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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

#121

Post by ThePadawan »

mikebenfield wrote: post #32
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…

I think this varies somewhat by field, but I promise you, in many fields essentially the only reason to get a PhD is for a career in academia. The idea of a someone in graduate school not aspiring to become a professor still sounds odd to me. And while I never had anyone outright lie to me or tell me job prospects were great, there were also few people who gave me a really clear picture of just how bad they were.

On the other hand, there are fields where the opposite holds. A family member studied Social Sciences, and the non-academia job situation (in journalism, museums, etc.) is pretty much "PhD or bust".

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

#122

Post by dagw »

brians wrote: post #65
School-Cotton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you get downvoted because theoretical CS research really doesn't need to involve coding, so it's not as odd as you seem to think.

Dijkstra famously compared this to astronomers who have no interest in telescopes or observing. I love theory, would happily retire to it—but I can’t see how anyone could have the right imagination calibration without lots of practice.

Dijkstra famously compared this to astronomers who have no interest in telescopes or observing

That certainly isn't my interpretation of the quote (unless you're thinking of a different quote than the one I'm familiar with)

The quote I know is: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

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

#123

Post by teekert »

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…

Maybe in the US, here in the Netherlands you get a reasonable wage and usually finish withing 4 years during which you learn to write papers, keep yourself busy and determine the direction of a research project by yourself (at least more and more over the 4 years). Afterwards you can make the step to industry, quite comfortably.

During my first year I was already told, 1 of the 100 of you will become professor so I had no illusions.

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

#124

Post by dagw »

dabockster wrote: post #102
WhitneyLand wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I haven't even heard the word palindrome outside of either college or outsourced coding challenges

So? Half the work I do involves concepts I hadn't heard of or was only vaguely familiar with before starting the work. Being able to have someone explain a concept to you and then you turning that into usable code seems very relevant.

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

#125

Post by msb »

kchoudhu wrote: post #62

I'm probably going to go back to get a PhD at some point in my 40s. Not because I want to become a professor, but because I think it'll be good to sit down for a period of four or five years and just think in the company of other agile minds. Of course, this is only possible because I'll have made sure to have had an entire career behind me, and I will not be worrying about putting food on my family's table or keepin…

This is me. I am 43, entering my fourth year of PhD. If you have money saved and want to challenge yourself in new ways a PhD is a worthwhile goal. A couple of thoughts:

1) Many of my 20 something peers are struggling financially, 20-30k a year is difficult to live on in CA. I made good money in my 20s and enjoyed life, having less now does not bother me. 2) I don't have children. My peers with children face a much different set of challenges than I do. I suppose it comes down to the support structure in your life, but I am not sure I could do this with school age kids. 3) I cannot stress enough the importance of a top tier school and a strong advisor.

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

#126

Post by dagw »

mikebenfield wrote: post #39
TimPC wrote: post #21

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 outli…

> Maybe CS and AI is an outlier Yes, it is a huge outlier. Probably the most extreme outlier there is. > Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry In CS? Yes. In most other fields? Absolutely not.

In most other fields? Absolutely not.

I work at a small unassuming civil engineering company and we have plenty of PhD's here. Within most areas of science and engineering I'd say that getting a PhD because you want to go onto industry is the norm rather than the exception.

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

#127

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

Can you give some examples of what a neuroscience PhD end up doing that is not science? I hope those 66% don't cover Starbucks!

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

#128

Post by blahedo »

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…

> 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.

In the US at least, a substantial proportion of professors teach at institutions that are undergrad-only or where only some departments have graduate programs. I am a tenured professor of computer science and have not supervised any graduate-level research (nor will I be expected to do so).

...which is not to say that the numbers aren't all messed up. They are. And I've had many lucky breaks (and also some unlucky ones) to get where I am. But your Ponzi claim presumes that the only outcome of a PhD is an R1 professor position, which is not the case.

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

#129

Post by sjg007 »

analog31 wrote: post #100
lovich wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discount your story, but weren't the financial implications of a PhD in the mid 80s and the mid 10s drastically different? If the benefits, the joy of learning and chance of getting a job, are the same but the costs, the massive amounts of debt you need in modern times, are much higher, but the number of PhD students is the same doesn't that mean something had to have changed? Maybe learning is more enjoyable…

Indeed, my parents put me through college, and I finished grad school with money in the bank thanks to the NSF. At the time, the conventional wisdom was: Don't get a graduate degree unless somebody else is paying for it, or you are in a job that guarantees a salary bump for doing it. I don't think that's changed.

Unless you live in a high COL area where even NSF grant money isn’t enough.

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

#130

Post by WhitneyLand »

troupe wrote: post #92
WhitneyLand wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The interview questions don't sound particularly rigorous, but asking someone to pick a programming language and do something simple with it sounds like a good way to make sure that they at least have actually done programmed before. If the job involved any type of programming, this would seem to strongly correlate with success. What do you think would be better?

It sounds like a good way? Yes, I agree intuitively it sounds reasonable, but that alone is not considered a best practice.

Why do we all work so hard to go by good data in our real work, but when it comes to interviewing someone we’re encouraged to just wing it, or use our best judgement? Careers can be affected with this stuff, and bad hiring decisions in either direction can hurt an organization.

There is research done on hiring but the learnings are slow to benefit the practice. General intelligence is one of the strongest indicators, but not gotcha trick puzzle questions. Work samples are predictive, but again, approach is everything. Track record of past success (when that applies) is important.

This is not my field so I struggle like everyone else to keep up with what’s right. It just burns me that such litttle rigor is typically applied to something so important.

Maybe it’s because interviewing is just one of those topics that seem easy, like, nutrition - most people think they know a lot more about it than they really do.

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