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Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

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301–310 of 485 posts

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. Lol! Are you new here? Y-combinator is literally about selling your soul to VC.

I'm slowly, very slowly, realizing this and that my objections to this are quite literally pissing into the wind to the wrong crowd. Begging and pleading for people to make tech that doesn't torture and depress the average user seems to just fall upon deaf ears, because all that ever mattered to them was the money.

HN can be annoying at times, but there are still more informed "rebels" here than most places. And they're not outright censored so quickly.

Most corners of the internet are either nonstop corporate worship, or wanting everyone to abandon everything and live in a hut in the woods. It's not perfect here, but there are people who present well-reasoned opinions and will peacefully engage with opinions they disagree with. I'm personally for tech helping humans but against the hellscape of trillion dollar corps controlling the fate of humanity and monitoring our every movement, and I don't feel out of place saying that here. There's always someone willing to comment and slap down corporate BS and they're usually voted somewhat highly.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#302

In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.

this is true of CS, not sure that it's true of STEM in general (engineering, life sciences)

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#303

Phds are a scheme for immigration

Is nobody going to entertain this? Immigration opportunity is a major motivator for foreign students to get PhDs. And the university likes the cheap and captive labor.

What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#305
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp.... Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.

Looks like he’s using a lookup table based on std::exp in combo with the Taylor expansion

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#306

Good. Academia is done growing. We're in a steady state, which means if you're in grad school, look at your advisor. Look at the other grad students who have him. Look at the work of the grad students who came before you, with this advisor. Think about the ones that will come after. Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking. If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work…

Education? The PhD path commits you to learn more and more about less and less.

The opportunity cost isn’t just in life-time earnings, it’s also the time you sunk hyper focused on one very specific topic.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only difference between a PhD and a hobby is money, or the presumption of it indirectly (certain jobs, etc) Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that. If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.

Sure - it's just a hobby that pays money. That and the library access, and the fact that you don't have to fit it in around a job, obviously. Kinda goes without saying. And you get a supervisor who might point you in the right direction and keep you on track - but I'm sure you barely need that! Of course the equipment access and technician support goes without saying. Not like anyone else is going to be letting you u…

> I can't imagine anyone would be drawn to the 50% female working environment, with hundreds of smart, beautiful single women aged 18-22. Who gives a shit about that? Barely even a benefit really.

I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no, and barring some tenured professors that feel they're above the rules, it certainly seemed like consequences both socially and formally probably increased the older and further up the chain you got (as they should). It's honestly pretty creepy to talk about them like you do.

Even at what was probably one of absolute best institutions in the world for accelerator physics, which I was interested in, I recall very early on being told by some faculty member that maybe 1 in 10 of us would ever land a tenure track faculty job. Almost everyone I have kept up with that wound up at the best graduate institutions for physics in the world have left, and are all basically doing the same shit I am (doing meaningless shit with computers), almost all of them worse for the wear, especially those who are now leaving after a postdoc or two.

I still have easy access to the local state university's library in its entirety, that is useful, but you don't need an academic job for that. I met plenty of other physics and math graduate school/postdoc drop outs in industry, you can't go far in our field without running into a lot of them everywhere, and most of plenty happy to talk about academic stuff. I don't have the same sort of access to faculty and expensive physics equipment that I did in the past, but given that I was able to actually buy my own home in my 20s with no help, support my own family and not generally have to worry about money and my own future in the same way that almost all of my peers still in academia did and still do, I can't fathom why outside of the absolute most brilliant focused 1 in 100 million minds would bother taking the risk of beating their head against the academic treadmill unless you were already very wealthy. Any justification just feels like massive amounts of cope for not wanting to leave the academic nest.

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#308
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PhD research was never about financial security You're looking at this wrong. PhD was always about financial security for the vast majority of PhDs. You think all those Chinese and Korean etc. students are coming to study engineering to get invited to the good parties back home? No, they're doing it because it provides financial security. Same for places all over the world. Europe, everywhere. It's basically upper…

Universities have been offering doctoral degrees for at least 800 years. It’s unclear to me that they have ever been linked to powerful/ultra-wealth careers. I think that completely discounting the “prestige” factor would fail to capture a large number of academics. Especially in fields like Philosophy (from whence the Ph gets it’s abbreviation).

Up until like 1700 most of the population was illiterate

Mostly only the nobility, and later, the merchant/professional class, even sent their kids to school. Born out in the country like 90% of the population ? Well your helping with the harvest, keep watch over the herd, etc. sux2bu I guess

Universities have ALWAYS been practically accessible to at best the middle class, which barely even existed until around 1500. Before then, you’re mostly talking about nobles

Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#309

From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…

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Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

#310
post #249
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds awfully generic. It doesn't sound that different from a Master's (heck, maybe even an undergrad) program that requires a thesis. Yes, there's a difference in the sense of supposedly doing novel research, but I'm not sure the degree to which you're theoretically moving the state of the art forward justifies your time investment in many cases.

I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think. Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.

The change isn’t unique to a PhD though. Plenty of people receive similar or better training in industry.
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