A proposal to improve job prospects for PhD holders and also alleviate college/university costs

Great Debates
21

Frankly, I think this is a solution in search of a problem. I was working on my PhD and the poor job outlook for it was one of the reasons I quit working on my thesis. I don’t think the problem is what to do with rising cost of education and out of work PhDs, it’s that we’ve artificially inflated the demand for a college education and PhDs.

When I was in high school, I remember a constant push for college preparation, essentially with the idea that if you didn’t, you were going to fail as an adult. I think something like 95% of my class went on to get at least a 2-year degree, and well more than half got 4-years. Yet I know that it wasn’t all that long ago that this wasn’t the case.

Lots of jobs that don’t really have a good reason for a degree are now requiring them. Looking at my field, as a computer scientist, why does an entry level IT help desk or even a menial code testing job require a degree? All the documentation for the help desk types can be written by people with degrees, but they don’t need a degree to follow a step-by-step document. Same with menial coding jobs, algorithms and design, or use cases or whatever can be done by people with degrees, so they can get by with a lot less. But it seems they now require them because everyone has them anyway.

And that’s why “the invisible hand of the market” now has ridiculous costs of education. The demand is ridiculously high, because everyone thinks they need one. And, as a consequence, the way to distinguish yourself beyond that is to go get graduate degrees. So with such a ridiculously high demand, the market will continue to raise education prices and pump out unnecessary PhDs.

I’m not really sure what a better solution is, since I think it requires a social change, though technology is helping some, but I think the solution to the current situation provided by the OP will exacerbate the situation. As pointed out, there’s a lot of incorrect assumptions about the knowledge and motivation of PhDs; a lot of them are not willing or able to teach. As it is right now, degree inflation aside, a degree in X from the University of Y is more or less a known quantity, but with a solution like this, with less oversight from the university, I think it would create more variability in the value of a degree.

Yes, there are programs that work like this, where you can get credits for assisting in research, but that generally gets special oversight. And homeschooling isn’t really comparable since, at least in this state and when I was in school, those kids were still required to pass certain state issued standardized tests and their portfolios of work were scrutinized by whatever state officials.

Perhaps something like this could work to some degree with high demand courses, particularly the low level courses, but to that extent, to a large degree they already are, since many introductory courses are taught by PhD candidates and such already. So, it really just seems to me like needless complication.

22

I didn’t read anything in that article that leads me to believe that PhDs are divorced from the free market economy. I’m afraid we’re reading the same article to two very different conclusions of what the author is saying. Can you explain why you read that article and think supply and demand has failed?

He wrote, “As Table 1 shows, there are just too many postdocs for us to absorb them as tenured faculty. . . . The forces of supply and demand are unlikely to improve the economic situation of postdocs in any plausible time period. One reason is that the supply of postdocs consists not only of U.S. citizens and permanent residents gaining Ph.D.s but also of U.S.- and foreign-trained Ph.D.s from other countries.”

I take this to mean that the author is arguing there is a large supply of postdocs to draw on, meaning they are undervalued. That seems exactly like supply and demand to me.

I’m not trying to be difficult, I just don’t see why this is society’s job to fix. If anyone else goes into an oversubscribed labor market for something, they are going to find it difficult to get good work. Why should the rules of supply and demand be different for the several thousand historians, sociologists, or engineers who are getting their PhDs this year, as compared to, say, the starlets who go to Hollywood to compete with thousands of other young attractive women for very few acting jobs?

If you want to say there should be more money for S&T research, I’m with you. More government funding of cancer or space research would be great – not because it would employ more people, but because the investment is worth it. But nobody is forcing talented students into PhD programs to pursue a career with possible low incomes, just like nobody is forcing starlets to leave Kansas for the Hollywood Hills. People are generally responsible for the career choices they have made, and it doesn’t make sense for society to have to actively manage an oversupply of PhDs (assuming that really is the case).

23

I’m not sure what problem this is actually trying to solve. The job market for PhDs is terrible, but that’s the just the market for academic jobs or, more generally, jobs requiring and using the PhD. In my own field, for example, people with theoretical math PhDs have an unemployment rate of about 1%; it’s just that most wind up having to go into something besides theoretical math (and teaching calculus to undergrads isn’t theoretical math). Setting up a grad-school-lite for undergrads or masters candidates to work with PhDs who aren’t full professors is really missing the point. I don’t think your idea of assistantships is bad, we already have them: they’re just postdocs. I’d like to see more of them too, but I don’t think there’s really much demand or interest for PhDs to take on what are effectively their own grad students. In addition to the very specialized knowledge and research in grad school, part of the point of it is to start your academic career by publishing papers, going to conferences, and generally getting your name out there. Working with someone who just has a PhD isn’t enough; you need a full professor with connections. It’s a vicious, nasty field.

24

PhD surplus? I wish, in my field at least. Given skyrocketing starting salaries for new PhDs, no surplus here.

Maybe the idea would work for humanities majors, but anyone interested in CS or Engineering is going to get some poor quality teachers, since the good ones will have jobs already.
People living in out of the way places would have to move to someplace with a big enough set of unemployed PhDs to do all this teaching. I’m not at all convinced it would be even cheaper than a (state) university, given the relatively small number of students a person could take and the number of teachers the kid would need.
Now, maybe a student could help an English Lit major do research, but not a Psych PhD. How would an unaffiliated person get Human Subject approval? (My daughter has a new PhD in Psychology (and also Marketing - she’s not dumb) and a good postdoc, so I’m up on this.

We hear all the time from professors in subjects with high PhD unemployment about how being an English major has all sorts of benefits for getting a job, like being able to reason well, etc. Maybe the real answer is to convince employers of the truth of this. One reason there is no crisis in Engineering PhD employment is that companies like mine suck up new PhDs for useful work. If those in other fields feel that anything but an academic position would be demeaning, they have only themselves to blame for the problem.

25

On this point, isn’t there perpetually some conventional wisdom that a large wave of retirements is just over the horizon? Perhaps this sort of thing fuels the continued striving, thinking (however inaccurately) that the situation is bound to loosen up somehow.

26

Perhaps one cause is the greater number of journals? The ones I review for have very strict requirements on the amount of new information required for a paper to be accepted. I’m familiar with LPU, but we have a reasonably small number of journals to fill.
Really good journals like Nature probably have a lot more submissions than they used to have, which would explain the requirement for more data and better results. I’ve seen more data in my journals, but that is the result of easier to obtain test cases and faster computers which allow more data to be run.

The problem of advisers wishing to hold onto students was there 33 years ago when I got my PhD. I always make sure to tell my PhD candidate interns about how to manage your adviser.
I gather you are a biologist, but it sounds like you don’t consider industry a legitimate career choice for PhDs. I understand, my wife is a biologist and when she was in grad school the faculty looked down their nose at industry. Not true in
Computer Science. In fact, we don’t have postdocs, since the demand is way too great and no university could afford them. We teach new methods to our new hires - or, since the field is changing so quickly, they teach new methods to us.

27

Indeed. If new PhDs don’t even consider taking half the jobs out there because they are too good for them, that is not a market failure. That’s a failure of imagination.
Someone wishing to be a professor should have a bunch of papers either published or in the pipeline by the time they graduate - not in the best journals, but at least in some. Someone without the initiative to do this is not going to suddenly perk up if they do get a faculty job, and they won’t get tenure. Publications are nice for the PhDs I hire, but not crucial.
I hope no one says there isn’t enough money for biology research. My engineering professor friends tell me that their students want to go into bioengineering because that is where the money is - and they are right.

28

As much as I want to foster education in the US I wonder if the preponderance of Federal money being pumped into higher learning divorces students from the actual cost of their education. I.e. a student gets accepted to college and gets cheap loans which pushes off the day of reckoning. The student then choses a major which doesn’t have great job prospects because they don’t feel immediate pressure to pay off the schooling.

29

Which means you are taking at least some kids from poorer families out of the college pool. No major is safe four years later, so you can reduce the pool of engineers as well as history majors.

30

Easy there! Not only did I consider industry legitimate, that’s what I ended up doing! Like I said earlier, I’m not coming from a place of bitterness. I’m doing very well!

But, I wasn’t the smartest one in graduate school (a very good one - not to brag, but to emphasize the issue), but I’m one of only a few who are even still in science 10 years out from PhD completion. The rest had to bail out when no jobs were there, and society is the worse for it. It’s not a matter of being underpaid. Scientists have probably been largely underpaid for a long time, and none of us went into it to become Tony Stark. It’s a matter of not earning a living wage.

The average age to get the first R01 grant back a few years ago was 42. The percentage of R01 grants going to people in their 30s is something like 2%. A career choice is not sustainable if you’re asking people to give up two decades of earning potential training for positions that don’t exist. Not to mention that it is quite rare to do your best science at the age of 60. All of this is dramatically different from the numbers 30 years ago.

Industry can’t sop up all the PhDs either. And, once you’ve done more than 5 years of postdoc, you end up being labeled “too academic” and you have little shot at an industry position (but still have a ways to go to apply for a tenured academic position).

I’m sure that things are industry specific, and what is true in CS might not be true in biology; the fact that there are not CS postdocs suggests that there is a dramatic difference in the fields. But, in biology there is a collapsing pyramid going on.

I don’t have the solutions (thus, am sorry for the hijack), but I see that there is a problem. Hell, maybe I’m part of the problem.

31

We should get away from the idea that an education is tightly correlated to the ability to do a job. Because it is not, a higher degree (except in a trade, like Medicine or perhaps a STEM science) is really just a proxy for general ability to do schoolwork. And perhaps not even that, given the various machinations by which people are accepted into degree programs.

If PhD holders need their job prospects externally bolstered, one suspects they chose poorly on how to prepare for a job.

I am reminded of a comment Bill Cosby made during one of his monologues way back in the late 60’s: “When I got out of high school, I had to join the army because all the dropouts had the jobs…” (Why Is There Air, I think)

32

This is really disheartening. I was taught as a child that the pursuit of Science was a Great Equalizer - it didn’t matter who you were or who you knew, your research stood on its own feet. Claiming that X paper was superior to Y paper based on its author was committing the horrible sin of the Ad Hominem Fallacy. If you do good research, you are a good scientist. If you do bad research, you’re gonna have a bad time.

33

It’s not that papers themselves are going to be dismissed; it’s that in order to do the research in the first place, you have to have enough clout, networking, reputation, and so forth to get into the right universities, labs, and so forth. (This certainly holds for areas that obviously require specific, expensive equipment, like particle physics or biology; what many not be as obvious is that it’s also true for all fields, including pure math). The age of amateur gentleman scientists is long dead; you need the right institutional backing in order to conduct research, and those spaces are limited and competitive. I’d still advise anyone who asked me for advice to go into science, since there a few very alternatives for something as profound, challenging, deep, and fulfilling and scientific or mathematical research. Still, it’s awfully depressing to realize just how slim your chances are, and to realize that you may wind up having to spend your life as, say, a code monkey in a software house if things don’t work out. There are far fewer academic or research jobs than people able and willing to do them.

34

Too many sub-topics in this thread for me to organize this post better. So, assorted thoughts…

  • There are thousands of paths for life after college, but hard-working top-of-the-class students are surrounded by role models whose experiences are entirely in academia. Further, the set of those experiences has tremendous selection bias. When a student goes to a professor, it is natural to hear: “Yes, I enjoyed grad school a lot, and I got a post doc position, and then I landed my dream job. You should definitely consider that path for your life!” This is compounded by the fact that these same students also have little life experience outside of academia. (“I like learning and thinking. More learning and thinking, please!”). Choosing what to do after college is also just plain difficult anyway, with major uncertainties down any chosen path, so there is a (natural, human) tendancy to prune the decision tree aggressively. The situation is a perfect recipe for complete dismissal of non-academic career paths.

  • I echo the statements that earning a PhD has little to do with becoming a good tutor/teacher. The stuff done during a PhD is just too narrow, too technical, too irrelevant to what these freelance students need. Academic experience is not a continuum along which one progresses, becoming ever more able to assist those lower down on the ladder.

  • Related: A degree goes well beyond “I wrote these papers. I took these courses.” Class discussions, debates with peers, conversations with professors, time management, social pressures, (and in grad school) going to seminars to learn about the field, “comparing notes” with peers doing research in adjacent groups, presenting work at conferences… When someone has a degree, you expect all of those experiences to be there, even if the only officially recorded items are course grades and (for grad school) the single bit of information that, yes, they did a thesis.

  • For freelance graduate research: Getting a PhD is one thing. Being able to conduct independent research is another. Being able to manage someone else doing research is another still. In short, having a PhD seems a poor proxy for “able to grant graduate degrees”.

  • The amateur scientist toiling away in the basement is gone not because of red tape or university clout or anything disappointing like that. It’s just that the “easy” stuff has all been done. To address the unknown questions 150 years ago, you needed a box of mice and your thinking cap, or a lodestone and some wire. We’re past those questions now, and you need infrastructure, technicians, equipment, engineers, computing, etc., to get to the forefront of human knowledge today. Even on the theoretical/mathematical side, forefront research involves tremendous resources (computational in some cases, but even just collaboration and interaction of the sort available in, say, a university environment).

35

In my field a fair number of professors have spent time in industry. and many of those who haven’t are very eager to work with people in industry. But there are a lot of areas where your observation is dead on.

Most PhD students have had to teach some, which is different from being a good teacher but at least gives some experience.

Excellent point. When I interview new PhDs I read or skim their papers, and ask questions to see of they really understand the field - the kind of experience you get in a good seminar.

But a necessary prerequisite. Not all PhDs are good at independent research, but very few non-PhDs are.

36

It should be noted that the eight year long PhD position is an American phenomenon and completely unheard of in the UK. In fact, most universities here put a maximum time (usually four years) on the length of a PhD, with you being thrown out after that time period is up. Funding from our research bodies is also usually limited to four years, with many only offering 3.5 years worth of funding. It doesn’t seem to affect our ability to produce science.

37

Who is “we”? I’m a computer science postdoc. There’s lots of us around.

38

Is there any particular reason why it should take eight years to complete a Ph.D?

39

In the sciences, I understand this is not the norm at all. In the humanities, it’s not unusual for the following reasons:

  1. There’s no collaboration or piggybacking off of an advisor’s research involved, as is often the case in the sciences – the dissertation is entirely the candidate’s project from conception to finished product, and there’s an increasing amount of pressure to turn it into a book manuscript that can be published very soon after the degree is awarded.

  2. Many dissertations require archival research (this is almost always the case in history, but sometimes it’s true in literature as well). Unless they have a nonservice fellowship, this means that most candidates have to pack all of their research and associated travel into the summer, since they’ll normally be teaching during the academic semester.

  3. PhDs need teaching experience to have a prayer of getting an academic job in the current climate (and usually it’s how departments expect them to fund their degrees in any case), but teaching eats up a lot of time. At least in English and foreign languages, grad students are often the instructor of record for introductory classes, responsible for all of the planning and grading, rather than TAs.

  4. Sometimes the candidate has to learn a new language or brush up their reading skills in a language they’ve already studied, which takes time.

  5. There’s no actual benefit to rushing through the degree before your funding runs out. It often takes job candidates three or four cycles on the job market to land a tenure-track job (luck of the draw, and it takes time to polish one’s interviewing skills), but older degrees start to look “stale,” especially if the candidate has been working outside of academia. So a common strategy is to go on the job market when the dissertation is nearly finished and could be defended within a semester if necessary, but to hold back if you don’t get a job that cycle.

40

How many credits does a PhD usually require?