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The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#31

Post by btilly »

hexonexxon wrote: post #19

Canada is handing out citizenship for anybody with a Ph.D right now, so are a lot of other countries. If you don't want to move write books or self publish ebooks, or write articles for industry journals or mailing lists and watch offers come in. This is what a girl I know with a doctorate in anthropology did: write endless articles for some academic publication, she had a job offer in Israel after the first few mont…

That's an exaggeration for Canada.

As http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htm says, a PhD is +25 points and you need 67 to get in. It helps a lot, but far from a guarantee.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#33

Post by lutorm »

zeteo wrote: post #10
jseliger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will no doubt be shocking news to Mr. Weissmann to find out that factors such as a desire to learn more or to make new contributions to human knowledge can motivate aspiring PhD candidates. "A desire to learn" and "Make new contributions to human knowledge" are laudable goals that I admire. But, even leaving aside the important question of whether grad school as it is currently structured is a good way of pursuing…

I've been to graduate school and disagree with your comment about expecting a tenure-track job. When you get to know them, PhD students are not poor deluded souls slaving away in the misguided expectation of a plush, secure position at the end. They are rather intelligent, motivated individuals, who choose to work on projects that are more interesting/important than optimal ad placement or crafty financial swaps, and…

Yeah, when I was in grad school, I and my friends said the same thing. However, when reality sinks in that choosing to work on such interesting stuff means living year-by-year on soft money at a postdoc salary, and that in many fields you have little advantage transitioning to a nonacademic job over someone with a MS, it doesn't seem like such a good deal anymore.

Also, I'm not sure you're calibrated correctly. It's not about sacrificing "latest model cars", more about sacrificing a reasonable chance of retirement.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#34

Post by zzleeper »

btilly wrote: post #31
hexonexxon wrote: post #19

Canada is handing out citizenship for anybody with a Ph.D right now, so are a lot of other countries. If you don't want to move write books or self publish ebooks, or write articles for industry journals or mailing lists and watch offers come in. This is what a girl I know with a doctorate in anthropology did: write endless articles for some academic publication, she had a job offer in Israel after the first few mont…

That's an exaggeration for Canada. As http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htm says, a PhD is +25 points and you need 67 to get in. It helps a lot, but far from a guarantee.

Not even that.. "A two-year university degree at the Bachelor's level AND at least 14 years of full-time study = 20 points"

So just doing a bachelor's will give you 80% of the PhD points..

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#35

Post by aheilbut »

javert wrote: post #26
Xcelerate wrote: post #20

I am surprised that so many people are relating PhD's to the money you'll make. I hear (very frequently) that "the amount of time you spend doing your PhD will put you far behind the 4 years of having a job" or "if you want to get rich, go into ...", or "management is where all the money is; you need an MBA for that". Uh... I'm doing a PhD because I like scientific research and can't stand the thought of being a proc…

your chances of being able to do exactly the kind of research you want goes up significantly with a PhD, plus you've already had the experience of doing it for 4 years. I'm not so sure that's a valid generalization. I'm getting a PhD in computer science, but any corporate R&D department I know of that would hire a fresh graduate would only let you do R in service of their particular D needs, i.e., you have too little…

I'm not even sure that all tenured professors are doing research as they would define it.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#36

Post by xmattus »

The missing half of this article is the failure on the part of academic departments to even acknowledge this problem publicly in their recruitment process.

I was an astrophysics Ph.D student at a fairly well-known program until last year when I left with an M.S. to go full time for the web development shop I started. It was a good decision on my part, for sure, but what really struck me is that after I broke the news to my advisor, he was quite open with me about how poor the job market is (not that I wasn't already aware). He and many other faculty members in the department sung a very different tune to me and my classmates during the recruitment process, as did my undergraduate mentors. This is an endemic problem throughout astronomy (at least) and probably many other disciplines in the physical sciences as well.

Even the students often seem to have a sort of Stockholm syndrome about the problem. I still hear from lots of my former classmates that a.) they're well aware of the extreme shortage of jobs in astronomy, b.) they're not seriously expecting to get an academic job and are aware that there are virtually no non-academic jobs doing astronomy and c.) they'll figure out how to get a job "in industry" (i.e. what the rest of us call "having a job") when they finish.

Many students in these programs seen to labor under the assumption that if academia doesn't pan out, their programming skills or quantitative knowledge will make them good candidates for a software or finance job. This is not really as true as they think, since as most HN readers are aware, good developer jobs entail knowing about a lot more than just a programming language, and the sort of programming and quantitative analysis you do in Ph.D research is really pretty far from what those of us in the private sector do with our programming skills.

Nonetheless, a lot of these same classmates would go full-out with their encouragement of prospective students when they came to visit. In my last year at grad school, I remember going on a long rant at the prospectives about how bad an idea a Ph.D in astrophysics is, and the looks of horror on my classmates' faces.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#37

Post by aheilbut »

Xcelerate wrote: post #20

I am surprised that so many people are relating PhD's to the money you'll make. I hear (very frequently) that "the amount of time you spend doing your PhD will put you far behind the 4 years of having a job" or "if you want to get rich, go into ...", or "management is where all the money is; you need an MBA for that". Uh... I'm doing a PhD because I like scientific research and can't stand the thought of being a proc…

4 years?

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#38

Post by jseliger »

zeteo wrote: post #10
jseliger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will no doubt be shocking news to Mr. Weissmann to find out that factors such as a desire to learn more or to make new contributions to human knowledge can motivate aspiring PhD candidates. "A desire to learn" and "Make new contributions to human knowledge" are laudable goals that I admire. But, even leaving aside the important question of whether grad school as it is currently structured is a good way of pursuing…

I've been to graduate school and disagree with your comment about expecting a tenure-track job. When you get to know them, PhD students are not poor deluded souls slaving away in the misguided expectation of a plush, secure position at the end. They are rather intelligent, motivated individuals, who choose to work on projects that are more interesting/important than optimal ad placement or crafty financial swaps, and…

I've been to graduate school and disagree with your comment about expecting a tenure-track job. When you get to know them, PhD students are not poor deluded souls slaving away in the misguided expectation of a plush, secure position at the end.

I have too (see here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... for some comments, mostly job-related), and I think most grad students—at least during the first half of their experience—do think they'll be the exception.

They are rather intelligent, motivated individuals, who choose to work on projects that are more interesting/important than optimal ad placement or crafty financial swaps, and who are prepared to sacrifice some Caribbean cruises and latest model cars in return.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree. Most seem to be pointlessly delaying adulthood. Note that there are exceptions.

Without data the rest of this discussion might be pointless, but the prevalence of articles warning against PhDs seems to me to point in an important direction.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#39

Post by xijuan »

javert wrote: post #27
scarmig wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's more likely to have physical and intellectual freedom: 1) A recent PhD with $40,000 to his name 2) A Google engineer who graduated from undergrad at the same time and has $400,000 to her name

The first one.

agreed

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#40

Post by madpickle »

javert wrote: post #26
Xcelerate wrote: post #20

I am surprised that so many people are relating PhD's to the money you'll make. I hear (very frequently) that "the amount of time you spend doing your PhD will put you far behind the 4 years of having a job" or "if you want to get rich, go into ...", or "management is where all the money is; you need an MBA for that". Uh... I'm doing a PhD because I like scientific research and can't stand the thought of being a proc…

your chances of being able to do exactly the kind of research you want goes up significantly with a PhD, plus you've already had the experience of doing it for 4 years. I'm not so sure that's a valid generalization. I'm getting a PhD in computer science, but any corporate R&D department I know of that would hire a fresh graduate would only let you do R in service of their particular D needs, i.e., you have too little…

I see this negative claim on HN quite a bit. R&D CS labs where D is in service of R do exist. I work at such a lab. We expect fresh PhDs to lead their own research project. Spend some time perusing the ACM DL in your area and try to find labs that have high publication-to-researcher ratios (many of these labs are quite small so it does no good just to do a raw pub count).
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