Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#31

Post by ska »

enraged_camel wrote: post #18
sgt101 wrote: post #8

It takes a certain poverty of mind to quantify the value of an education in terms of earnings. I don't earn a huge amount, but I have a fantastic job, I live in a wonderful place about 5 minutes from my office and doing my Ph.D. was the best thing that I ever did. I agree that you don't need one, and many people with one that I have met and employed are fairly hopeless (in comparison to razor sharp and super talented…

>>It takes a certain poverty of mind to quantify the value of an education in terms of earnings. I don't know... If I spend up to 7 years of my life studying and researching my ass off to become one of the foremost experts in a specialized field, then it better have more benefits than just personal satisfaction. A fantastic job with good living arrangements do not require a Ph.D.

Going into a Ph.D for the money is a bit like going into a sport for the laughs. You might well find some, but it's not the point.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#32

Post by doktrin »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #22
manaskarekar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of 'The illustrated guide to a Ph.D' - http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

What a perfectly delightful piece of academic propaganda. I'm sure that I am overreacting, but the suggestion that a PhD is the first and only time that you will experience original knowledge in your life seems quite smug.

I'm pretty far from an academic, but I do believe you are overreacting a bit. It would be absurd to even imply that a PhD was the only route to original knowledge (insert patent clerk anecdote here).

However, original knowledge is one of the core tenets of an academic doctorate after all, and it's certainly one legitimate avenue towards original research and knowledge.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#33

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Ok, so I read the article (years ago, while in the midst of a social sciences PhD, so imagine how I felt :)), and I read it again.

Then, I vainly read the comments hoping that someone had made my point, but alas.

So, a couple of propositions:

1) pay in academia is less than that in industry (especially in engineering and computing) 2) more PhD's stay in academia. 3) Averages are affected by extreme values. Note I'm using the mean here, as that's what all the studies do (annoyingly enough).

Therefore, it would make sense that on an aggregate level, the salaries of people with PhD's would not show an increase relative to those with masters.

Note that clearly this does not imply that doing a PhD is an (economic) waste of time, as it may be that PhD's, conditional on being employed in industry actually earn more than those with master's degrees.

Man, I hate the mean sometimes.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#34

Post by fein »

drobilla wrote: post #28
fein wrote: post #4

Well of course! PhD's are in the unfortunate position to be overqualified for 90% of the positions they would apply to, and too much of an education to leverage for a higher salary. Industry experience is what makes the R&D rooms at BigCo's tick, and academia doesn't pay that well. Even a masters in CS is overkill these days. Most employers are looking for entry level code monkeys in order to underpay, or industry ha…

> I could either have another expensive piece of paper, or add more code to my github account for future employment... You could always do both. Academics who can actually write good code are a pretty rare commodity.

I'm a developer at a state university: Free Tuition.

I feel guilty about not up and doing it already, but I'm only 1 year out of college, and don't want to go back to that grind just yet.

I really have no excuse aside from "I don't wanna" right now, and that's a pretty shit reason.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#35

Post by tjr »

wmf wrote: post #27
dumitrue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no requirement to have a PhD to participate in research (grad students would never get to publish, though I understand this is not what you meant). When you submit an article to a journal or a conference (at least in my field), you don't get to (or have to) expose your credentials. In fact, a lot of times the submissions are double-blind so the reviewers don't even get to see your name or your inst…

If you can't read the literature because it's behind a paywall that you can't afford, it's very likely that any papers you write will be rejected for poor form, lack of proper citations, and possibly being entirely redundant. I think there are much bigger problems trying to perform research outside "the system", but access to the literature is an issue.

(Not necessarily directed at wmf...)

In a lot of HN conversations pertaining to computer science research, it appears to me that a lot of folks equate doing computer science research with publishing papers.

I suppose that if your job is to work as a researcher, or as a grad student, or as a professor, perhaps publishing papers is very important.

But in the context of doing research independently (as this subthread seems to be about), why should we care? Isn't the more fundamental point of computer science research to develop new software systems that either do something totally innovative, or improve upon previous systems in novel ways?

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#36

Post by VLM »

recursive wrote: post #24
enraged_camel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It takes a certain poverty of mind to quantify the value of an education in terms of earnings. I don't know... If I spend up to 7 years of my life studying and researching my ass off to become one of the foremost experts in a specialized field, then it better have more benefits than just personal satisfaction. A fantastic job with good living arrangements do not require a Ph.D.

Personal satisfaction is one of the best outcomes I can imagine. What's more important than personal satisfaction?

Health and safety of your kids and spouse?

I could have gone academic, in fact I could toss it all away and go academic right now. However ... I would never voluntarily make my wife and kids suffer like that. Maybe after I retire it would be safe to go academic.

It boils down to you might be able to fire me up enough to eat ramen and live in a cardboard box because of topic X, but I'd have a hard time looking my kids in the eye and telling them they'll never eat anything better than ramen because dad likes topic X more than them.

That's the screwed up nature of the system. "Everyone knows you HAVE to take a vow of poverty and give up your private life to advance science". Oh really, and why is that? Why isn't it "Everyone knows you HAVE to take a vow of poverty and give up your private life to stamp license plates, but if you wanna be rich go into academia..."

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#37

Post by dcalacci »

I think that although this article notes some important disappointments in the way PhD students are treated, it is speaking to an audience that most likely doesn't exist.

I don't think it's useful to compare the value of a successful PhD experience to some amount of money. This is especially true for the people who would be considering a PhD in the first place.

Whether or not someone pursues a PhD likely comes down to the personal value they believe they will get from the process, not the projected economic benefit.

On some level, it makes sense that the majority of PhD-holders do not have a starting-gate income advantage over BS holders. In recent years, a BS has become a gateway to the workforce.

I think this is partly because of the ease of hiring it presents to employers. If someone is a college graduate, that serves as a soft guarantee of ability, responsiblity, and education.

PhD work is by nature ill-suited to the workforce. Research positions are rare, and finding an open opportunity that speaks perfectly to a unique education will be difficult. Hiring a PhD student may only come with the 'soft guarantee' mentioned above, and little else, if the position does not align with the students' research.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#38

Post by dumitrue »

wmf wrote: post #27
dumitrue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no requirement to have a PhD to participate in research (grad students would never get to publish, though I understand this is not what you meant). When you submit an article to a journal or a conference (at least in my field), you don't get to (or have to) expose your credentials. In fact, a lot of times the submissions are double-blind so the reviewers don't even get to see your name or your inst…

If you can't read the literature because it's behind a paywall that you can't afford, it's very likely that any papers you write will be rejected for poor form, lack of proper citations, and possibly being entirely redundant. I think there are much bigger problems trying to perform research outside "the system", but access to the literature is an issue.

Sure, but it does depend on the field. In my field (Machine Learning) most (if not all) papers are essentially available online for free (mostly because of very strong actions like http://jmlr.org/statement.html). There might be some obscure papers on perceptrons from the 70s which are behind paywalls, but you are very unlikely to need them. To a somewhat smaller extent, this is true of most computer science and math.

Now, if you're doing research in biology, then this is a bigger problem. Pubmed is great, especially when you get access to freely available papers, but open access is not the norm yet. The tide is turning though, and I think most (all?) NIH-funded research is supposed to be open access.

However, if you're doing research in biology, not having a PhD is not really the main issue -- you need a lab, money, equipment, mice etc. There's no AWS for biology, sadly, though in fairness it would be a need idea! :)

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#40

Post by dcalacci »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #33

Ok, so I read the article (years ago, while in the midst of a social sciences PhD, so imagine how I felt :)), and I read it again. Then, I vainly read the comments hoping that someone had made my point, but alas. So, a couple of propositions: 1) pay in academia is less than that in industry (especially in engineering and computing) 2) more PhD's stay in academia. 3) Averages are affected by extreme values. Note I'm u…

Yeah, it's likely that the values in the article don't really mean what they are presented to mean due to average career choices.

This article would say something more meaningful if it included data only from PhD's that attempted to go into industry.

Post reply on HN