Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees • Hacker News Board

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#41

Post by some_random » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #15

Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves. PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer d…

Academia doesn't have a monopoly on intellectualism, and in fact "tech bros" tend to emphasize the reason and rationalism that typically defines intellectualism.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#42

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #29

As is typical on HN, most comments are about how PhDs are of little value or how academia is not what it once was, whereas the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.

If the PhD had more value, people would be more willing to go further into debt for it. Like the rest of higher education.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#43

Post by lthornberry » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

Gimpei wrote: post #33

searine wrote: post #15

Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves. PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer d…

Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you k…

The glut is primarily a function of the fact that universities have decided that it's fine to have most of their courses taught by poorly-paid adjuncts. That is, actually, a bad thing. If we returned to having tenure-track faculty do a substantial majority of teaching, most people who get humanities degrees would get jobs in the end.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#44

Post by lthornberry » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

some_random wrote: post #41

searine wrote: post #15

Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves. PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer d…

Academia doesn't have a monopoly on intellectualism, and in fact "tech bros" tend to emphasize the reason and rationalism that typically defines intellectualism.

This is Dunning-Kruger in sentence form.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#45

Post by jccalhoun » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#46

Post by vvpan » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

comrade1234 wrote: post #19

Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program. Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.

Renaissance Technologies is a very successful hedge fund that almost exclusively hires PhD's to do the coding, no matter what field.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#47

Post by lthornberry » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

Empact wrote: post #12

Distinctions only hold esteem over time if they are worthy of it. The last two PhD’s that crossed my feed had dissertations on “The Architecture of Whiteness” https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377 And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561 If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.

The fact that you don't understand something is not evidence that it's not valuable.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#48

Post by morelandjs » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.

Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#49

Post by seanwilson » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison.

Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#50

Post by some_random » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #40

Gimpei wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you k…

>According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862 It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US…

The benefit is intangible and honestly if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country. They would do what the 99% of people like them who are unable to pursue a PhD in their chosen topic do, work another job and publish a smaller body of work in a less prestigious setting. The fact of the matter is that those are not the 1,600 people who have the ability to earn a PhD in English or Literature, it's the ones who's interests and personal profile afforded them the opportunity.

Now to be clear, I'm not saying that this work is unimportant. Intangible benefits are (despite the name) very real and do benefit the nation. It's just a much more complicated than engineering PhDs making stronger forms of concrete or whatever.