# Should we get rid of the Ph.D. thesis? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 23, 2007, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140 "2007-01-23T19:48:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/21 "2007-01-24T01:34:22Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager] 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? [/QUOTE] I think getting published is a good requirement, as long as the requirement is that it is a refereed journal. Yeah, it may not be fair that Student Xs get off the hook with Journal of the Left Toe of the Mouse while Student Y publishes in _Science_, but to me, that’s no different than Student X passing with a D- and Student Y passing with an A+. My former advisor recently came up with the requirement that her students at least have something in review before they graduate. And if the paper gets rejected, she will hound your ass to death until you resubmit it somewhere. This rule came down after she made the stunning announcement that she was officially “disowning” a former graduate student–someone who I used to be close to. The student’s crime? She never attempted to publish her thesis. I can’t say I totally blame my advisor, but damn. Glad I got my stuff out! ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/22 "2007-01-24T01:50:15Z")
[QUOTE=monstro] My former advisor recently came up with the requirement that her students at least have something in review before they graduate. And if the paper gets rejected, she will hound your ass to death until you resubmit it somewhere. This rule came down after she made the stunning announcement that she was officially “disowning” a former graduate student–someone who I used to be close to. The student’s crime? She never attempted to publish her thesis. I can’t say I totally blame my advisor, but damn. Glad I got my stuff out! [/QUOTE] Now that requirement I approve of, since if people have never had the experience of at least submitting something while in school, chances are they won’t when they get out - especially if they go into industry, where people usually don’t bug you to publish. Bravo for her. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 2:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/23 "2007-01-24T02:57:05Z")
[QUOTE=Molly & Polly] I think we should get rid of the PhD entirely. Titles are for British anachronists. [/QUOTE] So we should get rid of the M.D. too? ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/24 "2007-01-24T03:23:19Z")
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink] So we should get rid of the M.D. too? [/QUOTE] But of course, neither the Ph.D. or the M.D. is a title; the title for both is “Doctor.” ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/25 "2007-01-24T03:30:55Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager] 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. [/QUOTE] Perhaps I misstated my point slightly. My familiarity is only in Computer Science, so that is the only perspective from which I can speak, thus I have a difficult time imagining a thesis topic which would be published in chunks afterward. In my experience, Computer Science Ph.D. candidates tend to publish various incremental improvements to an algorithm and/or incremental results leading up to their thesis. Hence, it was not that he would necessarily receive a Ph.D. simply because he had been published, but that the correctness of the algorithm and/or the incremental results had been verified by a (hopefully) reputable journal. The picture he painted was that a defense for a candidate who is published raised many fewer of those sorts of questions and an unpublished candidate would be grilled much harder in those areas. However, in retrospect, I understand it is probably much different for most other disciplines ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/26 "2007-01-24T04:53:09Z")
[QUOTE=ITR champion] 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. [/quote] I question both of these assertions. [QUOTE=ITR champion] First, there’s already a widespread popular perception that thesis research is a waste of time. [/quote] There are plenty of popular perceptions that themselves are baloney. [QUOTE=ITR champion] 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? [/QUOTE] Nope. Those fifty or fewer people may be the appropriate people to be reading the results of that labor and thus helping the author (the doctoral candidate) contribute something very useful to the corpus of human knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![Molly\_Polly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea5d25/32.png) [@Molly\_Polly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Molly_Polly)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/27 "2007-01-24T05:45:47Z")
[QUOTE=Colibri] 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. 😉 [/QUOTE] _“You girls”_ indeed! You may address us as Your Royal Uppity Highpersons, PhdiddlyD. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/28 "2007-01-24T13:07:32Z")
Hell, no! I had to suffer and struggle to get mine. Ain’t no young whippersnapper gonna become a Phud without going through the same meatgrinder! (mumble, mumble. Get off my lawn!) ---
**Author:** ![Lissa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85f322/32.png) [@Lissa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissa)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/29 "2007-01-24T17:04:11Z")
[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] I’m extreley hostile to this idea. I don’t have much sympathy for someone who has graduated a university who cannot comprehend a journal article.\* Hell, \*\*I **read them, and I’m not even technically a highschool graduate.** (Should I come across a word I don’t understand, there’s a handy-dandy item on my bookshelf which will explain it.) Scholarly research _is_ within the hands of the general public. They just choose to ignore it. It’s not written in Latin, after all. - This, of course, does not apply to students who have a learning disability. \*\* Graduated from an unaccredited Christian school which was extremely light on academics and heavy on scripture. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/30 "2007-01-24T17:06:54Z")
[QUOTE=Molly & Polly] _“You girls”_ indeed! You may address us as Your Royal Uppity Highpersons, PhdiddlyD. [/QUOTE] That’s Herr Doktor Professor Colibri to you, thank you very much. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Hippy\_Hollow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hippy_hollow/32/4841_2.png) [@Hippy\_Hollow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hippy_Hollow)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/31 "2007-01-24T17:53:40Z")
My school has an alternative to the thesis requirement: three articles submitted to refereed journals. AFAIK virtually nobody does this. We are more or less trained as researchers and usually end up in academia, at least at some point in our careers. I don’t think most academic departments look kindly on articles vs. the process of proposing a topic, writing a proposal, getting your ad hoc committee to approve the proposal, collecting and analyzing data, and writing it up. I’ve written articles in a few days’ time… the dissertation has taken me six months so far, and I’m still collecting data… I think there is something very symbolic about a dissertation project. It’s designing a research study and contributing to the field (which is usually quite narrow, but there are lots of cross-applications for theoretical studies in social science, at least). It’s the apprenticeship that you perform and how you enter the guild. It certainly isn’t about being intelligent - it’s about being relentless and making this amorphous thing fall into shape. I sort of imagine once I complete mine and become part of the machine, I’ll expect others to do the same as well… ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/32 "2007-01-24T18:45:51Z")
[QUOTE=Blaster Master] Perhaps I misstated my point slightly. My familiarity is only in Computer Science, so that is the only perspective from which I can speak, thus I have a difficult time imagining a thesis topic which would be published in chunks afterward. In my experience, Computer Science Ph.D. candidates tend to publish various incremental improvements to an algorithm and/or incremental results leading up to their thesis. [/quote] My PhD is in computer science also. I got two papers out of my thesis, one published before I finished and one after, and actually two out of someone else’s - it’s a long story. I wasn’t trying to get papers out, since I went to industry, and I could have gotten more out of it, including incremental improvements. That was 27 years ago when the world was young, so my dissertation wasn’t an incremental improvement, but something new. > [@](#): > > Hence, it was not that he would necessarily receive a Ph.D. simply because he had been published, but that the correctness of the algorithm and/or the incremental results had been verified by a (hopefully) reputable journal. The picture he painted was that a defense for a candidate who is published raised many fewer of those sorts of questions and an unpublished candidate would be grilled much harder in those areas. > > However, in retrospect, I understand it is probably much different for most other disciplines Professors I know wouldn’t tone down the arguments just because something had been published! I get the impression you’re not done yet - so you might be more worried about your orals than is warranted. I’ve never heard of any orals horror stories, so I wouldn’t got out of my way to make the orals easier. The only case where I’ve heard of a problem has been political, and this isn’t going to help. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2007, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/33 "2007-01-24T20:55:32Z")
The purpose of a Ph.D. dissertation is to serve an apprenticeship in doing original research in one’s field. And in mathematics, at least, that apprenticeship is necessary for most future researchers. The dissertation itself may break little remarkable new ground outside of an area that, as the OP puts it, is “a hyperspecialized field that holds meaning for only an extremely small number of people.” But it’s a researcher’s _first baby steps_ as a researcher. There’s no sense in judging the value of the Ph.D. dissertation in mathematics, as a class, by its contribution to mathematical knowledge. It’s the later contributions of those who earn the degree that matter. That apprenticeship (in math, anyway) is also an introduction to rigorous thought. Due to life’s twists and turns, I did no further research after my dissertation, but what I learned in doing my dissertation has never lost its value or application. ---
**Author:** ![Silence\_of\_the\_clams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Silence\_of\_the\_clams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silence_of_the_clams)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2007, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/34 "2007-01-25T15:37:37Z")
You are forgetting something; completing a PhD is not just to get that stamp in your CV, it also about getting connections to people you can co-operate with during your research. Getting out there and getting other people to get an interest in your field of work makes is much more easy to do the science. Thats why a PhD is important if you plan to continue doing research. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2007, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/35 "2007-01-26T18:19:09Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager] My PhD is in computer science also. I got two papers out of my thesis, one published before I finished and one after, and actually two out of someone else’s - it’s a long story. I wasn’t trying to get papers out, since I went to industry, and I could have gotten more out of it, including incremental improvements. That was 27 years ago when the world was young, so my dissertation wasn’t an incremental improvement, but something new. Professors I know wouldn’t tone down the arguments just because something had been published! I get the impression you’re not done yet - so you might be more worried about your orals than is warranted. I’ve never heard of any orals horror stories, so I wouldn’t got out of my way to make the orals easier. The only case where I’ve heard of a problem has been political, and this isn’t going to help. [/QUOTE] I’m not finished yet; I am currently in my last semester of coursework and hope to finish my exams and begin my research in the summer or fall. In all honesty, I was most scared of the qualifiers because some of them cover topics in which I’m not strong, have no intention of pursuing research, and have not taken courses in 2-3 years. However, my advisor has given me horror stories about defenses for candidates who were unpublished. Maybe I give too much credence to these stories, though I do feel that if I know my topic well enough that I should receive a Ph.D., then defending it should be no more difficult than this sort of conversation. Personally, I have no desire to work in academia; I hope to do research in industry or government. Hence, I don’t have a high degree of desire to get lots of papers published. I’m currently doing some research as a bi-product of courses I’m taking that might lead to a publication, but that’s about the end of it. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2007, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/36 "2007-01-26T19:41:20Z")
[QUOTE=Blaster Master] 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. [/QUOTE] In my field, math, every university I know hires lecturers to teach the entry-level calculus classes, and these people typically don’t have Ph.D.'s. (Graduate students often assist them, and sometimes postdocs do as well.) But to teach anything above that level, including any course intended for math majors, you have to be a full or associate professor, and that means a doctorate. Hence the department faculty are split into two levels based on whether they have a degree or not. But there’s no real connection between Ph.D. research and teaching the upper-level undergraduate courses. Those certainly could be handled by people without research experience; extra teaching experience and classroom training might serve people who teach the juniors and seniors better. Further, there are plenty of colleges that don’t expect research from their faculty, but do require a Ph.D. For people who make their careers there, all the effort put into the doctoral thesis goes to waste. ---
**Author:** ![Angua](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8baadc/32.png) [@Angua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Angua)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2007, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/37 "2007-01-27T20:06:26Z")
[QUOTE=CalMeacham] Hell, no! I had to suffer and struggle to get mine. Ain’t no young whippersnapper gonna become a Phud without going through the same meatgrinder! [/QUOTE] Damn straight! 😉 We were allowed however to compose a thesis whose chapters were made up of journal papers; my thesis did in fact consist of three refereed journal papers, together with an introduction of background material and a conclusion tying everything together. That didn’t make my defense any easier – in fact, it made it longer and harder, the rationale being that as it was all published (in reputable leading peer-reviewed journals) then I should be able to take any heat from my examiners. Even so, getting rid of the thesis would be silly. Like others have said, its an important part of the process of teaching someone a) how to think in the way required to do research, b) demonstrating that you have learnt this skill and c) demonstrating that you can in fact present research in a coherent manner taking into account the big picture. PhD via publication, IMO, doesn’t have this last skill; you can publish three papers, all of equally good quality, which are accepted by journals, but they don’t necessarily have to either deal with the big picture or demonstrate how your work fits into the larger framework of the subject, and contributes to it. That is, IMO, the advantage of the thesis. ---
**Author:** ![HazelNutCoffee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@HazelNutCoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HazelNutCoffee)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140/38 "2007-01-28T01:41:15Z")
[QUOTE=ITR champion] 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. [/QUOTE] I beg to differ. While it’s true that there’s not much more to be said on certain subjects, new perspectives and new objects are popping up all the time. Humanities is not only about the past. In literature, for example, the body of potential objects of study is always growing. I don’t see it running out in the forseeable future. “Baloney” theses are not encouraged, at any rate. While it’s true you need to bring something new to the conversation, you can’t just start your own (not with a PhD thesis) - you have to contribute to one that is already ongoing. There’s always something new to add - it’s just the question of being creative enough to discover it (or to be silver-tongued enough to make it sound new, anyway). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-get-rid-of-the-ph-d-thesis/389140.md?page=1)