Not very many - 30 credit hours maybe? The credits are not what make the PhD take a long time - it’s the thesis, which is not done as “credit hours”.
It is the norm in the sciences. Table 1 from the link above shows total time to degree and registered time to degree (I guess these differ a bit as some people might take some time off. Personally, I never saw anyone take any significant time off.). The life sciences show TTD at 8.3 years in the last time that they have, which is unfortunately 2003. It’s actually down from a max of 9 years in the early 1990s. Remember as well, that this is real years; there are no summers off here, and in all likelihood you’re working weekends and holidays.
I got my PhD in the life sciences less than ten years ago. Mine took six years, and I really pushed and pushed to get out quickly. My biggest issue was that we were lied to about time to degree. When we were interviewing, we were told that it took 5-6 years to graduate on average, and this was clearly not true. There was no way to verify because no data was kept.
The amount of data generated in the course of a PhD today vs. 20 years ago is ridiculously higher. The general rule in my program, which is something of a norm, I believe, was two first author data publications in real journals. But the amount of data in a publication today vs 20 years ago is astronomically more. So, it takes a lot longer despite the fact that this benchmark of two papers has remained the same. But, the real reason that it takes longer is that there are simply no positions for all these science PhDs, but we need them to continue running experiments (and getting grants) and thus there is absolutely no incentive to decrease the time to degree, and every incentive to make it take as long as possible.
Maybe in your program. My program (EE) required 96 credit hours, on which there were restrictions on how many hours of research or seminars could be taken and a minimum number of hours of real classes. There was also a requirement on taking classes outside your area of research (and classes in other departments that were applicable did not count for this requirement).
This was not dissimilar from the requirements I saw in other programs to which I was accepted.
Compressing it all down, it would take 2 or 3 years of nothing but classes to fulfill this part of the degree with additional years of research work and seminars. From what I heard, a lot of students would get around half the classwork fulfilled in the first year or two just preparing for quals (we had an alternate system to qualifying exams at my school).
FTR, they never lied to us about the time to degree. They said 8-10 years of steady work. Maybe 5-6 if you got really lucky and worked your tail off (emphasis luck). OTOH, we had a solid department with a good reputation.
Really? Where? I have never seen a resume for a CS post doc, and I see plenty of them. I got my PhD 33 years ago, and a postdoc wasn’t even considered. All the time I’ve been recruiting PhDs - which is quite a while - I saw one, a woman from Brazil who was getting her foot in the door.
I’ve only skimmed some author bios in Computer, but I don’t recall seeing any there either.
Did this start during the recession?
ETA: If you are in the UK, this doesn’t apply. I was only speaking of the US.
I took seven years, but that was with switching universities and taking and passing two sets of quals and orals, and taking a semester off to just teach.
When my PhD student interns leave I give them a lecture about managing their advisers. I’ve seen how being too valuable to your adviser is a bad thing, for exactly the reasons you mention. I made it a point to not learn certain things - or pretend that I didn’t know them.
Two examples of cutting through the junk. My intern two years ago really wanted to move out here, and we offered her a job. Her adviser, who I know, managed to get her out in 6 months versus the expected two years. When my daughter unexpectedly got two job offers, she glommed together some papers she had written into a dissertation in about 4 months, and finished at least a year earlier than expected. And I leveraged my job offer to get my stuff done faster. It is a lot of work, but you can do it.
Of course biologists have nasty things like the gestation period of lab animals to worry about …
It’s gotten worse lately, apparently, but there have always been CS postdocs. 33 years ago when you graduated, there was still quite a demand for faculty and there were a lot more companies with dedicated research labs (e.g. DEC and Bell Labs). By the early 90’s (when I graduated), the departments were saturated and companies were eliminating their research departments. So lots of people found themselves in holding patterns including some, in my department, who had C.V.s that could have gotten them a tenure case ten years earlier. Also, if your research wasn’t in the latest trendy area, you were kind of screwed.
IME: 72 credits (e.g. 4 years at standard 9 credits/semester) total for PhD, 32 credits for Master’s. 24 of those 32 can be transferred to PhD. But the PhD level is the part where you should have already stopped worrying about grades and credits, except to fulfill some minimum BS that the school throws at you. Most programs aren’t about the classes you can take.
Concur. The fastest I know of is 4 years, if this person finishes, which I imagine will happen. The longest I know of is near a decade for just a master’s, but I never met this person except know their advisor was terrible, so I don’t know of the motivation. The one person I did know who was a student of this guy got screwed out of a master’s by several years at the very last minute.
I finished my PhD within 5 years. It also depends on what is being investigated, the funding, the level of cutting edge technology needed, the techniques that can be used, etc. I was studying a disease for which little was known in an animal that has no other model and has little reagents that can be used experimentally. After lots of negative results, I managed to compile some experiments into a thesis and graduate. I’ve published one article out of that and I’m in the process of writing 2 others.
Another thing is that negative results are not published. But I suggest that at this point, this is important, so that people don’t keep reinventing the wheel and students end up spending months/years/resources on stuff that doesn’t pan out.
Also, the PhD route may be so in the US because in many cases students go from BS to PhD without getting an MA/MS in the way. I know this is not so in other places, where the standard still is BS-MS-PhD (or something like that). So while it may seem 8 years is a lot, it is not that far from a masters that took 3 years and a PhD then that took 5.
Lastly, I do know (based on talks with friends in humanities) that some humanities department are trying to cap the time to PhD to 4-5 years.
I stand corrected. For some reason, I was under the impression that time to degree was shorter in the sciences. It sounds like the job-market-related issues, at least, are very similar.
What I get from the article is that PhDs who want a tenure track faculty position are the ones getting screwed. That I can believe, and it explains why I don’t see resumes from post docs. It is certainly true that the number of industrial research positions have declined, but there are still plenty of good openings for new PhDs - and there is a shortage of them, given new hire salaries.
I don’t know about IBM, but Bell Labs had a lot fewer real research positions than most people thought. My group was usually 50% research funded, but we were looking 3 - 5 years out not the 6+ years that Area 11 looked at. And my center had lots of PhDs who never did real research.
I do some research now though I’m careful to never call it that, and many of our new PhDs aren’t all that interested in research.
When my wife was in grad school, in biology, the faculty had a definite “get a faculty job or you’re a bum” sort of mentality which my CS professors never had. Do CS professors have this mindset now? Or is the data from the article about a self-selected set of students?
In my field, YMMV completely by the program/school. After getting your BA/BS, typical routes are:
[ol]
[li]Apply to a PhD program, where you get a master’s on the way. You are free to drop out after the master’s with little consequence. This may be the most common.[/li][li]Apply to a PhD program, where you go straight towards the PhD. 2b if you drop out, you may be given what I call a “pity master’s.” Pretty common as well.[/li][li]Apply to an MA only program. Once you finish, you may apply to a PhD program. Not that common, in my experience.[/li][/ol]
Oh I am somewhat comforted by the fact that Apu Nahasapeemapetilon took 9 years to get CS PhD at Springfield Heights Institute of Technology, and he’s not exactly lazy (if fictional).
I was in the biomedical sciences. I was the chairperson for one year and attempted to bring in people to discuss “alternative” careers in science (a funny term considering greater than 90% of people end up in these alternative careers). I was banned from having this seminar under the auspices that this is not what we were being trained for. I believe the quote was “If you guys want to become patent lawyers or drug dealers, you’ll have to figure that out on your own time.”
So, the only acceptable careers were a) academic scientist b) you’re on your own.
I had always heard that computer science graduate education doesn’t prepare you very well for non-academic work. Is that not true?
I need to go snag another PhD then…
Well, yeah, I’m in the UK, but that doesn’t change what I said: I still attend meetings, conferences and so on with researchers from the US, get the same job advertisements and know of projects employing postdocs. There’s as many CS postdocs in the US as there are in any other subject, in my experience, and this doesn’t seem to be something novel, or introduced during the recession.
No. My wife has a PhD in pharmacology, and after a few grants she obtained for herself after her viva she entered industry. Apparently in biology, once you enter industry there’s absolutely no way of re-entering academia, as there’s some weird bias against it (despite industrial labs being lightyears ahead in the techniques they are using and the funding they receive). In CS, it’s quite common for people to move back and forth between industry and academia, and there’s no bias against industry, as far as I can see.
It doesn’t prepare you well for the kinds of jobs that CS undergraduates get. But then again, somebody with a CS PhD isn’t looking to get those sorts of jobs, typically, anyway.
It depends on what your dissertation is on, I guess. Likely true for theoretical computer science work, but mine was in architecture and compilers, and I had no trouble moving into industry - a bit above the BS level, though.
The thing I don’t get about this article is that it doesn’t touch upon if they’re making that little money because of their advanced education. Have they injured themselves financially via getting a Ph.D, or were they destined to make that little all along by sticking with that field? I mean, according to the salaries quoted on average they’re making less money a year at 1.5 times the hours than I make with a B.A. Would they have made more if they stopped at a B.S. or a Masters? Or would they make even less with those degrees in their chosen fields?