Abolish the PhD (2016)

Does the author think that if we do away with the title, young academic workers, without publications or status, are going to be treated any better? If it somehow manages to overcome the temp-worker problem by giving them permanent contracts or tenure, the outcome won't be pretty. We've been there and done that. If we don't, the problem stays, but we've abolished the title.

"Are you a doctor yet son?" "No ma, but I've got three publications in Frontiers of Cell, Memory, and Sports Management."

(2016)

"Problem is, “graduate students” are not students. They are workers."

Graduate students are both.

My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating them to the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

I will take a chance on a promising student straight out of undergrad who seems like they might be interesting, knowing that it will take them some time to get their feet under them.

That would be very different if they were employees.

Should we build in more protection and better benefits for graduate students, both from the perspective of them being students and employees? Absolutely. But they are students.

This identifies a problem: PhD students are treated badly both in terms of working conditions and pay. The solution isn't to abolish the PhD. It's to have better working conditions and pay!

PhD students should be employees with all of the protections this gives them. They should have unions (I have been both at union and non-union shops, you want to be in a graduate student union). PhD students should benefit from the combination of protections given to students and to employees.

Students should get paid a living wage. The problem today is that NIH, NSF, DARPA and others refuse to give us funds to pay students reasonably. I cannot write an NIH grant to pay a PhD student reasonably. Literally. My grant will be rejected because I'm paying too much. I can't pay postdocs what they are worth either for the same reason.

For better pay, you need to lobby Congress to beat NIH, NSF, DARPA and others with a big stick until they stop this system of abuse.

If you want to end advisor abuse it's simple: PhD students should not be tied to advisors. Under a system where your funding depends on one person, you always suffer from a power imbalance. PhD students should be free agents. When you join, the university promises you 6 years of funding and checks in every 2 years. Go nuts.

As for the thesis? Even in STEM a thesis is important. But, what a thesis is has changed. Today you often staple together 5-10 papers that you published. That's great!

PhD overproduction?! Nonsense! We don't have nearly enough PhDs. The demand for PhDs in industry is huge across many fields. It's true that in some fields there is too much supply, but there's also an oversupply of people of those majors in general anyway, that's not an issue with the PhD.

PhDs are critical for the development of humanity. It's a system that takes a smart person and turns them into a capable smart person who can find hard new problems and solve them.

There is absolutely no reason why we can't unionize all PhD students, immunize them from advisor influence, and pay them a living wage.

In industry we just call those junior and senior employees.