The PhD Paradox: A Journey into Academia's Upside-Down World

I feel like this article missed the mark, getting a PhD used to be something for affluent people who genuinely felt like contributing toward the progress of society.

There’s always a disconnect between a romanticized ideal and what is practically possible. And reading the comments what some departments do to secure funding seem like a far cry from the ivory towers universities were known for.

  "Brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough."
      -- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

A Ph.D. filters out people who do not want to be a scientist enough whilst training the doctoral candidate in the "publish or perish" mantra that now prevails.

But for every smart observation there are exceptions: Fields medal recipient (well, he won it but rejected to take it) G. Perelman (born 1966 and jobless last time I checked) has almost no publications or citations to show. But he will be remembered forever for proving the Poincaré conjecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman ).

> Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic credentials but for their real-world achievements.

The mistake is to think that someone's world is more "real" than their neighbor's. That may be arguably true if we talk about farmers or fishermen, but it's much less clear that an entrepreneur's world is more "real" than a university professor's.

This seems like a biased angry rant rather than a legitimate criticism, coming from the perspective of being an academic PI running a research lab.

In what sense are an academics accomplishments not "real world achievements?" excepting cases of fraud, etc.

To get tenure you need to publish a lot of papers in good journals as the lead PI. Co-authorship means you were supervising people, e.g. effectively running a team doing novel research, even if you didn't do all of the work yourself.

You can't really publish papers in the "hard sciences" without actually doing valuable real world stuff. Running a life sciences wet lab for example means you are actually operating a biotech lab and doing real physical experiments, basically the same type of stuff one would do in industry. Computational labs nowadays are typically maintaining and releasing software along with their papers, and will often employ a team of professional software engineers (I do so in my lab). To do these experiments you need to win grant proposals which fund doing them, which means you are working on something deemed important by a well funded granting organization or agency, and you have a track record of delivering results when you've won grants in the past. For example, the NIH only funds research with clear human health implications, under priorities set by congress.

At my institution the majority of my colleagues have spun off multiple startups, and have a huge number of patents that are licensed by industry. They are in general making the same type of discoveries and research that industry is doing- but at an earlier stage, they can do things that won't pay off in VC timelines.

University and college students used to have one standard deviation higher intelligence compared to the general population. With credential creep, this has disappeared. College students are average. There's no reason to believe the same thing hasn't affected PhD students. In other words, the quality is just not there (on average). There are also much better career tracks for the best minds in 2024 compared to 1924 (startups, biotech, etc.) which exacerbates this.