If I could recommend something to you, it would be exactly that. Get into a PhD program, and drop out after two years with the MS consolation prize. If you have the two years and the money, get your MBA afterwards. In a total of four years, you can have an MS/MBA combo, which is a lucrative one in half the time it takes to get a PhD.
Don’t get me wrong, I love having my PhD, and my future is bright because I work my butt off to get my current position, and frankly got extremely lucky in obtaining it. But, if I had it to do over, no way.
Another thing to add is that the best graduate schools in the sciences are in four cities: New York, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego. As I mentioned, science, not being a free market, does not adjust for cost of living. You get the same stipend as the guy in the midwest. You ever try living in one of those cities on 22K per year?
I know. I’d rather try living in Las Cruces or Socorro (where the two schools I’m interested in are) on 5K a year (I think the pay is better than that, though) than Boston on 22K. Besides, I’m a chemist and my interest is research (well, organic chemistry with specific interests in things like calixarenes and nanotubes.) I want to be in lab doing something interesting and preferably getting paid well for it. I’m going to go where the research is interesting to me, and that is firstly NMSU and secondly NMT. Screw the idea that an MS chemist is one who couldn’t hack the Ph. D. program; this is one chemist who doesn’t want to do the Ph. D. program and actually put that in his applications to grad school, though I bet I could hack it if I wanted to.
And maybe I will look into the MBA. I’ve only taken a couple business classes, but they were somewhat interesting. Not as interesting as chemistry, but better than psychology.
Chemistry isn’t quite as bad, and you can generally do your PhD in about five years. Postdocs are more of an optional thing in chemistry, and don’t tend to last more than two years. But, yeah, I hate the premise that the MS is the guy who couldn’t hack the PhD. I have no illusions. I got the PhD because I had a higher threshhold for pain than the many who dropped out, not because I was any smarter. My own anecdotal evidence tends to support that they guys who dropped out were smarter; they considered all the alternatives, and thought about the issues and made a non-traditional decision. These are the kind of people that we should be encouraging to become scientists, not scaring away.
I’m trying to figure out some sort of inroads into science policy, as I wish that I could change the current system, which is in imminent danger of failing. In twenty years, none of the best science will be done in the university as a result of the absolulte abuse of the people in the lower levels (grad students). I have no horse in that race anymore, so I can’t be considered griping, I just love science, and want it to be healthy.
Actually, my point was less that they have to suffer just because I did and more that “you knew the deal going in, so don’t whine about how it turned out”. If they don’t like the deal of being a grad student, don’t take the job. Find another way to pay for your education and/or make spending money. If that’s the only way you can do it, then accept the terms with some modicum of grace. It’s more a standpoint that you accepted the terms and knew the score, so, in the immortal words of my friend Till, man up and do what you said you’d do.
If it’s really all about the recognition that they’re members of the faculty or recognition for whatever reason (which I find to be a highly suspect premise personally), then I have reiterate: Qualifications first, recognition as a qualified professional second.
Yes, graduate students are a valuable part of the higher educational system in many many instances. But you’re not professors, you’re not full-time teachers, you’re (at least theoretically) subject to supervision in your academic and/or teaching duties and this is because you are not yet fully-qualified professors.
Here’s the problem. In the past fifteen years, grad school has gone from five years long to 7.8 years long. By the time someone graduates grad school now, they tend to have about 11 years of laboratory experience under their belt. (three plus before grad school, and almost 8 during). Compare this to 20 or 30 years ago when the current crop of professors became professors after only five or six years of laboratory experience.
In fact graduate students ARE fully qualified to be professors several years before they graduate. Twice as qualified as current professors if you just go by years.
So, the problem boils down to this: there is an oversupply of graduate students which is being fomented by the universities. If a school needs 100 people to perform experiments they can a) hire technicians at about 40-45K per or b) open up a graduate school, and offer 20K plus a degree. They save 50% on their overhead by choosing b. They don’t have to care at all whether that degree or education is worth anything; the classes in graduate school are abysmal and could be passed by a halfway intelligent chimpanzee (I know because I’m probably as intelligent as one of the smartest chimps, thank you very much). By saving 50%, they can double the number of employees, thereby increasing the pool of PhDs (and diluting the talent). Thus, there is a mechanism in place for falsely keeping the supply of PhDs high, and thus salaries can be kept low.
To bring this back to unionization, if graduate students are simply technicians who take a few awful classes, they are employees. They have the right to unionize (as an aside, I loathe unions and wish there were another way to do it).
They knew this coming in? No. They didn’t. Graduate schools keep absolutely no records of the success or failure of their graduates. When I was interviewing, I was told how great the graduates did after graduation. This was, of course, bull (and I went to an ivy league graduate school) but there was no way to prove otherwise as they keep no records of their graduate’s whereabouts. My graduate school has no record of what I’m doing right now and I graduated six months ago. They have no idea, because they don’t care. They got what they needed out of me, which is a 50% reduction in their payroll for six years. And then, they don’t want to allow unionization on the premise that we are students? We aren’t students. We’re cheaper technicians.
Personally, I’m lucky in a lot of ways. I’m getting out of undergrad with no student loan debt (thanks, Mom and Dad!) Plus, I’m lucky that I can go to USAA (thanks, Mom!) for things like health insurance.
It’s kinda funny. Out of the seniors graduating this year (10 or 11 total, I believe), about 5 want to go for a Ph. D., one wants to teach high school, one’s going to dental school, a couple aren’t sure what they’re going to do (find jobs, I suppose) and then there’s me, the guy deliberately looking at an MS and would rather go to NMSU than Harvard or UC-Berkley (two of the many places other seniors have been accepted to.)
As I said, I’d rather have a family and work a 40 hour 9-to-5 job for pay that I could support them comfortably on. (Of course, I don’t tell the girls this as that’s often a good way to scare them off.) It might be non-traditional to some, but it’s what I want to do, and I don’t need (and refuse to) take any crap from anyone who might want to look down on me for that.
And this is why policy has to change. Because you sound like EXACTLY the kind of person that science should be bringing in, but can’t anymore.
And if unionization is what needs to be done to get that to happen, then I guess I can become pro-union for a little while.
I think it was funny a few years ago, an economist wrote a paper for Science stating that graduate students and postdocs were being paid considerably less than the janitorial staff at Harvard. At the time people were picketing for a “living wage” for the janitors.
P.S. the girls aren’t going to swoon any less with an MS than a PhD. That would be mathematically impossible.
I just want to add this: if you change the language about “technicians” to “teachers” or “researchers,” every single word Fiveyearlurker has said applies to the humanities as well.
Sorry, didn’t want to leave out humanities, but I can’t speak much to it as I don’t know as much about the issues there. But, I can easily see that it is much cheaper to hire a graduate student in English to grade papers than to hire a full-time person for that job, and making the same arguments that I made above for the humanities.
I can only speak to the sciences. But you can search all you want. PhD programs keep NO records of their graduates. I wasn’t asked what I was doing on the way out the door, and I never offered the information. I attended two different graduate programs, and neither graduate office could provide any information or statistics on their graduates.
If you pick up one of those guides to graduate school tomes, you will find no statistics on success of PhD students.
Well how do you measure this? Who made important discoveries? Who can afford the nicest car? Who has the happiest families? What about the guy that is working for a pittance doing projects to build infrastructure in the third world or something?
The schools don’t care until one of their former students picks up a Nobel. Then they’re all over you. Otherwise, they don’t care, unless they’re hitting you up for cash.
Very interesting discussion here. I think a lot hinges on what field you’re talking about. My experience is one of having recently finished a PhD in organic chemistry at a very well-known school in the Northeast US. Graduate school in chemistry (and in biology as well AFAIK) is basically a full-time job. My first year of grad school consisted of taking classes, TAing (which involved actual teaching more than just grading), and some research. The rest of my 5 1/2 years were spent doing research in the lab, six days a week, about 10 hours a day (it varied). The research was both mine and my supervisor’s, and I think this is what makes grad school in the sciences much different from the humanities.
In the case of chemistry, students were expected to spend about 60 hours per week working in the lab. To expect them to hold a non-research part-time job at the same time would be unfair. Our stipends were sufficient to live on (pay rent, eat and have a little bit of fun – but not much). We definitely weren’t making large purchases or saving lots of money.
There was never a drive to unionize at my school. We were treated fairly well by the administration, though not as well as the undergrads.
In chemistry, for academic positions, post-docs are required unless the candidate is really exceptional. Many industry positions now require post-docs as well unless the candidate’s skills are uniquely aligned with the company’s needs or the candidate has a really good track record (good school and lots of publications).
The current state of things seems to be that schools would prefer to have a large amount of the course load handled by grad students and adjuncts than to grant tenure to more professors to handle it, and that as far as already tenured professors are concerned, research and publications are much more important than teaching classes.
If grad students unionize, how would this impact the schools’ hiring practices (more adjuncts?) and admissions quotas (smaller grad classes?)?
In the physics department of the school I went to (UM-Rolla) only one professor in the whole department was actively involved in his own original research, and he was a theoretician. On my freshmen “Intro to What?” class, one prof continually had to defer to his graduate students during a lab tour to explain what was actually going on in his research (thin films). Nonetheless, I’m sure his name appeared first (if not exclusively) on all papers regarding “his” work.
OTOH, in the nonacademic departments like Cloud and Atmosphereic Physics or Rock Mechanics and Explosives profs routinely did their own research. And in nonresearch departments like Basic Engineering (which taught Statics, Mechanics of Materials, most Dynamics, and a couple of intro and lab courses) profs did all the lectures and prepared, if not oversaw, all of the lab courses and materials. But I worked for one assistant prof–a guy who had Distinguished Teaching plaques for every semester he ever taught–who was seriously worried about not getting tenure because he hadn’t brought in enough funding.
Part of the problem, and I don’t know how much this has changed over the years, is that profs have to spend a considerable amount of time soliciting for funding, filling out paperwork (espeically anything associated with DARPA or DoE), and these activities are the ones on which the greatest attention is focused that there is little incentive for the profs to do actual work. Given a pool of indentured servants who’ll work for virtually nothing to do the research, experimental, and classroom/lecture work, they jump at the opportunity to lighten their workloads. Plus, at least in the hard sciences, I suspect many profs have so little grasp on current developments in their own fields that they aren’t able to provide the kind of career guidance needed by developing grad students, leading to the complaints that profs just want students as labor and provide little or no mentoring.
I’d seriously love to go back to school and get a Ph.D. in the sciences–biophysics or somesuch–but after seeing anecdote after anecdote about how grad students are treated, how little reward many receive for basically taking most of their advisor’s workload, and the scarce post-doc opportunties I’m pretty dubious about even considering it.
How fairly you are treated, and how far the stipend goes depends on the school and location. At Rolla, I don’t think there were any massive complaints (or more than normal) for most departments, and the cost of living was so low that the $12k stipend comfortably paid for an economy apartment, groceries, and so forth, and be able to sock away a little bit for fun and contingencies. I can’t imagine living on even twice that in, say, Boston or San Francisco. And as JHW3 says, the work takes so much time that there really isn’t any way for a student to take on a second job.
The resulting degree and post-doc experience isn’t really all that competitive in the current market, either, especially not in comparison to what one can make with a law or medical degree, or even and MBA. While I’m a little less sympathetic to those shoting for a doctorate in the Fine Arts or Social Sciences (what is the necessity?), I find it disheartening, both from a personal and objective standpoint, that we place so little value on the basic sciences in this country, and I think this is a harbinger of our eventual downfall as a technological and educational power.
But meanwhile, business as usual. Should the students be allowed to organize? Sure, if they like. And the universities can no doubt replace them…probably with immigrants who’ll be happy to come to this country and get graduate degrees from first tier universities. That’s the market.
You may not find something like that in the library, but I can tell you that some PhD programs do keep track, do keep records, do spend considerable time and effort taking stock of what happens to their graduates after they earn the degree.
All I can say is that I graduated less than six months ago, and if my school wanted to contact me, or list what I was doing, they would be completely unable to. I didn’t avoid telling them. I was just never asked. No exit interview. The graduate office never asked. I’m not even sure my supervisor remembers where I went, and I was his only graduate student!
I went to two different PhD programs and neither kept any record at all.
Well they can try if they want, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them. If I’m reading the article right, they’re already getting $18/k a year PLUS tuition. That sounds like a pretty goddamn sweet deal to me. When I was a grad assistant, I got tuition and a small stipend, and to be honest, I would have done it just for the tuition. I was happy to have that. Most students had to pay to go to grad school. Most students take on a considerable debt by the time they’re done. What would tuition be at Yale and Columbia anyway? It’s gotta be astronomical. I don’t think they know how good they’ve got it. Yes, they’re working for the college, but the college is doing them a favor just as much as they’re doing the college a favor. You wouldn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting a professorship with only an undergrad degree and no experience.
