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Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

nature.com

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Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#81

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

Isn't calling someone a tech-bro itself just anti-intellectualism blended with sexism?

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#82

Post by zitterbewegung »

fhars wrote: post #74
DanielHB wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are discarding opportunity cost in your assessment.

The counter party to your opportunity costs doesn't send collection agencies, though.

$250k in savings in six years is doable with a salary of $125k after undergrad.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#83

Post by damiante »

mp05 wrote: post #22
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.

> 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. So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part

Correlation does not imply causation (but it does stare at it from across the room and suggestively waggle its eyebrows)

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#84

Post by daft_pink »

DanielHB wrote: post #69
daft_pink wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.

You are discarding opportunity cost in your assessment.

Maybe, but if you compare paying 30-50k per year plus living expenses for an average masters program for 2-3 years and then paying student loans for a really long time because you couldn't afford it in the first place vs paying no tuition and getting a $30k-40k stipend for 4-5 years. The advantage of a year or two of additional work isn't as great as you think, when you subtract out tuition and the stipend they give you during the PhD and compare the pay differential and job prospects when you finish.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#85

Post by janalsncm »

I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but:

1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.

2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.

3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.

4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#86

Post by atrettel »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
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.

Almost nobody pays for a PhD. I didn't pay for mine. This isn't like student debt for undergraduate degrees, though I think the argument about the "opportunity cost" of getting a PhD has merit.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#87

Post by whatshisface »

BeetleB wrote: post #76
morelandjs wrote: post #48

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 t…

I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...? My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).

Sometimes what you need is less precision, much faster. Carmack's famous inverse square root falls into this category.

If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#88

Post by Palomides »

dgacmu wrote: post #57
dakiol wrote: post #37

I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years

Prior to the new administration I would have pointed out that US CS and engineering Ph.D.s are generally paid with a stipend that's "just enough to live on". There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/ I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations…

I get what you're saying, but "in some places, in some disciplines, you could be at a livable level of poverty" is not a very persuasive point

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#90

Post by dingnuts »

BeetleB wrote: post #76
morelandjs wrote: post #48

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 t…

I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...? My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).

Honestly the whole story sounds like a tall tale to me.

> 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

I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.

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