Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

It's an unfortunate predicament, and one for which I don't see any particularly simple solutions.

First of all, this is hardly a problem that's exclusive to "liberal arts" PhDs. However, it's probably exacerbated in their case due to the often limited market demand for their skills.

What solution, other than some form of guaranteed job, is viable? Subsidizing PhDs lifetime employment with public funds would be messy and unpopular (although not completely without merit, IMHO).

The second option would be to limit supply. For instance, Universities only admitting as many PhDs as they could possibly absorb (or, providing a guaranteed-employment PhD track for a select few).

This would drastically lower the number of PhD recipients, with uncertain effects on society as a whole. While this might negatively effect our net research output, it might also funnel talented and hard working individuals into potentially productive lines of work. I'm basing this on the assumption that anyone who is capable of completing a PhD (in anything), has the potential to contribute very meaningfully in a variety of other professions or even fields.

"Universities only admitting as many PhDs as they could possibly absorb"

This is an excellent idea, and I've also been a proponent of pushing liberal arts minors in combination with other degrees that provide a much more employability. Neither of these ideas will be embraced because each college department honestly believes their area of focus is the most important topic on earth. Add the desire of the college administrators to build a little kingdom of their own, and you won't even be heard.

I'm not sure how it works in the liberal arts, but for STEM PhDs, it's not so much that they "believe their area of focus is the most important topic on earth" as much as they admit PhD students so that they have employees to do research.

No it's not... there are many more job-types available for PhDs than academia, so tying it directly to how many that particular school could support isn't a good strategy.

Is a school only to admit a graduate student when one of their tenured faculty is ready to retire?

Sure there are more graduate students than jobs available, especially in academia, but it's not necessarily a good idea to tie admissions directly to something like that.

It makes less sense in the sciences where graduate students are typically the ones that do the experiments that the PI is interested in and keep a lab running and funded (Post-docs usually have a little more independence in their projects). But, one thing that naturally limits the number of graduate students in the sciences is that those positions are usually funded. So, if a department wants to admit a student, they had better make sure that there is some way to pay for them. That naturally limits the number of graduate students that a program can handle at any one time.

Another solution would be to allow those interested in PhDs an informed decision as to whether or not to pursue the degree. Major media could make occasional reports on the status of the post-doctoral job market available to all interested parties; those parties could then be allowed to balance personal cost against expected outcome.

The entire system of modern "research" and PhDs strikes me as an unsuccessful attempt to mass-produce the kind of scientific thinkers that made our modern world.

PhDs are basically people who occupied the "student" role as long as they could. Based on my experience, they often lack the fundamentals to make use of their education. They are not clever enough, curious enough or brave enough.

We have expensively overeducated an ordinary person in the hope of producing a Newton or Galileo.

No doubt there are many exceptions, but I have noticed this tendency.

You feel that a 4 year degree is enough depth and background to learn all of the details of most technical fields to contribute original research to them? To me that seems unlikely and if someone could pick all of that up then they would already be in the Newton category and probably bypass the PhD process altogether.

I think it's important to note that neither Einstein, Newton nor Galileo were geniuses in a vacuum. They all stood on the shoulders of prior discoveries, and were well educated by the standards of their time.

In general, I think we tend to be a little quick to hero worship. Either way, there's certainly enough room in the scientific community for researchers who are diligent, meticulous and contribute to small measurable improvements in the state of the art.

Moreover, given the increased complexity involved in actually pushing the state of the art in just about any field - I'm not exactly sure what an alternative higher-educational model would or should look like.

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