When I went to grad school (1958), I didn’t work that hard, got out in 4 years and got jobs easily. In fact, I got one totally unsolicited offer (since then I realized that one of my profs had moved there and might have recommended me). Nowadays new PhDs send out hundreds of letters, get a few interviews, maybe get short-listed once and end up driving a taxi or flipping burgers. Under these conditions it is total wonder why anyone does it.
What would I do if I were starting out now? Become a programmer, I guess. Or maybe get the PhD (I enjoyed and still enjoy doing math) and then become a programmer.
I was incredibly popular as a TA and Lab Master when I was in Grad school for exactly this reason – I was one of the few PhD students in my group for whom English was the primary language.
Mr. Neville is an astronomer. Competition for academic jobs is brutal. He’s been on a few search committees, when his department was offering a job, and there are usually more than 100 applicants for each job. He’s at a decent school, but it’s no Harvard. From what I understand of other science fields, this is pretty typical. I have a master’s degree in astronomy, and I can tell you it doesn’t help much in looking for a job outside of academia.
Given these facts, why on earth would anyone think we need more Americans with graduate degrees in science and engineering? If we really did need more PhDs in astronomy, there would not be 100 applicants for each faculty job at a state school.
Grad student stipends aren’t that much, but they’re only a fraction of the total cost of a grad student - the student’s adviser is likely paying tuition and health insurance out of the same budget. A lab tech gets paid a lot more salary, but is cheaper overall than supporting a grad student (and likely to stay longer as well).
Talking about science and engineering is mixing too many fields together. The fact that an astronomy MS/PhD has a 100 applicants/job ratio doesn’t mean that a mechanical engineering MS/PhD has that same ratio.
Is it common for graduate engineering students to specifically seek to tailor their MS or PhD to a marketable topic?
No argument there. Probably why half my engineering undergrad classmates went to work for Accenture or went to business/law school after graduation. A few got PhDs and went to work for places like ExxonMobile where I’m sure they probably do all right.
I got a BS in microbiology, worked for about 6 years, then quit and went back to grad school, where I’m now working on a PhD, so I think I’m qualified to comment on the subject.
Item the first: Any job you can get in science (and by science, I mean biology) with a BS degree is crap. By the end of my six years, I was actually getting pretty good money, but I had zero control over what I was doing. Every action I took was dictated and directed by someone else. And I mean that literally. There were rules about where you placed your pipette down, or how long you could take stuff out of the freezer, etc, etc. I was doing work that a trained monkey could do. All that mattered is that I did it exactly correctly every time. If I’d stayed in that job, I could have moved up in the company, but the next step up would have taken me away from the lab, so I would no longer be doing science; I’d be a middle manager. I didn’t want to do that. I’m one of those people that was born to be a scientist.
Item the second: Grad school sucks ass. In all honesty, if I knew then what I knew now, I probably would have taken that middle management job. In particular, being a grad student later in life is utterly miserable. It’s hard enough when you’re single and carefree. It’s infinitely more difficult when you’re married with a family. I am lucky enough to have a fantastic PI who is incredibly understanding and flexible with my schedule, but I know many aren’t. And the flipside of a flexible schedule is that it just takes that much longer to finish. While most of my classmates will be leaving in a reasonable amount of time with a whole lifetime’s career ahead of them, pretty much debt-free, I will be leaving later than them, with a decade or so less time to have an actual career and save for my retirement, and with a mountain of debt. So, I repeat: grad school sucks. Being a nontraditional grad student sucks much much worse.
Item the third: at least in biology, there’s no shortage of PhDs. Quite the opposite, in fact. The job market is terrible, particularly if you want to be an academic. It’s gone from “I hope my students can find an academic job instead of having to go into industry” to “I hope my students can find an industry job” to “I hope I’m going to be able to keep my own job. Screw my students!”
-Smeghead, who is not in a good mental place at the moment.
after 9/11 there was talk it might be harder to get a student visa for the US. Of course academics screamed against that, they did not want to see their cheap labor pool dry up.
Plenty of good, qualified American students rightly calculate that the opportunity cost of doing a STEM PhD isn’t worth it. 4-7 years of PhD making shit, 2-10 years of post-doctoral work making (slightly more) shit, for the chance of getting tenure track job making something more than shit, but not near enough to justify near poverty wages for a decade or more.
Foreign students are often already making shit and have zero opportunities in their home countries. The PhD stipend looks like luxury to them, and they have the opportunity to go back to something better afterward. Of course, many decide to stay after finishing, and get stuck in the perpetual post-doc cycle as well. They are often at an even greater disadvantage when competing for good post-docs, since they can’t be on federal training grants, and in my experience, unless their english skills are very good and/or they had a killer PhD or post-doc with high profile papers, they will have a rough time getting a permanent job. Many end up exploited as post-docs for the rest of their careers.
I employ one who fits this category - he will never get a TT job. He knows it, and is planning on returning to his home country in a couple years when his daughter goes to COLLEGE - that’s how long he’s been in this cycle.
As an aside, PhD students are not cheap. Each one costs me about $50,000 a year. In total, my lab spends about $35,000 a MONTH on salaries (students, techs, post-docs and mine).
What field are you in and how much as a percentage of your overall budget are salaries? If possible, broken down into grad student, technicians, post docs etc would be nice as well.
What are your laboratory materials costs? Do student fuck-ups constitute a significant amount of your budget?
I understand that grad students cost significant amounts of your time to train and that’s probably worth more then the 50k, but I still find it difficult to understand the financials of training them. 50k seems downright cheap for kids who would otherwise be superstars in IT, business or finance(2-3 years out of college myself and my more accomplished friends pulled in anywhere from 65-250k/yr) . I suspect if the stipend was raised to even 40k(60-65k total by your numbers) you’d end up getting significantly more mature people who have 2-3 years of work experience as opposed to fresh out of college kids who don’t have a clue what they want to do.
Bolding mine. This seems very suspect to me. I can imagine paying for health insurance, but tuition? that just seems odd. Why would a school essentially pay itself? If this were true, why would a professor ever take on grad students at all? Just pay for experienced research techs/post docs.
I have to pay my students’ tuition. That’s why they cost 50 large per year.
Stipend, tuition, summer stipend, health insurance comes to about 50K. Note that this is before they spend a dime on lab supplies.
We spend in the neighborhood of 10K-15K on lab supplies a month. Sometimes much more. Lab budget is around $500,000 per year. This money comes from my external grants (mostly federal).
And as to why would I take on students at all? Mostly I don’t - most of the lab is postdocs because they are cheaper. My students now, one is being paid from money the department gave me during my recruitment that I have to spend on a student, the other is from a different program where I made them pay the tuition as a condition of taking their student, so it worked for me.
Mostly, I try not to have students unless they bring in their own money or they are on a training grant. But I have to have some, since I’m judged on that for promotion etc… And a good student is a joy to have - I’m very picky. A bad post-doc I can ditch immediately; a bad student takes a lot longer to get rid of.
Ditto for me–almost.
Was on the 2nd year of a PhD in Microbiology track at UCLA. Working in a large research/commercial lab: 110 techs, 5 MD’s 10 PhD’s.
Pay: 998/month in 1979.
Post Doc that I worked for was making 12K/yr–3rd year post doc
I took an extension Fortran/WATFIV class with my brother in law on a whim, loved it Could not believe that people would actually pay you to code.
Dropped out of the PhD program and took a job as a programmer for 20K/yr and never looked back. My first boss–PhD nuclear physics, made the same decision.
This was before Amgen, et al, but still–I made the right decision.
It sounds like a weird accounting trick, doesn’t it? I think you’re missing the typical funding mechanisms in a research lab - labs tend to be funded by external grants written by faculty members rather than directly by the school itself. A grad student supported by a research grant is working primarily for his/her adviser and not for the school; the adviser is then responsible for the costs associated with that grad student. It’s not the school paying itself; it’s closer to an external research effort paying the school for the student’s tuition.
Teaching assistants are different. In my program (I’m hoping to finish my PhD this year), there are 3 TA positions each year that are supervised by the program director. These are used either as recruiting tools to fund new students who don’t yet have grant funding, or to provide some bridge funding for students between grants. Even in these cases, though, the program pays the TAs’ tuition out of its own budget.
And that in a nutshell is one of the huge problems with science research labs. The professors fight for their lives for grants and then hold it over everyone beneath them. I clearly remember my advisor walking into my office at 10 pm and noticing that I was talking to my mother back home. She screamed at me to put down the phone RIGHT NOW because she thought she was paying for the call. I was using a calling card because I already knew how obsessed she was with ‘her’ grant money.
Any proposal to have time off during any day of the week, any time of day or night was met with, ‘I don’t pay you to do things you want to. You work for me only.’. I was making $1040 a month in 1996 minus mandatory health insurance and student fees.
The biggest thing science research labs could do to help the situation for American students is to remove themselves from the student funding. The school as a whole could fund PhD students as either real students or real employees or both. Right now, it is the worst of both worlds.
The problem isn’t that lab heads exploit their people. The problem is that you had a psycho for a major professor. Most labs are not run this way. Mine isn’t, and I was highly successful at an Ivy Medical school before I left for a place to raise my daughter where the daycare doesn’t have a panic room (yes, that’s true).
Yes, i’m incredulous about this. Yes, I understand that labs are funded mostly by external research grants.
Charging professors for their Ph.D students seems ridiculous to me. Graduate students are the engine by which research at a university goes forward. (Or, as Mozchon’s lab is set up, you run it like a business and just hire more experienced personal for the money). The university benefits from this research. In grant money, in patent licensing/royalties from technology spin offs, in prestige, in enrollment due to said prestige. So no, I don’t think that the graduate students work for just the professor. In a very real sense they work for the University. It seems like double dipping and it seems like false economy to charge tuition for your who may just well be your best most passionate workers.
I mean, if it is as you suggest that the graduate student works solely for the professor, then why are they being charged tuition? Because after the first year, maybe two their training will mostly be from that professor anyway. All this double dipping system seems to do is make it difficult to have graduate students because as mozchron points out it’s cheaper to hire more experienced post-docs (and lets be fair, their wages are suppressed because of their experience as graduate students.). Mozchron’s only incentive to take on students seems to be basically be that s/he wants a promotion.
It’s no wonder graduate students are paid like crap and (sometimes) treated like crap. It seems they’re a burden to a professor in the current system. It’s no wonder the most talented Americans don’t seem to choose to pursue doctoral studies.
Christ. I want to earn my PhD. You guys are making me sad.
I apologize for peppering you with questions, but this is a very interesting discussion. I think it’s still at least related to the OP. But please speak up Bijou Drains If you think I am threadjacking.
Mozchron,
Do you think that paying a higher stipend would net you more talented graduate students?
Do you think your graduate students would be happier or more productive if they were?
If you are at a state school do you have to pay more for foreign students due to out-of-state tuition?
Would you take on more students if you could?
And I suppose this is the one that really matters to my argument. Do you feel the average graduate student provides overall positive value to you? to the university?
I work in the oil business and our company does not hire anyone in the earth sciences ( Geology, Geophysics, etc. ) field that does not have at least a MS. At the moment there are not enough candidates out there and one commonly accepted reason for this is that the 1980’s oil bust laid off so many of them that students decided to get an advanced degree in some other field. The benefit to us old dogs is that salaries are high and retention bonuses are pretty generous. The downside is that we are awash in MBA’s and lawyers.
One way I’ve had it explained that may be of value is that running your own lab is essentially just running a small business. You have to manage employees, salaries, and expenses. You have to acquire income (grants) by producing a product (papers). And if you’re not profitable, you’re in trouble. I’ve heard from many recent job candidates that most interviewers aren’t really interested in your work as much as they are in how you plan to get funded. My university just did a round of hiring, and several candidates were rejected because their ideas, while interesting and solid science, were seen as difficult to fund.
