Doctoral degrees
The disposable academic
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
Dec 16th 2010 | from the print edition
ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.
In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.
One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”
Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
While the author has a lot of good points, I think the fact that she majored in Theoretical Ecology gives her a skewed viewpoint on the whole system.
ReplyDeleteFML. There are only so many of these types of articles I can read before smoke starts pouring out of my ears. Fear and regret, fear and regret.
ReplyDeleteI was interested to read that Humanities PhD candidates hang in there much longer before dropping it and going away. I wonder why? Partly perhaps because STEM PhD students have more options for lucrative employment out in the real world, so if they're not enjoying themselves and their research isn't progressing, they're more likely to say the hell with it and get a job.
ReplyDeleteI tell my students that they should only go into a PhD if they can realistically expect to be done before they're 30, so that, if they don't get a job, there will still be time for them to retrain for another career. And I tell them not to go into debt to do a Humanities PhD, under any circumstances.
I love how the brown steps in the graphic twist and turn, just like a colon.
ReplyDeleteHanging around for non-STEM grad students is easy to understand. Consider that you love the academic experience. And you know there is no job waiting for you once you graduate. Might as well stay in grad school and enjoy the intellectual lifestyle as long as you can.
ReplyDeleteI believe this is a critical problem that we face. And anyone who has produced more than one grad student in their career is a carbon producer to this problem.
As someone who entered graduate school in the late 1980s, when predictions of a Ph.D. shortage in the '90s due to retirements and the burgeoning of the bay-boom-echo college population were rife, I'm a bit skeptical of the idea of a "Ph.D. glut." I can't help noticing that much if not all of the predicted demand eventually materialized (though somewhat later than predicted), but was mostly satisfied through contingent appointments. As far as I know, most humanities Ph.D.s can still, with relatively little effort, find the equivalent of a 4/4 teaching load, albeit at more than one college and at starvation wages. That makes me wonder whether there's really a Ph.D. glut, or a decent-job shortage.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as the "lump in the python" caused by the baby boom echo wanes, we may actually be facing the possibility of a glut. If that's the case, then departments that grant the degree need to take responsibility for narrowing the beginning of the pipeline. No one wants to cancel their Ph.D. program, and each entering class needs to have a critical mass of people to make seminars, etc., work, so just slashing the entering class in half probably isn't going to work. But I wonder if whole fields could agree to do something along the lines of admitting what is now a normal size class only every *other* year? That would still require some adjustments, but, as long as all the departments in a particular field agreed to go with either even- or odd-year admissions, I think it could work (and any student so impatient or ideal-schedule-driven that (s)he couldn't wait a year to start would not fare well in today's academy anyway). And, with all the infrastructure still in place, it would be easy enough to adjust upward again if and when the situation warranted.
The other solution, I suppose, is to entice the about-to-retire boomers I keep running into who "always wanted to get/finish a Ph.D." back to school. They'd make for fine classmates, TAs and emerging scholars, but wouldn't need jobs afterward -- in short, the ideal Ph.D. candidate given the current market.
@Julie
ReplyDeleteThose are huge books arranged in an endless spiral staircase, a fitting symbol of the endless marathon that is postgrad ed.
I like our new header.... "Spooky Tooth: the College Misery Experience."
I'd happily suspend our grad admissions for a year or two, or several, but the university knows they're cheap labor and keeps asking us to admit more and more.
ReplyDelete@Streinikov
ReplyDeleteAll I see is a colon. Or maybe a tapeworm.