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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

> However, most of the people who have a huge impact on the world, outside of pure research and education, do not have PhD's. Draw from that whatever conclusion you think makes sense.

My conclusion is that Marc is being a bit sloppy here. Like 75% of the Y Combinator partners, I have a Ph.D.---and I think graduate (and, indeed, undergraduate) degrees are overrated. But given the small percentage of Ph.D.s even among technical people, it would be very surprising if most people having a high impact had them. More relevant is to ask whether Ph.D.s have relatively more impact than those without doctoral degrees. I don't know the answer, but I think it's a more interesting question.

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Marc is telling it like it is, even if it is a little difficult to hear.

A Ph.D. is a huge opportunity cost with an extraordinarily high risk/reward ratio. I have often had undergraduates ask me if they should pursue a Ph.D. I first ask them if it is their desire to teach at a research university. This desire is a little like becoming an NBA player especially in certain technical fields like physics. A horde of Ph.D. candidates is good for tenured Professors and research universities, but not necessarily for the students. Post-doc hell is left as an excercise for the reader.

If they don't have a burning desire to be a professor or happen to dislike trees, I don't really see the point of a Ph.D. I tell them to at least take a hard look at the costs of their decision either way: real financial, opportunity, time, etc. An objective tally will rarely be in favor of a Ph.D.

I share Marc's (and your) skepticism about the value of a Ph.D., which is part of why I said that graduate degrees are overrated. I also counsel undergraduates to consider the large opportunity costs of graduate school. But I was taking issue with the sloppiness of the statement "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world . . . do not have PhD's", which would seem to be true whether or not having a Ph.D. is particularly valuable. It's sort of like saying "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world are not left-handed". Well, yes, but that's true even if you replace "the world" with "baseball", and yet lefties have proportionally more impact in baseball despite still being a minority. The question is, can the same be said of Ph.D.s (in the world, I mean, not in baseball)?

I think this is software-centric thinking.

If you look at hardware, you really need a Ph.D. to make a serious contribution to theory, and a lot of important founders (Intel springs to mind) had doctorates.

[Off Topic]: mnemonicsloth, please put your email address or some contact info in your news.yc profile, if you don't mind. Or shoot me an email.

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