Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
insidehighered.com
Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
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Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#2I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#3I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
and therein lies the quandry that sinno exposed.
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#4what an honest and rare stance.
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#5Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively.
Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends.
If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist.
Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost.
Biotech, data science, AI/ML are also good bets. What's not a safe bet is generic "programmer" likely to be automated out of a job and salaries are likely to crash when there's an oversupply of lower-skilled talent. Most programming will become trivial or eliminated by automation, as is already beginning to happen with AI code completion.
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#6I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
Oversupply. I hate to be a heretic against the orthodoxy, but viable academia needs to be startup- and business-focused on delivering useful, productizable impact rather than pure research. (Stanford Med School is like this, as are some other departments.) Publishing is still perishable if it doesn't result in concrete utility.
Google Translate's live camera font changing.. was Word Lens and was a Stanford thesis before that.
Lytro field camera... was Stanford research.
Impossible Burger... was Stanford GMO heme.
Google... Stanford.
Cisco...
VMware...
HP...
Nike, TSMC, Trader Joe's, Netflix, PayPal, Nvidia, Varian, Charles Schwab, Atari, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, ..
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#7I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
Oversupply. I hate to be a heretic against the orthodoxy, but viable academia needs to be startup- and business-focused on delivering useful, productizable impact rather than pure research. (Stanford Med School is like this, as are some other departments.) Publishing is still perishable if it doesn't result in concrete utility. Google Translate's live camera font changing.. was Word Lens and was a Stanford thesis bef…
^ It's no coincidence: it's mindset, talent, support, and connections that comprise a superorganism / ecosystem.
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#8In math, chemistry, psychiatry, physics, etc, a person with a PhD will be much faster and more effective at getting things done that relate to their area of expertise. As such there is a strong job market for PhDs in those areas in general, though of course most of those jobs aren't academic.
Does a political science degree actually indicate a similar quantifiable increase in capability beyond just having more writing experience? I don't know much about what professional political scientists do so perhaps someone can enlighten me.
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#9Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively. Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends. If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist. Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost. Biotech, data…
if you had a tool that manufactures tesla parts, could you assemble a tesla?
Re: Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
#10Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively. Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends. If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist. Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost. Biotech, data…
PhD in AI/ML is no longer a good bet, hasn't been for about 5 years.