Should we get rid of the Ph.D. thesis?

Great Debates
1

The original idea behind the Ph.D. thesis was a good one. Doing original research in a field gives you a deeper understand of the field than merely reading other people’s research. You get to know what types of uncertainties affect the results and how to judge a source’s reliability or lack thereof. Hence having years of real research experience under your belt makes you a better teacher, reviewer, and leader in your field of choice.

In some fields the system may still work fairly well. In chemistry and biology, students in the doctoral programs still do research that’s cutting-edge and relevant. In other fields, however, I fear the system is collapsing. In math and physics, the Ph.D. thesis is often in a hyperspecialized field that holds meaning for only an extremely small number of people. In the humanities, doctoral students are often pushed into very obscure topics simply because everything that can be said about the most famous people, events, and trends has already been said. In some cases, students may even be forced to pursue a thesis that might be charitably described as “baloney” because more accurate research would not be original enough.

The results are becoming evident. First, there’s already a widespread popular perception that thesis research is a waste of time. Second, universities are giving more of their teaching load to lecturers who have only a Masters, an unspoken admission that the Ph.D. is not as relevant as it used to be. So what say you? Should we change the system so that professors can go tenure-track without having to spend five years of their life laboring on something that may only be read by fifty people or fewer?

2

Nope, lowers the barriers to entry too much.

While it is true that many a dissertation never sees the light of day, the better scholars are able to submit their dissertation to reputatable journals for publication.

As long as faculty members at research universities are expected to continue to publish research articles, the degree needs to test their ability to do just that.

Now, do we need a secondary education level for lecturers? Absolutely - as long as people are willing to be taught by those same lecturers.

We also need to take scholarly research and get it into the hands of the general public. Each university needs an office of “dumbing it down for Oprah,” IMHO. That office would take a journal article and create an abstract that can be read by the average university graduate.

3

You might as well ask what good is a single brick for building a wall. Each thesis adds something to the grand total of human knowledge - maybe a very little bit, but something.

Besides, even if your thesis is “baloney”, the research you have to do for it isn’t. You can write crap, but you can’t cite it.

4

[QUOTE=Algher]

We also need to take scholarly research and get it into the hands of the general public. Each university needs an office of “dumbing it down for Oprah,” IMHO. That office would take a journal article and create an abstract that can be read by the average university graduate.
[/QUOTE]

It’s my opinion that a university graduate should have the wherewithal to tackle a scholar article without it being dumbed down.

And I’m having a hard time envision an office containing personel with enough expertise to handle the incredibly diverse range of research topics that would come through it. I can’t even understand much of molecular biology and I have a Ph.D in biology! I would pity the poor sap who would have to distill cytochrome p450s and 19th century Russian poets all in the same day.

5

Nope. The dissertation is absolutely essential. But then I’m a biologist. :slight_smile:

6

More like an unspoken admission that universities want a lower payroll burden. And tenure track for master’s holders? The whole purpose of hiring lecturers is getting classes taught without the burden of tenure - or, often, of health and other benefits.

The same universities that hire lecturers also hire researchers, with PhDs, who are also off of the tenure track because they’re not teaching.

7

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
First, there’s already a widespread popular perception that thesis research is a waste of time.
[/quote]

Waste of time compared to what?

This, I think, is a different issue from “getting rid of the the Ph.D. thesis.” The Ph.D. thesis is still valid for those who wish to have a career doing original research.

The gist of your second paragraph seems to be that almost no original research remains to be done in certain fields. (Frankly, I doubt very much that one of them is physics.) If that were so (and I am not at all convinced it is), one solution might be to eliminate doing research in that department and no longer hire Ph.Ds. Courses in that subject area could be taught by non-Ph.D. Lecturers who might be eligible for tenure; but who would not ever qualify for the title (or salary) of Professor.

Certainly if someone is going to be expected to do original research at all, they should earn a Ph.D. by doing original research and writing a Ph.D. If they don’t need to do original research, then they shouldn’t be required to do so. But they shouldn’t be paid at the same scale as those who do do original research.

8

I think we should get rid of the PhD entirely.
Titles are for British anachronists.

9

[QUOTE=Molly & Polly]
I think we should get rid of the PhD entirely.
Titles are for British anachronists.
[/QUOTE]

The title, or the thesis? The OP is not talking so much about the title, but the research requirement.

I take it neither of you girls has a Ph.D. :wink:

10

[QUOTE=ITR champion]

The results are becoming evident. First, there’s already a widespread popular perception that thesis research is a waste of time.

[/quote]

It is self-evident because there is a popular perception that it is a waste of time? We call that a circular argument where I come from.

Since when did a Ph.D. have anything to do with teaching?

Aren’t you skipping a step? Don’t you have to actually become a professor before you make it on the tenure track? Getting a Ph.D. isn’t suppose to be easy and it’s even harder to get tenure.

I question your assertion that thesis are useless. Bryan Mark Rigg wrote a book called “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” which is a very interesting look at Jewish soldiers serving in the reich. Just because a lot of famous people or events have been explored doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of other stuff to explore. Quite frankly, once you get to the level of Ph.D. you’re going to be writing papers for other people at a similar level who know all sorts of stuff about the subject, so writing about the more obscure topics makes sense.

Marc

11

Should we get rid of the PhD thesis? Absolutely not. That’s pretty much the whole point of the PhD-- to demonstrate that one can do original research. Who gives a shit what ignorant people think.

12

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Should we get rid of the PhD thesis? Absolutely not. That’s pretty much the whole point of the PhD-- to demonstrate that one can do original research. Who gives a shit what ignorant people think.
[/QUOTE]

Well, policy makers and politicians do…

13

There have been, I think, a few proposals to replace the thesis requirement with a get-X-number-of-refereed-journal-articles accepted. This does fulfill the “demonstrate the capacity to perform research” requirement. However there is somewhat of a quality-control issue as the choice of reviewers for a journal article is often a crap shoot. Not to mention that reviewers often have axes to grind and the journal review process can easily drag on for many months or even years.

14

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Second, universities are giving more of their teaching load to lecturers who have only a Masters, an unspoken admission that the Ph.D. is not as relevant as it used to be.
[/QUOTE]

This has been touched on by several others, but I don’t think it was answered directly. From my experience, some instructors have Masters degrees or sometimes just a Bachelors and experience in the field, depending on the level of the course he is teaching. A professor is different in that he is expected to generate research and publications in addition to teaching some (usually more advanced) courses. For example, a professor teaching a section of English 101 would be irrelevant because the university can pay someone else a lot less to teach the same course and allow the professor to spend more time either performing research or teaching higher level classes for which the pay is warranted and unavoidable.
To address the question raised by the OP, as a Ph.D. student myself, I must agree with most of the rest of the posters that it simply wouldn’t make sense to get rid of the thesis. The whole point of a Ph.D. is that you either intend to do original research or be a professor (in which you do original research and teach) or intend to work in a field that is THAT highly specialized. In terms of raw knowledge, I don’t see much difference between a Masters and a Ph.D.; that is, I don’t feel like any of the work I’ve done since I obtained my Masters degree has made nearly as much of a difference in my knowledge of the field that my Masters did over my Bachelors or my Bachelors over my Associates, etc.

Though I am not yet working on my thesis (hopefully I will within 6-8 months), what I have learned is more about being a scholar in my field. I’ve done lots of reading of papers, working with professors’ current research projects, and even working (to some degree) on original research associated with papers we’ve read or the professors’ research. In fact, one of my classes this semester is specifically about research, experiment design, etc. which, as the course outline seems to lead, is really only useful from the perspective of performing original research in the field.

So, in essence, while I do tend to think some of the requirements I have to fulfill to get my Ph.D. are antiquated or unnecessary (e.g., qualifying exams on the curricula of courses in which I received As at the same university, but took as long as 2-3 years ago), I think that by virtue of the thought that the thesis is unnecessary or overrated, it demonstrates that the Ph.D. program is not appropriate for you. Personally, I’m sick of taking tests and courses not specifically about the areas in which I’m most interested and, while its a somewhat scary prospect, I can’t wait to get cracking on my thesis. While there is definitely knowledge to be gained from these courses, considering that I want to do research in a very specialized area (about which there isn’t enough material per se to generate a regular course) and that I’ve already taken so many courses, doesn’t it make more sense to do research specifically on what I’m interested and not just keep taking courses 'til I’ve taken them all? After all, the whole reason I want to have my Ph.D. is so that I can keep doing that research.

15

[QUOTE=Finagle]
There have been, I think, a few proposals to replace the thesis requirement with a get-X-number-of-refereed-journal-articles accepted. This does fulfill the “demonstrate the capacity to perform research” requirement. However there is somewhat of a quality-control issue as the choice of reviewers for a journal article is often a crap shoot. Not to mention that reviewers often have axes to grind and the journal review process can easily drag on for many months or even years.
[/QUOTE]

Several discussions with my advisor revealed that this is pretty much how the depart operates now. That is, in order to write a journal article, one generally must have generated some original research in order to get it published. Further, one will generally write journal articles on advancements on the same topic or at least closely related topics; how likely are you to see the same person publish a paper on string theory in 2005 and then one on 13th century Mayan weaponcraftsmanship in 2006? Chances are you’ll see someone publish an article with a face recognition algorithm in 2005 follow it up with an improvement to that algorithm in 2006 and an iris recognition algorithm in 2007 or the like. Now, of course, those publications alone won’t guarantee that one will be recommended for a Ph.D. and, in fact, there are some rare cases (usually only at the biggest name universities for a specific field) of individuals who never published anything getting recommended; however, he has said that an individual with a few publications is practically guaranteed he will be recommended with little disagreement. Chances are that the thesis of an individual with a number of publications will simply be a compilation of the results of the research outlined in all of those publications. By virtue of the fact that one has had several publications, one has already demonstrated that he can “perform original research” and “is recognized by his peers to have made a significant contribution to the field”. That is the crux of what it means to have a Ph.D.

16

For almost everyone who gets one, the PhD dissertation is the only time of your life when you are going to be able to do research full time without worrying about money or other, short term, responsibilities, and when you are going to have someone who really cares about it helping you. It’s an introduction to publishing, to a really deep literature search, and working on a really major project. Some dissertations might be obscure, some might be actually useful. But the topic isn’t all that important - the skills learned are. When I graduated I got a job in a totally different area, but that didn’t make my dissertation worthless.

Some schools require a masters thesis, some don’t. I wrote one, but it was nothing like my PhD thesis in depth. BTW I’ve always worked in industry, so you don’t have to be an academic for a dissertation to count for something.

I do think there are people who are in PhD programs who are not driven, and maybe those people shouldn’t waste their time.

17

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Chances are that the thesis of an individual with a number of publications will simply be a compilation of the results of the research outlined in all of those publications. By virtue of the fact that one has had several publications, one has already demonstrated that he can “perform original research” and “is recognized by his peers to have made a significant contribution to the field”. That is the crux of what it means to have a Ph.D.
[/QUOTE]

I had a couple of journal articles published before I got my PhD, none on the topic I did it on. Dissertations should go into a lot more depth than you can fit into an article, at least in my field. Now, lots of people publish papers from their dissertation when they’re done, or chunks that are standalone, but sometimes the topic is such so you can’t publish each chapter independently.

The lag time is also important, as mentioned. The higher prestige the journal, it seems, the longer it takes to get something accepted. In any case, I’d think a university would like to have the final say about which research is good enough, not some outside editors and referees.

18

Not worry about money? What school are you at? : )

19

[QUOTE=Finagle]
There have been, I think, a few proposals to replace the thesis requirement with a get-X-number-of-refereed-journal-articles accepted. This does fulfill the “demonstrate the capacity to perform research” requirement. However there is somewhat of a quality-control issue as the choice of reviewers for a journal article is often a crap shoot. Not to mention that reviewers often have axes to grind and the journal review process can easily drag on for many months or even years.
[/QUOTE]

Plus not all journals are created equal. Would something in “the Journal of the Left Toe of the Mouse” count as much as something accepted to Nature?

20

[QUOTE=drhess]
Not worry about money? What school are you at? : )
[/QUOTE]

It was a long time ago - but when I was at Illinois I saved money on my stipend. Actually I meant getting research money. I’ve read lots of grants, and writing them didn’t seem like fun. The exceptions were the good old days when people did research in places like IBM Research and Bell Labs Area 11. I’ve had a pretty good time of it, but I have a knack of convincing my management that my research is eminentily practical.