went to grad school, who performed so well that tptb decided she should be a professor. But before they could do that, they felt the pressure to give her a PhD (and where I went to grad school was very much on the "unconventional" end of the spectrum), so they enrolled her in the PhD program, made her take classes, and gave her a degree after she had finished enough classes to cya in the eyes of the accreditors, made her staple her papers together for a thesis, gave her a PhD, and then promoted her to professor.

Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.

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

#108

Post by krastanov » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:32 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #101

limbicsystem wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By the time of the induction lecture, won't most students be too invested already to be able to go back?

This is a fair question, but you should also keep in mind that there is no stigma to dropping out of a PhD program (if you do not mind the opportunity cost of preparing and applying it is not the worst way to "take a gap year").

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

#109

Post by cinquemb » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:32 AM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #104

cinquemb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's. I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.

Yes, but this is a problem unrelated to PhD programs (the majority of people go to college and college is expensive). Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees). They did pay for books though...

> …(the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).

This didn't used to be the case, so, yes it is true to say it is unrelated to the PhD programs if you set aside what it takes for people to enter them in the first place and the decisions that have to be made by all actors (of which only the self has control over).

>Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees).

Yeah sure, my sister got a full ride for undergrad and for her masters and my cousin got a full ride for undergrad, but for every person like them, there are many more that even leveraging such knowledge of opportunities and trying to pursue them in earnest, doesn't net them opportunities.

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

#110

Post by dnautics » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 4:37 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #9

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…

> 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.

I mean, yes, it is possible for me to do biochemistry in my garage without a professorship (and I do), but will people actually take you seriously? Will you get money to do your research? Where will you publish? Not all of us can be Peter Mitchell, and arguably it's harder now that government funded research has a near monopoly on the research industrial complex.