It's no secret that the life sciences field is over saturated, competitive, and vastly underpaid with a high barrier for entry. Industry demand is low on both bachelors and doctorate level positions.
A bachelors really doesn't get you anything as a sciences student. Besides QA/Tech positions, there aren't many options to cut a viable path within the field. Most companies demand a minimum Masters with a preference for PhD's for most Scientist level positions. Having upward career mobility is very tough without a higher degree.
Spurned on by a lack of better options, most students pursue grad school in hopes of landing a tenure track position or hope their research aligns with relevant industry markets. Competition is insanely high though from the sheer churn of graduate students who are essentially cheap labor for their universities.
Having done so myself and observed lots of people do it:
1. It's a way to (pointlessly) delay adulthood.
2. Fear of the job market.
3. Don't know what else to do.
4. Magical thinking (despite the numerous articles out there, like mine (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...) that attempt to dissuade it). I think this is the biggest issue. In addition, there seems to be a Lake Woebegone effect: Everyone thinks they're going to be above average.
EDIT: I forgot to add another important one: Grad school is pretty easy and fun! You get to hang out on campus, think about ideas, take a minimal number of classes, do a bit of teaching, and have copious free time. The problem is that, as time advances and your priorities start changing (want a real life / job, date people who don't date people whose lives aren't together, etc.), reality starts to intrude. Many grad students have an unacknowledged Peter Pan complex.
I did really well when I finished my undergraduate program, and my professors kept trying to get me to pursue a Doctorate or PhD. in my field. They were really enthusiastic about it telling me that with my talents I deserve more than a B.A.
None of them could give me a convincing answer as to how I would benefit long-term for continuing my education. None of them could give me an example of a job that I would be unable to get with my current level of education. All of them admitted that it would require 4-6 more years of my life, and that even with the best financial aid / scholarships, I would still be paying $60-100k out-of-pocket for the experience.
So basically, it would have required me to put off getting a full time job to instead drive myself deep into debt all while sacrificing all of my free-time until I was 30.
Instead, I moved to Seattle, found a job in I.T. and I have been climbing the corporate ladder ever since, making more than enough money to live comfortably and save money. I was lucky enough to earn my B.A. without any student debt.
My degree isn't even in an I.T. field. I have a B.A. in Journalism! The thing that has done more to further my resume has been my full-time employment and my technical certifications. I get to expense my certifications to my company...
Furthering my education would have ruined my future. Ending my education has accelerated it. Sadly, I worry that this is going to become true of Undergrad programs in the next decade, and that's not a good thing...
In STEM, if you don't get a financial offer along with your PhD program acceptance letter, then you've probably just been politely rejected. The financial offer will usually cover your living costs (a few $k per month), so it won't cover any lost opportunity costs... but you shouldn't need to take on debt to do your PhD in STEM. I'm guessing journalism is a different story!
For STEM, it's also true that certain job opportunities (eg. elite R&D facilities) more-or-less require a PhD or equivalent levels of mastery. It's possible to obtain those jobs after a long period of field work (without PhD), but it's a lot more difficult. Plus, you will always be butting up against credentialing norms during those jobs' recruiting processes. (Whether that's equitable or not is another story.)
> In STEM, if you don't get a financial offer along with your acceptance letter, then you've actually been politely rejected.
This is important. I thought at the time that I accepted that it was due to the massive budget cuts happening in California, and the UC's were undergoing furloughs.
A prof I know at Berkeley won't let anyone in the Ph.D. program unless he can secure funding for them. He's in a humanities major, though. Maybe in STEM profs think they can land a job to pay it off.
All of them admitted that it would require 4-6 more years of my life, and that even with the best financial aid / scholarships, I would still be paying $60-100k out-of-pocket for the experience.
That sounds pretty fucked up. Working on your PhD is a job and you should be getting a salary from the University, not paying them.
> My degree isn't even in an I.T. field. I have a B.A. in Journalism!
You are probably a bit of an outlier in that any credentials in journalism, never mind a postgraduate degree in journalism, are only recently a way of increasing your chances of gaining employment in that field.
If non-commercial journalism grows that might change. But for now I'd venture to guess Ph.Ds in journalism are rare among those working in the field.
Legally required qualifications may make a nod towards being for the good of the general population but there's a great deal of rent seeking involved.
In Germany until a few years ago you could practice as a psychotherapist after doing your Master's (which included a large practical component.) Now they tacked on more post graduation training time. In the USA and other unfortunate countries that follow its example medicine, dentistry and law are all postgraduate degrees, elsewhwere they're undergraduate. In the USA until recently physiotherapy was a Master's degree. Now they require a "professional doctorate" like an Ed.D. or Psy.D. You can still practice in the US with a Bachelor's in physiotherapy acquired in Europe. In Germany physiotherapy is an apprenticeship.
In my home country of Ireland they recently increased the necessary qualifications for teaching from a one year post bachelor's diploma to a Master's. This despite the fact that the evidence for positive effects of teaching qualification on effectiveness are minimal, at best.
>In Germany until a few years ago you could practice as a psychotherapist after doing your Master's (which included a large practical component.) Now they tacked on more post graduation training time.
I think in the special German case this was made to allow for more career switching - I have a relative who has a diploma in Pedagogy, he took one of the new short psychotherapy courses ("post graduation training time") and is now a certified child psychologist, a career that was before this new course impossible for him without the prior psychology degrees.
Many disciplines don't have a reliable way of predicting professional performance from a simple test, like the actuarial discipline, and I think psychology and pedagogy would be among those fields.
So, an employer looking at many undifferentiated candidates would likely choose someone with a masters or doctorate, if not at least to cover their hiring decision if ever questioned.
The development of a fast and cost-efficient test would lower the need for credentials as a gateway.
> Magical thinking (despite the numerous articles out there...
I think humanity applies the lessons from these articles in the aggregate, but at an individual level, this is a much messier story.
It features people (like myself) who didn't really understand or place any importance on marketability when asked to choose a major at 17.
Four years later you get another fun choice: accept your current job prospects, grab an advanced degree, or start from scratch on a different undergrad degree, which is psychologically quite hard.[0]
I know a lot of people push for universally free college tuition. A part of me though would much rather encourage school loans that signal to students the viability of their major by adjusting interest rates or availability of credit based on the field of study.
Though that has it's problems too. We'd want to pay teachers considerably more, for instance.
Ok, I mostly just wish someone had handed me a copy of "So Good They Can't Ignore You" when I was young and stupid.
[0] And some people successfully convince a great manager to take a chance on them. That involves a lot of search costs and a lot of luck, though. It also filters for risk-tolerant employers, which becomes a high-risk strategy itself.
All of your reasons are valid. I would add one more:
5. Academic success has been rewarded every step of the way.
I look at my high school classmates who I know went on to get Phds. (Sample size of 8) All of them were among the smartest few percent in the class. Every success that they got through the end of undergrad was due to academic performance. But afterwards things slowed down. Only 2 of 8 stayed through to tenure. The two smartest got Phds in math and wound up in non-faculty positions. One other got a science industry job. One wound up at a hedge fund. And two teach high school.
All things considered it's not a bad lot in life, but these were amongst the best and brightest of my peer group. Five of Seven would have been better served taking other paths to their end destinations.
There is a systemic incentives problem going on. Every individual school has an incentive to push as many people as possible into academia. This is for both cheap labor, and because their brand goes up when absolute #s of their grads go on to big things. The schools in aggregate also benefit when there are more Phd grads than job applicants. (Again keeps costs down) The systemic over-supply punishes the graduates as a whole.
It's a case where the individuals who have gotten the most mileage listening to their teachers, are also the ones who most need to stop listening to them. :-)
Yeah! I did my senior thesis in an 8-person biochemistry lab, graduated in 2009. I was probably solidly in the bottom 2 students of the group. I was just as smart as my labmates, and I had a lack of attention to detail and a weak work ethic. A handful of them went on to more education, and most of them stayed in the field.
I think I might be doing the best, career-wise, unless any of them pivoted to be a medical doctor. I got fired from a biotech job (that pesky work-ethic...) and learned python while working data-entry. Being a C student in college kinda paid off, if it helped me dodge a career in the life sciences.
Linkedin/FB stalked, of the 8 of us we have:
Research Associate (has a Masters now),
Phd/MD Student,
Scientist II,
Research Lab Tech (might be unemployed & traveling the world?),
Research Lab Tech,
PhD Student,
Physician's Assistant,
Senior Software Eng.
All but one of these people are harder-working than I am, and all are just as smart. I just lucked out by having an economist for my dad, who planted the idea that I should look at switching to a field in demand.
Yes, the Profski Scheme, as it's known (although IME it's the administrators who are behind the inflation of the scheme).
I think there is fundamentally something morally wrong with the HE system in the US and now the UK, which lands young people in so much debt before the start of their working lives (I would make exceptions for vocational qualifications like medicine).
The sooner this space is disrupted, the better - it is a moral imperative.
Friend said he and his wife joked about being peeved that their PhD's didn't come with the line 'Successfully completed without resort to psychotherapy or drugs'
On point number 1, since we are living longer (Happy Birthday, Your Majesty), there is a logic to delaying adulthood by around 5 years until your mid to late 20s.
Grad school can also be a great place to date, and the time can be used to reflect on what you really want to do in the future.
All your points resonate with me and the people I knew in grad school.
I had two criteria when it came to doing a PhD: it had to be funded and it had to be relatively short (so UK rather than the US).
Developing the next CRISPR, detecting gravitational waves, or building a stellator is a pretty grown up thing. In the end there is a non zero chance of achieving or contributing to something exceptional during your 20s (depending on your field).
2. Fear of the job market.
Well said. No other entity is recruiting young undergrads like academia does. Only topped by consulting firms, maybe.
3. Don't know what else to do.
The fellow students I encountered (~30) were mostly driven/obsessed by curiosity (2-3 exceptions maybe).
4. Magical thinking
Academia problem or society in general? This pattern prevails everywhere.
"Developing the next CRISPR, detecting gravitational waves, or building a stellator is a pretty grown up thing. In the end there is a non zero chance of achieving or contributing to something exceptional during your 20s (depending on your field)."
It is a mistake to look at a field full of so many thousands of people and focus on the outliers.
The common case of the PhD experience is proving cheap labor to a tenured professor on their projects while moving your own PhD process forward, in a field that lacks the hard science component that allows you to paint such a glowing image of the process. You dipped into physics twice, in fact; even accidentally, I'd suggest this means something. Further, both fields you named are fields where getting a PhD still leaves you quite eminently hireable even if you "fail out" of academia... this, too, is not the common experience.
Someone getting their PhD needs to make sure they ask questions about what is most likely, not what the most awesome possibilities are, who are, by that very token, getting drowned in applications for those positions. Do you have a good story as to why you will get those positions?
I really fall under #3.
My wife got a job offer which implied relocating on a short notice.
I wasn't finding any work at all and a PhD seemed like a way to keep busy for 3 years doing something (potentially) interesting.
That one I don't get. Having watched my wife get her PhD, I'd say that it requires at least much "adulthood" (place in that word what you will) as any job I've ever had, and probably a lot more.
I'm reminded of sitting first day in class, English 101. The teacher said 'I won't accept late work in this class' And I'm like fair enough. Then she added 'because when you get out into the real world your boss won't accept late work' And the other students are nodding their heads while I'm trying hard not to snort coke out my nose.
The difference between me, the other students and the teacher was I'd had been working at technical job through school. In the real world crap's late all the time. Meeting the deadline involves jettisoning requirements like the sailors in a stricken ship tossing valuable cargo over side.
You know your wife is an adult. And school actually is the real world. Grad school is often harder, you don't have a boss. You don't have tasks that are neatly sectioned. Work places tend to be organized to psychologically pressure you into getting stuff done. Self motivation is a big factor in being successful in school.
Lot of students don't get that though. And the potential transition out of school seems scary. So they punt.
>Grad school is pretty easy and fun! You get to hang out on campus, think about ideas, take a minimal number of classes, do a bit of teaching, and have copious free time.
What on Earth? Did I go to grad-school in an alternate dimension or something?
I am actually going to get my PhD in the next few days.
Perhaps I am an outlier, but I really think it was the right thing for me.
I hit the end of my undergraduate degree and I felt like I had just started learning, so I looked into graduate school and liked what I saw.
I've spent the last 4 years working on my PhD and I have learned a lot, I've made real improvements to human knowledge, and I've gotten a job that would have been impossible with a bachelors and 4 years of work experience.
But the biggest reason is simple and terrifying: because it is fun.
Very much this! I'm about to start my seventh year, and if all goes well, my last. It's been a blast, and I've learned so much: whenever I've thought to myself "gosh, I wish I knew more about ___" I could choose to learn about it from a leading expert, for free.
For people who measure their success in dollars earned a PhD is an idiotic investment. About a year ago I calculated the difference in how much money I have, and how much money I would currently have had I accepted an offer from Google after my first year. Obviously that stung a little. But I wouldn't trade the last six years for anything... not even the above-mentioned amount of money ;)
>I've spent the last 4 years working on my PhD and I have learned a lot, I've made real improvements to human knowledge, and I've gotten a job that would have been impossible with a bachelors and 4 years of work experience.
The real problem with oversupply of PhDs is there are fields of study which aren't remunerative outside academia. If you get a PhD in electrical engineering, say, or something medical, you can get a job.
But if you field of study was sociology or literature and you can't find a job in academia (and you probably can't), you're never going to be able to pay of eight or ten year's worth of student loans.
I am reasonably familiar with how science PhD's get funded, having worked with many of them. Who fund PhDs in literature or sociology (or any subject that is unlikely to pay for a job in the "real world").
A similar argument could be made for not studying any humanities subject. The point is often not what the degree is in but the soft skills you gain. A good undergrad degree is seen by many employers to be enough to get a job (outside of specific technical fields).
It's what I started with too. I've seen a lot of discussion about how CS Grad students are getting underpaid.
I acquired $70k in student loans to afford to live in the city with my partner while working on my degree.
Essentially they paid about half of cost of living.
I took $20k in loans out as well for living, ended up using about $15k of that per year and paying the rest back. I had a cheap apartment shared with others, it was enough to live a very fun life for three years.
> But the biggest reason is simple and terrifying: because it is fun.
This is a great reason to do it. For me, I consider it getting my retirement in at the beginning of my career. I did something for several years just because I wanted to.
I'm currently quite happy in an industry job in which my PhD is an asset, but I'd still advise others against pursuing a PhD. I could've found a career path that would be just as fulfilling without a PhD, and I could've gotten there faster if I hadn't spent 10 years on a PhD+postdoc.
My standard advice to people currently in grad school is to drop out with a masters.
I am not aware of a way to get into a "scientist" level position doing biology research, in industry, without a PhD. This alone would answer the question "Why do so many people continue to pursue doctorates?"
If somebody has evidence to the contrary, please fill me in.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I would qualify that as reflecting how many candidates see themselves, and how they've opted to romanticize their life choices, rather than it being an objective statement about why people do what they do.
Nobody aspires to be the night manager at a fast food place, but many of the people who end up with jobs like that got there because they made impractical educational choices (which might include getting a PhD without understanding how they were going to turn that into a career after the fact).
I'm not anti-PhD at all, but plenty of people get them for the wrong reasons or without thinking about what they'll do with it once it's done. In my experience, for many people it's a way to have an extended childhood/college experience well into their 30s. When you're in school you can judge yourself and others based on your aspirations (which can be especially intoxicating if those aspirations are romantic notions like "extending mankind's understanding"), but once you're out of school all that matters is what you've actually accomplished. It can be a scary transition and I don't blame anyone for wanting to postpone it if they have the means to do so.
There's data scientist. You don't need a PhD to pursue that. I mean, you probably won't be researching cures for cancer, but you'll still be applying research methodologies. You'll be getting paid more and probably won't have to wait half your lifetime to get a plum position. I abandoned grad school after seeing the rigor mortis that has set into academia and private research companies.
I work as a data scientist at a nonprofit research organization (rti.org) and have to apply far more skills than the PhD researchers here. While we fall back on them for depth in subject matter expertise, we also have to understand conceptual design, research methodology, stats, newer data sci methods, software development, 3+ programming languages, user experience design, tech stacks, database design and deployment, data visualization, business consulting, public speaking, etc... Often, we lead client engagements, determine project deliverables, co-author academic papers, present at conferences, schmooze with key stakeholders, and so on. ALL of us, however, would lose our minds if we had to focus on a single domain area or spend a protracted amount of time on one problem. I worked on > 50 projects across the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities in 2015. It can be exhausting, but it is a real blast most of the time.
So... Consider the path of a research data scientist if that sounds fun. It's also very lucrative, which is nice, too, though I'm not personally motivated by the finances of it.
I'm confused. All the skills you cite are exactly the ones I would expect a PhD researcher (esp. in math, comp. sci, stats, etc...) to be proficient in (although, perhaps not the schmoozing). You're saying your PhD researchers aren't skilled in research methodology and stats??
Ehhh. I suspect an information asymmetry problem -- that is, the GP doesn't know what his/her colleagues actually know -- coupled with a tendency of researchers to let work drift by when it isn't in their wheelhouse.
While I've known a lot of PhDs who know nothing about statistics or programming or some other specific skill (nobody is an expert at everything), it's pretty hard to make it through a good graduate program while knowing none of these things. What generally happens is that domain experts try to keep their minds focused on their domains (where their value is highest), and let non-specialist work fall to generalists. Generalists then (sometimes, incorrectly) assume that the specialists are useless outside of their niche.
I'm not going to say that there aren't incompetent PhDs, but it's a bad assumption to make, in general. You don't assume that your CEO doesn't know how to clean a toilet simply because she lets the janitor do it.
What comes with the PhD positions is a requirement to respond to RFPs with concept notes, proposals, etc... and a lot of high level project management. They provide subject matter expertise from an analytic angle (usually without getting involved in the technical aspects) but almost never are involved in modeling, development, or anything else that I listed above. We're seeing change wherein data scientists more often are involved in the proposal and business development process, but not wherein PhD-level researchers are involved in the technical implementation of projects.
You can't get an MD without a PhD depending on the country the first 5-6 years get you a PhD the residency gets you the MD.
Some medical schools also allow you to take an extra 1-2 years and get a "research" on you degree as well.
Interesting, what are some countries that do this? I'm also not sure how a Ph.D. can be conferred without a research component, but that's a US-centric view I'll grant you.
They aren't, I should've been clearer.
MD and PhD in medicine have a very large overlap, the first 4-5 years of med school are virtually identical.
If you decide to drop out of medschool before you start your residency you can get a PhD very easily usually within a year or so depending on the school and how many credits you have.
Not true in the USA, Canada, Ireland, Britain, Australia, New Zealand. Hell that's not even true in Germany or Austria, the most title obsessed countries on earth.
A German Dr. Med. is closer to a Master's degree than a doctorate and you can practice as a physician without it though few do.
Are there any countries where you have to get a real (research) doctorate to practice as a physician?
You can't practice as a physician without an MD, if you drop out of med school after 4-5 years you can get a PhD very easily since with the exception of the research component the first 4-5 years are almost identical between MD, and PhD.
In many countries the "doctor" in "medical doctor" is an honorary title, not an actual academic title. Like calling the commander of a ship "captain" whether they actually hold the rank (military/merchant marine captain) or not.
I've spent the last couple of weeks intensively researching paths into the life sciences without a PhD (I'm deciding whether to go get one).
I haven't found a way in either. If you start your own company somewhere in the field, or otherwise support yourself, you can rock and roll as an indie researcher. Otherwise, a Ph.D. seems necessary.
I wonder if this will change over the next decade, as synthetic biology continues to expand rapidly.
There is no non-PhD pathway into biomed research that leads to career advancement beyond the drone level [1]. If you do get a PhD, there are few jobs, relative to the number of graduates. All in all, I'd advise against it, unless you have a very specific love of the field, and can handle a modest, academic lifestyle in exchange for working very hard at what you do. And for that, the drone-level jobs are perfect for testing the waters: you should get a job in industry first, and if you decide that you love it, get a PhD.
Also, beware the "$TOPIC is expanding rapidly" trap: synthetic biology is merely the buzzword of the moment. When I started, it was computational biology. Later, genomics. The number of opportunities created by these booms has never kept up with the hype waves that preceded them.
[1] There is, however, a pathway for "business" people who enter biomed. But I'm assuming you're not interested in this, and in any case, getting a PhD won't help you with it.
Thanks for the advice, that all sounds right to me. I particularly like the point about the $TOPIC of the moment.
The roll-your-own-company lab approach sounds a little better, overall. One tricky thing is that I'd have a lot more credibility starting a biotech company with a Ph.D. Right now I'm considering a Ph.D. to get the training and credibility (union card, as someone else said). Still not a slam dunk, though - Transcriptic's founder just has a bachelor's.
I'm actually at the point of considering graduate school to help my chances of establishing a life science based start-up in the future.
Is getting a graduate level degree (at least a Masters) a necessity to be the head of such a company? From what I've seen, most other companies in the space seem to be headed by people with either a PhD or MBA.
Unless you're trying to start a "professional" firm (Law, Civil Engineering, Accounting, etc.) there are not really any educational requirements. Hell, most well-known entrepreneurs didn't even stick college out long enough to get a Bachelor's.
I dropped out of college to found a med-tech company that went on to be funded by YC. Every other company in my space is founded by a doctor. I haven't noticed a difference in how we are treated yet. If you're good, you're good, and you can always hire the PhDs later on.
To be fair, you folks aren't doing research -- you're doing residency program scheduling. And domain expertise is more important for your product than any sort of theoretical knowledge of science or medicine.
To found a company doing scientific research, it helps a great deal not just to have a PhD, but to to be an established researcher in the field you're commercializing. Most scientific startups founded by outsiders are...transparently bad.
Agreed. It really depends on what you are going for. You can learn domain knowledge on the fly (a lot of ours is how the organization functions), but you can't gain a deep understanding of the science side like that.
My experience has been that the advanced degree would have helped a bit with VC interest and probably attracting cofounders. If there's not a specific time-sensitive market opportunity that you're going after, then I think you are right to consider it.
Working tech probably trumps academic credentials in these matters though -- so as long as you know what you're in for, dive right in.
There is a very good essay titled "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" that gives a really excellent description of the mindset that exists when young people go to graduate school. This described me well when I was floating around in my early to mid 20s. I enrolled in a doctoral program in industrial engineering and (ended up leaving with a masters) rather than humanities, but still, I see a lot of myself in what this article describes.
All this is a bit less applicable to some fields. I've heard that employment is good PhDs for CS and some other engineering fields - but then again, so is employment with an MS or BS. Economics may be a good field for a PhD.
One other factor is that getting a graduate degree from a US based university can be a path to immigrate to the US. There really aren't many options for people who don't have family reunification as an option, so going to grad school in a STEM field in particular may have value that isn't captured in pay relative to fields that don't provide this path to the same extent.
The article mentions that enrollment in PhD programs hasn't declined like it has for law schools and historically hasn't been a path to immigration. One way to measure this would be to see if there has been a substantial decline in enrollment in PhD programs from people who already have the right to live in and work in the US.
This is a good question to ask. Prospective and current PhD students need to understand the pros and cons, and the incentives driving their recruitment. But in terms of defining the problem, it all depends on your perspective... As a society, we are severely lacking in people doing deep dedicated study in important areas. Understanding biology at a level that allows us to alleviate much of human suffering is still a long way away, for example. So perhaps the question is 'Why do we pauperize people interested in doing serious science and then make them feel bad about it?'
Two thoughts on why people go for doctorates even though they are unlikely to get a job that requires it.
One is that there is a real conflict of interest for their professors. They are supposed to be advising their students in their best interests, but they need to keep a big surplus of graduate students to keep their graduate programs going, and often also as research assistants.
The other is that American elementary and secondary education is designed to funnel people into higher education, and so that is what students learn how do do, rather than getting a job in the real world. Contrast this with Germany, where there is a very solid track for learning useful skilled manual trades (and that is a key reason German manufacturing continues to be very healthy in the face of Asian competition)
Germany has good academic (selective) schools and good technical schools.
We used to have something similar in the UK.
I have a PhD and was good academically. I recently bumped into an old school friend, who was not academic in the slightest and is now a tradesman earning great money.
If I had kids, I wouldn't mind one bit if they decided to pass on higher education and learn a trade instead.
I call it, "Revenge on the snobs."
i'm a drop out so i may be biased, but my experience of software developers with doctorates is that they are very consistently not as good as self taught juniors in the workplace.
this makes sense.. a doctorate is a research effort with a very different kind of end goal to the typical workplace environment. its an opportunity to explore the field and do work that most employers will never let you - but more importantly the skill set required is, imo, highly orthogonal to the skills require for day-to-day 'boring' work.
why do people expect doctorates to result in employment outside of academia? they are poorly suited to this by design... and afaik its completely intentional because of the aforementioned difference in skill requirements.
There's another selection bias at play: the really good PhD's in CS who didn't go to academia and aren't doing research at a research lab, are making millions at Google/Facebook/quant finance, and not <foo corp>.
its funny how all of the best programmers i know have quite a lot of disdain for the idea that Google or Facebook are good at engineering... their public facing code is good evidence of it too. HHVM is full of rank amatuer crappiness, as well as some fairly cool stuff... but mostly crappiness and WebRTC is an absolute nightmare to use in practice compared to most rookie efforts in the same area (and its not because of what it does, its because Google have lots of internal stuff to work around the shittiness that isn't public afaik).
i've met plenty of very shitty googlers and facebookers, as well as some truly excellent ones. but i suspect you will find much better guys in games, vfx, military and finance (which at least backs up some of your point). in my experience there is a much lower tolerance for crappiness in those fields by necessity. the performance and quality bar they have to meet is orders of magnitude higher in a lot of cases...
I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't done a doctorate degree. It turned out that I wasn't a star, I didn't produce the research that would put me on to a tenure-track position with ease. But I don't think there was any way I would have found my limitations without doing it, without seeing how much smarter some people were - I would always have been left wondering what could have been. Now, I have come to terms with it, and moved on.
I'm in my 6th year of a (hopefully soon-to-be-completed) doctorate, and my experience has been very similar. I started the degree because I wanted to learn more about a particular field and develop the related technical skills. I couldn't think of a job where I could get the same benefits. I've learned a ton, but have also seen that while I have certain strengths, there are others who are smarter, more motivated, and frankly have different priorities than I do. Like you, I'm now coming to terms with it, but I have a better idea of what strengths I do have and am working towards putting them to good use.
Motivation is the big factor. Most PhDs are smart enough to pursue a career in higher ed, but it takes a PhD to evaluate your level of motivation / love of the subject.
Intrinsic motivation is becoming even more important given the incentives for entering the field are diminishing (job insecurity, more senior management, publish or perish).
The article seemingly is very focused on employment. It's taken as axiomatic that people must do whatever they do because it leads them into an employer's arms, at some point.
What about whether a PhD helps people with romantic relationships, sense of belonging in the community, happiness, social ranking, whatever other goals they might have in their lives?
In light of that I think the topic should be changed on HN - I expected a much more balanced analysis. The current headline on the site itself is "The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s".
Especially given the current H1B situation. It looks like almost anyone with a PhD and a good immigration lawyer can get an O1, even if they're being hired as an entry-level developer or another position that clearly doesn't require extraordinary skills.
What this leaves out is that not all Ph.D. programs are equal. If you are good enough in your field to get accepted into one of the Top 10 graduate programs, you're going to have a great chance of getting a high-quality job when you graduate, assuming you do well. If not, then you're chopped liver.
Those top 10 programs can probably fulfill most of the faculty openings in any given field, nationwide, with enough graduates left over to fill all of the needs of private industry and government labs as well. There is just no reason for recruiters to look further down-list.
I have friends who have taken faculty positions at PhD granting programs ranked 20th or so in the country. They have reported back that their grad students are, um, underwhelming, and they end up doing a lot of their own research hands-on.
A Ph.D. is a union card for doing research. If you want to be a university professor, a principal investigator at a lab, a Chief Scientist or Chief Scientific Officer at a major corporation, then you need that union card.
A Ph.D. program should not be for people who just like learning more stuff. You can take classes, get a masters degree, or just study on your own, if that's what you want. A Ph.D. is supposed to be a certification that you can create an original work of new research, at a quality level that meets the approval of other professional researchers. The research project is typically substantial enough to require years of effort, and the support of others who have already gone through the process.
This is a better way of explaining something I wanted to put in my comment. You have been accepted by your peers as an independent researcher and many companies will pay good money for that.
Most PhDs pursue their subject because they are very interested in it.
That interest may stay the same, it may (in most cases) die down / be satisfied, or it may intensify.
You will always be wondering whether academic was for you or not unless you do a PhD.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadA bachelors really doesn't get you anything as a sciences student. Besides QA/Tech positions, there aren't many options to cut a viable path within the field. Most companies demand a minimum Masters with a preference for PhD's for most Scientist level positions. Having upward career mobility is very tough without a higher degree.
Spurned on by a lack of better options, most students pursue grad school in hopes of landing a tenure track position or hope their research aligns with relevant industry markets. Competition is insanely high though from the sheer churn of graduate students who are essentially cheap labor for their universities.
1. It's a way to (pointlessly) delay adulthood.
2. Fear of the job market.
3. Don't know what else to do.
4. Magical thinking (despite the numerous articles out there, like mine (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...) that attempt to dissuade it). I think this is the biggest issue. In addition, there seems to be a Lake Woebegone effect: Everyone thinks they're going to be above average.
EDIT: I forgot to add another important one: Grad school is pretty easy and fun! You get to hang out on campus, think about ideas, take a minimal number of classes, do a bit of teaching, and have copious free time. The problem is that, as time advances and your priorities start changing (want a real life / job, date people who don't date people whose lives aren't together, etc.), reality starts to intrude. Many grad students have an unacknowledged Peter Pan complex.
None of them could give me a convincing answer as to how I would benefit long-term for continuing my education. None of them could give me an example of a job that I would be unable to get with my current level of education. All of them admitted that it would require 4-6 more years of my life, and that even with the best financial aid / scholarships, I would still be paying $60-100k out-of-pocket for the experience.
So basically, it would have required me to put off getting a full time job to instead drive myself deep into debt all while sacrificing all of my free-time until I was 30.
Instead, I moved to Seattle, found a job in I.T. and I have been climbing the corporate ladder ever since, making more than enough money to live comfortably and save money. I was lucky enough to earn my B.A. without any student debt.
My degree isn't even in an I.T. field. I have a B.A. in Journalism! The thing that has done more to further my resume has been my full-time employment and my technical certifications. I get to expense my certifications to my company...
Furthering my education would have ruined my future. Ending my education has accelerated it. Sadly, I worry that this is going to become true of Undergrad programs in the next decade, and that's not a good thing...
For STEM, it's also true that certain job opportunities (eg. elite R&D facilities) more-or-less require a PhD or equivalent levels of mastery. It's possible to obtain those jobs after a long period of field work (without PhD), but it's a lot more difficult. Plus, you will always be butting up against credentialing norms during those jobs' recruiting processes. (Whether that's equitable or not is another story.)
Just my $0.02.
This is important. I thought at the time that I accepted that it was due to the massive budget cuts happening in California, and the UC's were undergoing furloughs.
Oops.
That sounds pretty fucked up. Working on your PhD is a job and you should be getting a salary from the University, not paying them.
You are probably a bit of an outlier in that any credentials in journalism, never mind a postgraduate degree in journalism, are only recently a way of increasing your chances of gaining employment in that field.
If non-commercial journalism grows that might change. But for now I'd venture to guess Ph.Ds in journalism are rare among those working in the field.
In Germany until a few years ago you could practice as a psychotherapist after doing your Master's (which included a large practical component.) Now they tacked on more post graduation training time. In the USA and other unfortunate countries that follow its example medicine, dentistry and law are all postgraduate degrees, elsewhwere they're undergraduate. In the USA until recently physiotherapy was a Master's degree. Now they require a "professional doctorate" like an Ed.D. or Psy.D. You can still practice in the US with a Bachelor's in physiotherapy acquired in Europe. In Germany physiotherapy is an apprenticeship.
In my home country of Ireland they recently increased the necessary qualifications for teaching from a one year post bachelor's diploma to a Master's. This despite the fact that the evidence for positive effects of teaching qualification on effectiveness are minimal, at best.
Credentialism.
I think in the special German case this was made to allow for more career switching - I have a relative who has a diploma in Pedagogy, he took one of the new short psychotherapy courses ("post graduation training time") and is now a certified child psychologist, a career that was before this new course impossible for him without the prior psychology degrees.
So, an employer looking at many undifferentiated candidates would likely choose someone with a masters or doctorate, if not at least to cover their hiring decision if ever questioned.
The development of a fast and cost-efficient test would lower the need for credentials as a gateway.
I think humanity applies the lessons from these articles in the aggregate, but at an individual level, this is a much messier story.
It features people (like myself) who didn't really understand or place any importance on marketability when asked to choose a major at 17.
Four years later you get another fun choice: accept your current job prospects, grab an advanced degree, or start from scratch on a different undergrad degree, which is psychologically quite hard.[0]
I know a lot of people push for universally free college tuition. A part of me though would much rather encourage school loans that signal to students the viability of their major by adjusting interest rates or availability of credit based on the field of study.
Though that has it's problems too. We'd want to pay teachers considerably more, for instance.
Ok, I mostly just wish someone had handed me a copy of "So Good They Can't Ignore You" when I was young and stupid.
[0] And some people successfully convince a great manager to take a chance on them. That involves a lot of search costs and a lot of luck, though. It also filters for risk-tolerant employers, which becomes a high-risk strategy itself.
5. Academic success has been rewarded every step of the way.
I look at my high school classmates who I know went on to get Phds. (Sample size of 8) All of them were among the smartest few percent in the class. Every success that they got through the end of undergrad was due to academic performance. But afterwards things slowed down. Only 2 of 8 stayed through to tenure. The two smartest got Phds in math and wound up in non-faculty positions. One other got a science industry job. One wound up at a hedge fund. And two teach high school.
All things considered it's not a bad lot in life, but these were amongst the best and brightest of my peer group. Five of Seven would have been better served taking other paths to their end destinations.
There is a systemic incentives problem going on. Every individual school has an incentive to push as many people as possible into academia. This is for both cheap labor, and because their brand goes up when absolute #s of their grads go on to big things. The schools in aggregate also benefit when there are more Phd grads than job applicants. (Again keeps costs down) The systemic over-supply punishes the graduates as a whole.
It's a case where the individuals who have gotten the most mileage listening to their teachers, are also the ones who most need to stop listening to them. :-)
I think I might be doing the best, career-wise, unless any of them pivoted to be a medical doctor. I got fired from a biotech job (that pesky work-ethic...) and learned python while working data-entry. Being a C student in college kinda paid off, if it helped me dodge a career in the life sciences.
Linkedin/FB stalked, of the 8 of us we have: Research Associate (has a Masters now), Phd/MD Student, Scientist II, Research Lab Tech (might be unemployed & traveling the world?), Research Lab Tech, PhD Student, Physician's Assistant, Senior Software Eng.
All but one of these people are harder-working than I am, and all are just as smart. I just lucked out by having an economist for my dad, who planted the idea that I should look at switching to a field in demand.
This is not a universally shared experience.
1. It's a way to (pointlessly) delay adulthood.
adulthood != working for a company
Developing the next CRISPR, detecting gravitational waves, or building a stellator is a pretty grown up thing. In the end there is a non zero chance of achieving or contributing to something exceptional during your 20s (depending on your field).
2. Fear of the job market.
Well said. No other entity is recruiting young undergrads like academia does. Only topped by consulting firms, maybe.
3. Don't know what else to do.
The fellow students I encountered (~30) were mostly driven/obsessed by curiosity (2-3 exceptions maybe).
4. Magical thinking
Academia problem or society in general? This pattern prevails everywhere.
disclaimer: physics PhD
It is a mistake to look at a field full of so many thousands of people and focus on the outliers.
The common case of the PhD experience is proving cheap labor to a tenured professor on their projects while moving your own PhD process forward, in a field that lacks the hard science component that allows you to paint such a glowing image of the process. You dipped into physics twice, in fact; even accidentally, I'd suggest this means something. Further, both fields you named are fields where getting a PhD still leaves you quite eminently hireable even if you "fail out" of academia... this, too, is not the common experience.
Someone getting their PhD needs to make sure they ask questions about what is most likely, not what the most awesome possibilities are, who are, by that very token, getting drowned in applications for those positions. Do you have a good story as to why you will get those positions?
The military does.
That one I don't get. Having watched my wife get her PhD, I'd say that it requires at least much "adulthood" (place in that word what you will) as any job I've ever had, and probably a lot more.
The difference between me, the other students and the teacher was I'd had been working at technical job through school. In the real world crap's late all the time. Meeting the deadline involves jettisoning requirements like the sailors in a stricken ship tossing valuable cargo over side.
You know your wife is an adult. And school actually is the real world. Grad school is often harder, you don't have a boss. You don't have tasks that are neatly sectioned. Work places tend to be organized to psychologically pressure you into getting stuff done. Self motivation is a big factor in being successful in school.
Lot of students don't get that though. And the potential transition out of school seems scary. So they punt.
What on Earth? Did I go to grad-school in an alternate dimension or something?
Perhaps I am an outlier, but I really think it was the right thing for me. I hit the end of my undergraduate degree and I felt like I had just started learning, so I looked into graduate school and liked what I saw. I've spent the last 4 years working on my PhD and I have learned a lot, I've made real improvements to human knowledge, and I've gotten a job that would have been impossible with a bachelors and 4 years of work experience.
But the biggest reason is simple and terrifying: because it is fun.
For people who measure their success in dollars earned a PhD is an idiotic investment. About a year ago I calculated the difference in how much money I have, and how much money I would currently have had I accepted an offer from Google after my first year. Obviously that stung a little. But I wouldn't trade the last six years for anything... not even the above-mentioned amount of money ;)
The real problem with oversupply of PhDs is there are fields of study which aren't remunerative outside academia. If you get a PhD in electrical engineering, say, or something medical, you can get a job.
But if you field of study was sociology or literature and you can't find a job in academia (and you probably can't), you're never going to be able to pay of eight or ten year's worth of student loans.
If you have a PhD it is important to sell the skills it gave you that an employer wants. A good list of which are found here: https://careercenter.umich.edu/article/phd-transferable-skil...
I acquired $70k in student loans to afford to live in the city with my partner while working on my degree. Essentially they paid about half of cost of living.
This is a great reason to do it. For me, I consider it getting my retirement in at the beginning of my career. I did something for several years just because I wanted to.
My standard advice to people currently in grad school is to drop out with a masters.
If somebody has evidence to the contrary, please fill me in.
If you want to be night manager at Wendy's, you don't need any higher ed.
And then there's a lot in between.
I suspect that most PhD candidates have aspirations that lean toward the former.
Nobody aspires to be the night manager at a fast food place, but many of the people who end up with jobs like that got there because they made impractical educational choices (which might include getting a PhD without understanding how they were going to turn that into a career after the fact).
I'm not anti-PhD at all, but plenty of people get them for the wrong reasons or without thinking about what they'll do with it once it's done. In my experience, for many people it's a way to have an extended childhood/college experience well into their 30s. When you're in school you can judge yourself and others based on your aspirations (which can be especially intoxicating if those aspirations are romantic notions like "extending mankind's understanding"), but once you're out of school all that matters is what you've actually accomplished. It can be a scary transition and I don't blame anyone for wanting to postpone it if they have the means to do so.
Many people have audacious goals that aren't fully realized.
I think the saying is "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
I'm not sure how true it is, but the idea is a common one.
So... Consider the path of a research data scientist if that sounds fun. It's also very lucrative, which is nice, too, though I'm not personally motivated by the finances of it.
While I've known a lot of PhDs who know nothing about statistics or programming or some other specific skill (nobody is an expert at everything), it's pretty hard to make it through a good graduate program while knowing none of these things. What generally happens is that domain experts try to keep their minds focused on their domains (where their value is highest), and let non-specialist work fall to generalists. Generalists then (sometimes, incorrectly) assume that the specialists are useless outside of their niche.
I'm not going to say that there aren't incompetent PhDs, but it's a bad assumption to make, in general. You don't assume that your CEO doesn't know how to clean a toilet simply because she lets the janitor do it.
A German Dr. Med. is closer to a Master's degree than a doctorate and you can practice as a physician without it though few do.
Are there any countries where you have to get a real (research) doctorate to practice as a physician?
I haven't found a way in either. If you start your own company somewhere in the field, or otherwise support yourself, you can rock and roll as an indie researcher. Otherwise, a Ph.D. seems necessary.
I wonder if this will change over the next decade, as synthetic biology continues to expand rapidly.
Also, beware the "$TOPIC is expanding rapidly" trap: synthetic biology is merely the buzzword of the moment. When I started, it was computational biology. Later, genomics. The number of opportunities created by these booms has never kept up with the hype waves that preceded them.
[1] There is, however, a pathway for "business" people who enter biomed. But I'm assuming you're not interested in this, and in any case, getting a PhD won't help you with it.
The roll-your-own-company lab approach sounds a little better, overall. One tricky thing is that I'd have a lot more credibility starting a biotech company with a Ph.D. Right now I'm considering a Ph.D. to get the training and credibility (union card, as someone else said). Still not a slam dunk, though - Transcriptic's founder just has a bachelor's.
Is getting a graduate level degree (at least a Masters) a necessity to be the head of such a company? From what I've seen, most other companies in the space seem to be headed by people with either a PhD or MBA.
To found a company doing scientific research, it helps a great deal not just to have a PhD, but to to be an established researcher in the field you're commercializing. Most scientific startups founded by outsiders are...transparently bad.
Working tech probably trumps academic credentials in these matters though -- so as long as you know what you're in for, dive right in.
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/448...
All this is a bit less applicable to some fields. I've heard that employment is good PhDs for CS and some other engineering fields - but then again, so is employment with an MS or BS. Economics may be a good field for a PhD.
One other factor is that getting a graduate degree from a US based university can be a path to immigrate to the US. There really aren't many options for people who don't have family reunification as an option, so going to grad school in a STEM field in particular may have value that isn't captured in pay relative to fields that don't provide this path to the same extent.
The article mentions that enrollment in PhD programs hasn't declined like it has for law schools and historically hasn't been a path to immigration. One way to measure this would be to see if there has been a substantial decline in enrollment in PhD programs from people who already have the right to live in and work in the US.
One is that there is a real conflict of interest for their professors. They are supposed to be advising their students in their best interests, but they need to keep a big surplus of graduate students to keep their graduate programs going, and often also as research assistants.
The other is that American elementary and secondary education is designed to funnel people into higher education, and so that is what students learn how do do, rather than getting a job in the real world. Contrast this with Germany, where there is a very solid track for learning useful skilled manual trades (and that is a key reason German manufacturing continues to be very healthy in the face of Asian competition)
I'm approaching the end of a 4 year PhD and so far do not miss the world of work too much. But ask me again in a year...
this makes sense.. a doctorate is a research effort with a very different kind of end goal to the typical workplace environment. its an opportunity to explore the field and do work that most employers will never let you - but more importantly the skill set required is, imo, highly orthogonal to the skills require for day-to-day 'boring' work.
why do people expect doctorates to result in employment outside of academia? they are poorly suited to this by design... and afaik its completely intentional because of the aforementioned difference in skill requirements.
i've met plenty of very shitty googlers and facebookers, as well as some truly excellent ones. but i suspect you will find much better guys in games, vfx, military and finance (which at least backs up some of your point). in my experience there is a much lower tolerance for crappiness in those fields by necessity. the performance and quality bar they have to meet is orders of magnitude higher in a lot of cases...
What about whether a PhD helps people with romantic relationships, sense of belonging in the community, happiness, social ranking, whatever other goals they might have in their lives?
In light of that I think the topic should be changed on HN - I expected a much more balanced analysis. The current headline on the site itself is "The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s".
Those top 10 programs can probably fulfill most of the faculty openings in any given field, nationwide, with enough graduates left over to fill all of the needs of private industry and government labs as well. There is just no reason for recruiters to look further down-list.
I have friends who have taken faculty positions at PhD granting programs ranked 20th or so in the country. They have reported back that their grad students are, um, underwhelming, and they end up doing a lot of their own research hands-on.
A Ph.D. program should not be for people who just like learning more stuff. You can take classes, get a masters degree, or just study on your own, if that's what you want. A Ph.D. is supposed to be a certification that you can create an original work of new research, at a quality level that meets the approval of other professional researchers. The research project is typically substantial enough to require years of effort, and the support of others who have already gone through the process.
you are saying it's not sufficient.
you might both be right; they are different properties.
Why do people keep getting degrees in journalism when there are no jobs?