A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Stale, as in, 70+ years old.
I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.
I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."
I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.
On the other hand, it's also offset by the decline of tenured faculty in college teaching.
We don't train too many Ph.Ds, we just undervalue them outside of academia. One thing I think would help is to not allowing someone to start a Ph.D until they had a few years work experience outside of academia. Too many students end up on the Ph.D railroad without experiencing anything outside of school.
Then a long time ago, someone claimed to have PhD failed my interview. I asked this candidate to pick a language and write a function to determine whether a string is palindrome or not. He couldn't even start with a function declaration (I don't even program Java but I know how to write a function declaration). I was disappointed, but I gave him another chance. This time I wrote the declaration on the board, and I asked him to write code to determine whether a number is even or odd. He flunked again. Our recruiter never followed up to request evidence for his PhD degree because he failed the interview anyway. Even though I still believe he lied, but if he didn't, how did this university, a university with good reputation, gave him his degree?
(btw, every single time I bring this up on HN, I get downvote, I never understand. So challenge me if you think I am lying.)
I have personally found most people who finish/almost finish their PhD's to be very good in describing problems, approaching solutions from different paradigms and articulating their thinking in writing. If you're trying to hire a PhD for a programming job, in most cases you WILL be disappointed.
That said usually they are fast learners and can quickly pick up good programming skill pretty quickly. (Its not as hard as people imagine it to be).
I was planning on doing a PhD but left after my Masters precisely because I wanted to improve my programming skills, which I knew the PhD didn't care much about.
That certainly isn't my interpretation of the quote (unless you're thinking of a different quote than the one I'm familiar with)
The quote I know is: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
edit: this is not a value statement.
Compare:
"He told me he was the king of Nigeria. I didn't believe him, but if he is, how come the king of Nigeria is white?"
By far the simplest explanation is that the candidate lied about having a PhD. You have no reason to believe this isn't the case. And yet you're holding onto this story as though the candidate didn't lie, and bringing it up in that context.
I hope that they'll be exposed once they get to post-grad next year, but I doubt it. I don't know anything about being a master's student, but I'm assuming they'll just have their hands held by professors, and get carried through everything by their fellow students. They won't even need to reach out to people outside of the program.
Anyways, now I know how people finish a CS degree without actually being able to code...
I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs who can't find academic jobs are that
1. Education is becoming more universally accessible and overall education is increasing. This causes a larger proportion of the population to be interested in getting PhDs and also to be qualified (academically) to do so. Similarly, to stand out in the job market, some people may be getting PhDs to differentiate themselves from people with masters/bachelors (or equivalents), since there are so many people with these degrees now.
2. A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of professors: a graduate student will work for 10-25% of a professor's salary, and without tenure. Maintaining this ratio requires having many more graduate students than professors, but doesn't give those graduate students anywhere to go when they graduate.
3. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as preparation for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so that they could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-paying job. I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.
4. Research spending hasn't caught up with the increasing number of PhDs.
5. Because of the research boom in the post world-war period (this occurred in the US as well), most people getting academic jobs around then were around the same age. Many of these people haven't retired yet, and they may subconsciously have introduced a new part of academic culture: you need to be old before you get a professorship.
6. Many students graduate with PhDs but without having done significant enough research to merit continuing in academia. This could have a variety of causes: publish or perish, admitting unqualified/unmotivated candidates, the academic "low-hanging fruit" getting harder to research with time.
It's also worth pointing out that this is pretty necessary from the lab's point of view, especially in some of the more high-end labs: PIs (in my experience, anyway) are frequently spending >90% of their time just writing grant proposals and dealing with the funding side of things.
There's very little time for them to do anything besides the funding circuit, and so the actual research part falls to graduate students and postdocs: People who obviously have less experience as professional researchers (and thus many more of them are required).
Universities decide this ratio. It's self contained. We can either have a different ratio, the current issues, or an exponential professor crisis that'd make brontitall look like childsplay
I don't think this is true at all. Why do PhD (4-6yrs+), when a MS is enough to find a job and get an H1-B/GC ??
This fits my personal experience as well. All of the foreign students I know who did MS's in the US were very wealthy, whereas only some of the foreign students doing PhDs were.
To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust.
The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 2017/18, the EPSRC has an 'indicative fee level' of £4,195 (and a national mimum stipend of £14,553 paid to the student) [1].
> Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
Not really: banks do not consider the stipend to be a salary, so when assesing loans treat PhD students as if they had no income at all.
That said, there is a particularly annoying type of PhD in the tech world, it is one who assumes that the person they are talking to who doesn't have a PhD, doesn't have that degree because they were incapable of getting it, rather than they simply didn't bother. That is, I suppose, human nature. It is always amusing when I encounter it because I know the person underestimates people.
Put another way, it’s been my experience that nearly everybody has a view that they’re better than average or different in some positive, unique way. The worlds full of hostie personalities as well.
Yes, it is a huge outlier. Probably the most extreme outlier there is.
> Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry
In CS? Yes. In most other fields? Absolutely not.
I work at a small unassuming civil engineering company and we have plenty of PhD's here. Within most areas of science and engineering I'd say that getting a PhD because you want to go onto industry is the norm rather than the exception.
There are a lot of humanities PhD's who will have a hard time in any capacity outside of academia leveraging their credentials.
Saw a doc on the making of a film, they have linguistic advisors for accents ... a PhD. I'd gather hard to come by.
Of course, this is only possible because I'll have made sure to have had an entire career behind me, and I will not be worrying about putting food on my family's table or keeping a roof over their heads. A PhD is to me, therefore, not a profession but an avocation. Something to do after you've done everything else. The idea of doing it a few years after college, with the intention of making academia your profession? That's terrifying to me.
1) Many of my 20 something peers are struggling financially, 20-30k a year is difficult to live on in CA. I made good money in my 20s and enjoyed life, having less now does not bother me. 2) I don't have children. My peers with children face a much different set of challenges than I do. I suppose it comes down to the support structure in your life, but I am not sure I could do this with school age kids. 3) I cannot stress enough the importance of a top tier school and a strong advisor.
I suspect that a lot of the stress of grad school goes away once money isn't an issue, and your progress in school isn't an existential issue. I really do wish mature grad students were more of a thing.
Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO", followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching and research academic".
The other side of the coin is that (in some countries) academic careers are changing, in that things are becoming more specialised between teaching and research -- funding crunches are pushing universities into letting teaching loads increase, while research grant funding is competitive largely based on "how many previous grants have you won" (which as it gets more competitive depends on having a lower teaching load to focus almost single-mindedly on research). A curious side-effect of which is that teaching posts are often continuing (there's a steady flow of students to teach) while at the start of a research career, research-focused staff may be on fixed-term contract (research grants are time-limited).
In other words, your family situation (how much you can move around to build a research career, how much you need a stable income) also has a big impact on your pathway.
I think this is actually how we want the future to be (we would prefer more bankers and real estate agents?). The real problem is nobody has worked out a humane way to fund it.
Combine this with both a larger social push for higher education, declining state support for local public institutions that in turn drive a need for higher enrollments to cover costs without (even larger) tuition increases. And add to that a k-12 educational pipeline that has failed in (fully) addressing the need for quality STEM education.
This, of course, oversimplifies the situation to a large degree. But the above factors contribute strongly. Intelligent and driven students, coming into the Higher Ed community with an interest in advanced degrees but relatively weaker STEM backgrounds, are disproportionately represented in humanities & social sciences programs.
We all know and expect that most PhD students will not end up in academia. The best PhD students often aren't those who want to be academics, but ones who are just insanely curious. There aren't many times in life when you can work on something that just interests you in great depth and (hopefully) push forward what we collectively know. A PhD allows that. If you're doing it just for the qualification, you won't get nearly as much out of it, and may not finish at all.
So, what should you get out of a PhD? If the advisor does it right, the PhD student should learn what it is to do high quality scientific research. That is, ask a question, figure out a series of experiments that might allow that question to be answered, evaluate the data, and come up with conclusions supported by evidence.
It turns out this is insanely hard to teach, and I've never seen a new PhD student, no matter what their background, who can do this at the start. No undergraduate or MSc programme manages to teach this, though some students seem naturally somewhat better at it than others. We try only to admit those.
With a new PhD student, many of the ideas, most of the suggestions for experiments to run, and much of the interpretation of the results will usually come from the advisor.
As a PhD progresses, the student should be gaining experience in what it takes to frame a good experiment that might actually answer the question you want to answer. And they should be gaining experience on how to interpret results and what you can conclude from them. During this phase, much of my role is staring at graphs the student has produced, and asking "why does it do that?". An experienced student would already have an answer, a semi-experienced student will have noticed the anomaly, but not know how to figure out the cause, and an inexperience student will not have noticed anything is strange.
By the end of the PhD, a great student will be ahead of me in suggesting the experiments to run, and will have already run them before they come to see me. Only about 10% of PhD students reach this point.
In the end, people over-rate what the topic of a PhD is in the educational process. What most people get from a PhD is an apprenticeship in scientific method. Those are transferable skills, and the reason PhDs have endured as a qualification is we really don't know any other way to teach them.
Of course, no-one actually teaches professors to teach PhD students - we learned it by osmosis too - so the quality of professors in teaching these skills is pretty varied.
In my field, the transferable skills from academic research are far more important than the domain knowledge.
Edit: It is pretty well known that there is exactly "One True Path" for a research career. See [0] or [1]
[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/care...
[1] http://ethicsandscience.scientopia.org/2008/11/20/excuses-fo...
It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "postdoc positions have those requirements", "the chances for getting a permanent research/teaching position is so and so".
While there are people who are dishonest with their students, it is borderline offensive to lump them up with all the rest. All the people I have worked with have been honest about job prospects and have worked hard to give me the best tools to work in those jobs.
http://thegradstudentway.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...
during the induction lecture on their first day. They are all still there on day 2. I like to think they are smart enough to know what they are doing and that the only people who are still writing phd 'glut' articles like this are those whose ideas about graduate training were formed a few decades ago.
At the time, the conventional wisdom was: Don't get a graduate degree unless somebody else is paying for it, or you are in a job that guarantees a salary bump for doing it. I don't think that's changed.
At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students.
This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dropped out because their prof lost funding. In my view, the risk of not finishing at all is a bigger cost of graduate education than the pay scale.
You will not get paid well as a PhD student, but there is no massive amount of debt involved either (and again, whether there are opportunity costs is a separate topic).
I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.
You absolutely can get a paid for ba and ma in the US. It isn't easy, but thousands do so.
Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees). They did pay for books though...
This didn't used to be the case, so, yes it is true to say it is unrelated to the PhD programs if you set aside what it takes for people to enter them in the first place and the decisions that have to be made by all actors (of which only the self has control over).
>Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees).
Yeah sure, my sister got a full ride for undergrad and for her masters and my cousin got a full ride for undergrad, but for every person like them, there are many more that even leveraging such knowledge of opportunities and trying to pursue them in earnest, doesn't net them opportunities.
Payday loan places are also pretty transparent about the situation.
And while I never had anyone outright lie to me or tell me job prospects were great, there were also few people who gave me a really clear picture of just how bad they were.
Personally I loved my PhD experience even when I knew that the race to tenure was not for me. In many ways the reward of a science PhD on the jobmarket is large. At my current company we are treated as superstars among both engineers and management, and there is plenty of ways to make use of whatever lessons learned. (Disclosure: experimental particle physicist working in the European defense industry).
Look at the Greats, or even professors until the 50s, they only had at most 6 grad students their entire career.
Many modern professors have as many students a year.
In other words, PhD does not mean "a license to teach" and it has not for at least a century.
I am not saying all these changes are for the good, but the premise in your comment is not true.
You are grossly misinformed. PhDs programs are training for a career in research. Professorships are only one possible path... and just like you intuited, it's not even the dominant career path.
In many fields, academia is the option for a career in research, and a viable career in academic research means a professorship.
I'm pretty sure Doctors specialize further, whilst working, as well?
If google is at 8%, everyone else of comparable size will probably be around 3% at best.
Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.
No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher without being a professor.
If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".
There are actually some benefits to this approach in that I don't have to work on "safe projects" that are deemed "serious research" by the community. It is actually quite liberating to work on things that others might scoff at and call you a "quack" or "wack job". And even if I am a "quack" I can honestly tell you that I am happy and feel fulfilled. Just my two cents. Life is too short to worry about everyone else.
Therein lies the rub.
Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other.
The same applies to PhDs and research. A PhD proves that the person has followed through with and understood a very precise topic of research for 2-3 years.
That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands.
A PhD program is set to help the PhD candidate research a very precise and specific topic, which more often than not is entirely irrelevant to any industry, so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.
The key difference is that an engineering degree is tailored to teach marketable job skills while the PhD program is the exact opposite.
I would say "not entirely accurate", rather than "incorrect". Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD?
> [.،.] so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.
And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field.
Given that industrial research requires you to do practically the same thing -- albeit in a more applied fashion -- a PhD is usually a good indicator when hiring for such positions. Again, there may be more suitable people for the position who don't have PhDs, but that is once again an exception to the rule.
Yes, very familiar. I've worked as a researcher in a public university and enrolled in a PhD program, but I dropped out after it was made patently clear that the whole thing was a complete waste of time.
I even had my advisor pressure me to continue working for the research group with scare tactics such as warning that getting a job would be virtually impossible and working for the research group was my only viable option.
> And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field.
...and that on its own is worth absolutely zero. You either have marketable skills or you don't, and a PhD degree does not help a PhD candidate develop marketable skills, It's years of drudge work for a research group that managed to get funding for areas which more often than not are entirely irrelevant. To develop marketable skills the PhD candidate needs to devote extra time that he doesn't have to go out of his way to make himself relevant as a job candidate.
"It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job."
Assuming that PhD's are 'smart' people, I would gather they understand all of this.
And of course 'prof' is only one role for PhD's in the world.
Economics and reality come into play as we are adults.
There's basically no excuse for 'the smartest among us' to not have a basic grasp of the dynamics of how their education will play out into their careers.
In the US at least, a substantial proportion of professors teach at institutions that are undergrad-only or where only some departments have graduate programs. I am a tenured professor of computer science and have not supervised any graduate-level research (nor will I be expected to do so).
...which is not to say that the numbers aren't all messed up. They are. And I've had many lucky breaks (and also some unlucky ones) to get where I am. But your Ponzi claim presumes that the only outcome of a PhD is an R1 professor position, which is not the case.
During my first year I was already told, 1 of the 100 of you will become professor so I had no illusions.
at what rate would new universities have to be constructed in order for this to do anything meaningful about the issue?
1. identify "known unknowns" and formulate the problem.
2. search and study existing literature and properly cite them.
3. cook up a clever way of evaluation and publish the results.
etc, etc. Unfortunately, in most universities, these techniques are kinda sorta taught, but they're far from being systematic. And many of them don't have the body of knowledge and staffers for this kind of things, probably because they're incentivized for wrong goals (e.g. the number of papers, media recognition, etc.)
I used to think that was just Japan, but then I tried to become a professor (during the post-NIH-training exponential burst of the early 2000s) and found that it's basically the same in the US now.
Nope, we don't nee more people aiming for science, we ain't got jobs for them.
I have a slave temperment and enjoy being hauranged by my PI?
My talents include falsifying experiments and writing endless papers about how our method is superior to all other methods? Yet we, much like the communist revolutions in the 20th century, have been working on it for the last 20 years?
1. For pleasure/curiosity/enjoyment (as in you are independently wealthy).
2. If you can't see yourself being happy in any other life and you understand the compromises you have to make (poor income, high competition, having to move a lot, etc.)
I know some wonderful PhDs who got doctorates with this very understanding and love their lives. But I didn't have the wealth to do it for fun, and I generally land on my feet and get happy no matter what, so I didn't borrow any more trouble and moved on with my life.
America's universities maybe may be different but this is how it was in Ireland!
The main problem with universities these days is that they are given the duty of both teaching and research, but they force people to teach that don't want to (some professors, grad students). In addition many people view universities more as job training than learning about a specific subject. If you go to college to get a degree in CS, but all you want to do is get a job at Google, you don't need CS experts to teach you intro to data structures or how to write SQL.
I think the long term solution is to entirely separate the realms of research and teaching, or to make teaching as a research professor entirely "opt-in" outside of discipline specific classes (the algebraic graph theory professor should probably be the one teaching algebraic graph theory). My university has been relying more and more on teaching-only professors to teach CS classes and I think it's a wonderful solution. The teaching-only professors are much more personable and engaged in the actual teaching, and the research professors get to focus on what they're good at.
No. PhDs are extremely specialized on a very narrow topic within a single field. They spend years researching that topic to the exclusion of everything else.
Asking PhDs to teach is like asking brain surgeons to treat common cold. They probably can do it, but it's a gross waste of their skills and expertise.
The result is an educational environment where the most visible job requirement for faculty is to teach courses in their field. But that is the portion of their responsibilities for which, from an incentives perspective, they are least accountable. Instead, to obtain a tenure-track position and ultimately earn tenure itself, primary requirements are research and publishing output, with double++ good to eleventy for bringing research grants to their institution. Teaching and advising/mentoring, not quite an afterthought, is much lower in priority & weighting in tenure review.
I have seen faculty in tenure track positions penalized for focusing too much on the side of student instruction, advising, etc. In one particular case tenure was denied on the basis of a light research portfolio despite an extensive and impressive track record of well-rated course instruction and an impressive dedication to meeting with students far more the the minimum required time. (2.5 office hours/week) Of course there may have been more to the denial, I only know the publicly available details from the fallout when a dispute was filed.
Why?
Research on the other hand, outside of the self-serving aspect - like how many papers one gets published - has hardly any immediate benefits relative to the benefits of teaching... and few long term benefits. It's more of a gamble.