As we all know, in the world of academia a PhD or other doctorate is pretty much a pre-requisite to being an academic and conducting research.
But what good is one for those who are not aspiring academics? And what benefit is there, if any, to the greater good to have ‘doctors’ walking the earth?
(Full disclaimer: I am a doctoral student, I work in education and I’m doing an Ed.D. I am not putting forward any kind of argument or position here, though, just interested in opinions)
Thanks
(We’re in IMHO, right? Good. Just checking.)
To me, the most worthless and damaging doctorate on the planet is one in Education. I have yet to meet one who could piss out of a boot. Switch to a real subject while you still can.
May I ask what field of study did you major in your undergraduate or master’s? (maths, science, history, etc. )
Most of the PhD’s I know are working in the academe. Some of them are also consultants to private and government agencies at the same time.
what good is an MD, outside of medicine?
My BA was in Modern Languages, and my MEd in Applied Linguistics.
‘damaging’? Yeesh. Okay - so what harm could a doctorate in education (or any other field) have on wider society?
(I can piss out of a boot…)
Doctors of Education become Superintendents and Assistant Superintendents. I am a teacher. They are my natural enemy.
Coming from the British system, the only thing I know of Superintendents is Superintendent Chalmers. We don’t have any direct equivalent here, although I share your mistrust of educational managers generally. Believe me, I do.
Nonetheless, Ed.Ds are something of a rarity here - and they certainly aren’t pre-requisites for management positions in education.
A goodly number of the Ph.Ds I’ve met in engineering practice weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit outside of their narrow field of expertise, and some of them weren’t even all that good within their ostensible area of discipline. (I cringe at one Ph.D candidate we had as an intern one summer who was attempting to perform discrete Fourier transforms and spectral analysis using Excel; even after I showed her how to do what she was trying to do in just a few lines of Matlab code, she insisted on using Excel because “I know this works,” notwithstanding that the answers she was getting from her profusion of spreadsheets was clearly nonsensical. Her Ph.D thesis: advanced spectral methods for computational simulation of dynamic events. I cannot conceive how she was able to do any useful work or convince a thesis board allow her to do work in Excel, but I digress.) Most of the Ph.Ds I’ve known who were any good went back to school after spending some years doing practical work in industry, and so had a good range of knowledge in addition to their thesis area.
I’ve considered going in for a Ph.D on a couple of occasions but after talking with potential advisors and fellow graduate students have demurred on the basis that it really wouldn’t help my career much and would actually detract from the practical cross-discipline knowledge I get by the direct experience of working in the field on hardware that actually flies and burns. I’m also not fond of publishing papers just for the sake of being published, or having a p.i. who had zero input into the research work take primary credit just because he or she provided some funding or ostensible oversight (a major problem in biosci research). I have a coworker working on his Ph.D with the attendant frustration (while working full time) and he has no intention of going into academia, so I don’t know what he plans to do with his diploma other than frame it. That’s a lot of work for a piece of paper that can’t be resold to an art collector or exchanged for a few million CHF.
Hopefully that is the only thing you and Ferris Bueller have in common.
Stranger
Well, I work in aerospace research with the government. We have occasionally hired people with only Masters. The major difference seems to be that people seem to kiss my ass more because of the PhD, so I guess that is a benefit.
Well, that and a desire to hump Mia Sara. 
Where I work, many people in lower management have BS or MS degrees, many people in higher management have a PhD, but I do not know if that corporate culture applies to other industries.
Either way, unless someone in middle management or higher retires you aren’t going to get their job.
Really? I’ve never been inclined to kiss anyone’s ass because they have a Ph.D, and in fact, when in meetings where we start by going around the room introducing ourselves and what we do, the people who feel the need to tack on their doctorate to their name,“Hi, I’m Jacob Schmitt, Ph.D, Stanford '83” get my special eye roll. The best, though, was a guy from a certain range safety organization that not only had to assert his “dual Ph.D” but then give a two minute summary of his c.v. and all the places he’d lived for the last twenty years. He turned out to not only be totally worthless but actually obstructive in his gulf of utter ignorance about all things pertaining to range safety requirements, propulsion, ballistics, and even basic chemistry like why cast rocket motor propellants won’t continue to burn energetically without being contained in a pressure vessel.
Stranger
The main benefit of mine is that I’ll never, ever be tempted to go back to school. Saves a lot of trouble down the road.
what schooling can you do after your PhD? A post doc?
Well, if you want to be nicknamed “Doc”, that’s one way to go about it.
Eh, it’s not so much of a problem. Everyone knows who really did the hands-on work. Standard authorship division gives first place to the grad student or postdoc who did most of the work, middle places to other lab members or collaborators, and last place to the PI. (The thornier authorship disputes involve large research groups where many people made big contributions, but no single contribution is obviously the majority or even plurality of the work).
Besides, a decent advisor does provide a significant chunk of supervision and useful background knowledge, in addition to providing funding and other intangible benefits.
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A doctorate (or approximately 2/3 of one) does tend to make you feel like you have to blather about yourself whenever academia comes up in conversation. And it seriously erodes your ability to have a normal conversation. So… that’s another two disadvantages.
It depends entirely on the field. I would venture to say that doctorates in the humanities are virtually useless in terms of employment outside of academia. In the social sciences, economists and psychologists have alternative employment possibilities, whereas sociologists, anthropologists,historians, and political scientists really don’t. Doctorates in history and English aren’t even all that useful in academia–too many people seeking too few jobs.
I very, very rarely encourage even very talented students to pursue doctorates. Increasingly, the available jobs are adjunct rather than tenure track, and that’s just not a good way to make a living.
I’m an environmental scientist with a Ph.D, and I’ve experienced this to a certain extent. It’s not so much “ass kissing” as much as automatic deference and respect. Then they get to know me. 
But I have to say, the benefit of the Ph.D has been strictly psychological for me. Whereas many of my coworkers seem to think a contractor with a Ph.D is an uber-genius and thus don’t need to have their work scrutinized, I’m not so intimidated or easily impressed. If these contractors present their work in a sloppy, unprofessional way, I’m not afraid to say so. I have to think my fearlessness comes from the fact that I have Ph.D. I’m not worried about coming across as stupid when I’m talking to one.
So my boss has given me the role of “bad cop” while he gets to play “good cop.” And that’s fine with me. I see it as job security.
Speaking here as a mathematician only. Forty years ago, nearly all the math grad students were in pure math. Now, they are mostly in stats or applied math (the exceptions do number theory because we have two superb number theorists in the faculty). But both statisticians and applied mathematicians have many choices of employment that actually use their knowledge. Nowadays, there are so few positions in pure math, most of them seem to be becoming quants and getting rich.
One of the very weakest PhDs I ever knew (his advisor had to explain his thesis carefully to him before the final exam and I had to show him how to use latex) then founded a software company and became fabulously rich.
I think it varies. In my immediate family there are 2 Phd’s, My So’s parents and sister are both Phd’s. Then there is a couple who we are acquaintances with, the wife has a Phd.
The sister of my SO is just an adjunct professor now. I think it was probably good for her to get a Phd, because she can at least get a job in academia. Her personality is absolutely horrible; but she could get by despite that in academia; I can’t envision a scenario where she could add value to a for profit business.
My acquaintance who was an engineer did not have a Phd., but he worked with many Phd’s and had the same job title as many of them. The Phd’s did make a little bit more money - but not much. He did not have a Phd, but he was was seen as a rising star (his own description) because of his personality. He did have a very good personality - he could mix very easily with people of all sorts of backgrounds. His ability to schmooze made him far valuable to the company than his technical skills - once you have enough technical knowledge the thing that separates the run of the mill employee from a star is the ability to have effective client interaction (according to him). Oddly enough, he does not like selling - he is interested in the science, so he left the company to do something else.
The wife has a Phd, and she has a tenure track position at a university. She has mixed emotions about getting the Phd. When she was working for a private company, she was a little annoyed that a consultant with a masters would be hired for do a job that a Phd might be passed over for because the person with a masters had a specialty in a very specific thing that was needed. She also was telling me one night about the post-doc pay and how low it is. It is really very low.
My sister has a Psyd in psychology. A Psyd is the same amount of school as a Phd, but the focus is more practical. She makes more money on an hourly basis by a long shot than anyone else I have mentioned thus far. She is in a group practice and turns away more clients than she sees. She is very good at networking and knew what she wanted to do since she was 13. At the same practice, they hired a social worker to take the spillover of clients my sister could not take. They make the same amount of money, but my sister is making it 15 years earlier.
So, I guess from all the people I know I would say that outside of academia a Phd has some importance; but other things such as the ability to network, sell, and get along with people have incredible value. Inside academia, a Phd is very important because it gets you in the door - but that room can be just a shitty adjunct job that barley pays the bills. Also, if you’re reasonably smart and have an annoying personality you’ll probably do better with a Phd than you would without, even if all your doing is adjunct work.
