There are exceptions, but to the best of my knowledge most PhD-employees in the Netherlands have not chosen their own topic.
This is nonsense. Although my PhD was in a project with a predefined topic, many of my colleagues were doing a PhD in a topic of their choice. The faculty would have N open PhD positions every year, and people could submit proposals.
Also, the primary argument set forth in this post is financial. If you avoid paying income tax (through scholarships), you can spend your money on other things. No shit. If you change the amount of the scholarship to $500 per month, you can also spend more money, but you'll only get garbage. You have to find some level of compensation where you still get good candidates. In some fields, candidates will go to industry at the proposed compensation level (I would).
Another problem that is not taken into account is how government budgeting works. They won't see a switch to a bursary system as a way to save money to hire more faculty staff. They will see it as a way to save money, period. Especially in economically difficult times where we have to increase our military spending because of conflicts in Ukraine and the middle east.
Indeed. Here in Denmark there are two options for PhD, you can either get one of the proposed topics, or you can submit a proposal.
Changing supervisors (at least in my experience) is not a problem, and this happens fairly regularly. It is better for a university to change supervisor than to lose a PhD student, as that happens often enough.
The salary here ($4500 or so per month, pre tax) for a PhD at a university is enough to lure those interested in academic work (especially after spending 5 years on Student payments of around $1k/month), whilst not being incredibly high. Of course, if you go into the private sector to do your PhD, you can expect a higher salary.
"in the UK and the US, PhD-students can in many (most?) cases choose their own topic"
In the US, in the labs I am aware of, most of the student stipend for the experimental work is paid by the lab from its funds. As a consequence most of the time it is on the grant's topic. Choosing the lab is a way of choosing the range of the topics.
"Our proposal would give PhD-students decent wage contracts for the research assistance or teaching which they would do"
PhD students do not merely provide research assistance. They design protocols, carry them out and ask new questions, at least the good ones. The only thing that most PhD students lack is the ability to safely shift focus since most of their ideas have already been done but they don't know that since they are not aware of the literature.
What I don't like about the articles on academics lately is that on the one side they are focusing on how to keep highly educated people with low salaries and on the other hand how to bring more people in academia. Increase the salaries and more smart people will come, it is as simple as that... instead they are trying to get more people in academia so more people get trapped by inertia in bad paying jobs...
I would say that funding and grants (or lack thereof) is one of the biggest determinants in the sciences in the US. You can choose your own PhD as long as what you choose is something your advisor has the money to support and agrees that it is an interesting direction to go. That's very different from choose whatever you want and more in line with what he thinks European PhD's are like.
I can't comment on much of this article, but it doesn't apply to the UK (as is implied), where essentially every student has full funding for their 3-4 years. Sometimes people hang around for an extra six months, but it's nothing like the US system.
Starting a PhD means someone has already mastered the basics of a profession, and is at an age that could work productively in the industry. At this point, doing a PhD is a choice between academia and industry for the next 4-5 years. If an industry really exists (e.g. STEM fields), PhD programs must be competitive with it; they must offer something like a job. Of course, there are fields where PhD programs have less funding and the status of PhD employees is less frequent: a PhD in literature may have less funding available compared to a PhD in bioinformatics and will attract people that have different expectations.
About the freedom of choosing a thesis topic, I think this depends on both the style of supervision (controlling boss vs. laissez-faire situation) and the funding project (some have vague goals and can accept a wide range of topics, while others are very focused on mini areas).
And I think danieldk is right about the money: you are welcome to accept less of it, this doesn't mean that the money saved by the state is really going where you want it to go...
I disagree that it truly needs to be "competitive", because the people in the PhD program are receiving value other than monetary compensation for their work (i.e. a PhD!).
I do think that PhD students need to be paid a living wage, because of practical considerations, but you definitely don't need to pay anywhere near a normal wage. Your job as a PhD student is to get your degree and graduate, not to make anyone else money directly with your labor.
True. By "competitive" I didn't mean "same money", but "an equally good choice for enough people to fill the PhD ranks". Bad or non-existent wages are almost never an easy choice, no matter how much one wants to do research or become a professor (unless they already have money and can be self-funded during the PhD). Lack of funding can lead to part-time PhDs or extra day jobs, making it more taxing, lowering the quality of the research, and even leading to failure to complete the degree (in which case, the person just wasted their time).
A PhD student should get a "living wage" as you say -- enough compensation to be able to continue and finish. Industry wages and research wages are different: being paid to work on a product which has a financial plan behind it works differently from trying to improve the state of the art, which can lead to small contributions or even a mathematical proof that it cannot be done :-)
Well... As someone with a brand new physics Ph.D., I think you're wrong that the pay doesn't need to be competitive. Ph.D. programs are really coasting along on the ignorance of the Ph.D. candidates, and I'm not sure how much longer that will last.
Here's what I mean by that: The opportunity cost of a Ph.D. in physics, in terms of foregone salary, earnings on tax-advantaged savings accounts, stress, etc., is north of half a million dollars (and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life). Talking to people I know from my own department, and those I've met at conferences, and such, the lifetime value added to one's salary from having a Ph.D. is probably greater than the opportunity cost. But it's not obviously greater--a Ph.D. is a pretty good signal for "smart and gets things done."
In other words, it tells you "this person was probably going to do well anyway." You can't compare the mean or median salary of Ph.D.'s with those of, say, people with a Bachelor's in some STEM field. If you were to compare median STEM Ph.D. salaries with same-field top-quartile (or maybe top-decile) Bachelor's salaries, you'd find there is not much difference.
Am I just a bitter washed-out Ph.D.? Hell no! I did all sorts of fun things (like intermural sports and traveling) that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I cherish those memories. But, if someone asked me "Should I go to grad school to improve my chances of earning a decent living?" my answer would be "Hell no!"
"I think you're wrong that the pay doesn't need to be competitive. "
I would say the pay is competitive judging from the difficulty of gaining admission into these programs. Why do you think it isn't competitive?
"(and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life)"
I'm not sure about a physics Ph.D. but most of my friends who are finishing up their Ph.Ds enjoyed their mid 20's more than the ones of us who decided to did the daily work grind.
Indeed, my friends who do postdocs at places like MIT never get more than $50k a year. That is definitely not competitive. You're getting compensation in a higher chance of your lottery ticket to getting a faculty job getting chosen, and people wouldn't accept such low salaries if there weren't some perceived trade-off value.
I'm currently a computer science PhD student (in Canada). I love my job (and the freedom and flexibility it gives me), and my funding is good enough that I have a comfortable living situation, but I (and most of my colleagues) could double our salaries by leaving school and getting a good job in industry. Even if I get an increasingly-rare tenure-track position when I'm done, I will never make up the wage gap with my friends from undergrad who went out and got more traditional jobs.
I love teaching, and I hate fighting with the computer (especially for dull line-of-business CRUD apps), so I don't particularly want an industry job, but the fact that I'm spending most of a decade (counting Master's) in grad school working well below the market wage for someone of my skillset still rankles. The fact that I'm going to spend 3/4 of my PhD taking no courses, but paying $12,000 a year in tuition grates too, as it's essentially a quarter of my salary clawed back for "job training", which in my case is a (very supportive) mentor and a desk in a windowless room - I may as well be a miner in a company town paying the company for pickaxes and head lamps (on the other hand, I also get all the same tax breaks I did in undergrad, so at least I'm not paying income tax).
When I describe my job to friends and family, I describe it as a sort of apprentice professor, because that's much closer to the truth than some sort of super-student. I'd rather be paid like an apprentice professor too, rather than a ramen-eating subsistence wage, as the original poster suggests.
To be maybe a bit clearer, I am not doing a purely financial analysis when I talk about how having a PhD is part of the reward. I would also never recommend grad school purely for the financial benefits! The point to me has always been that it gives more freedom (well, probably not for computer science PhDs) to direct the type of work that you do post-graduation. Instead of being a technician, you get to be much more independent in selecting projects, planning them, and potentially managing research groups whether in industry or academia. It means credibility as a consultant, it means credibility asking for more budget for a project you want to do.
And I am again, not talking about PhD's in computer science, which seem to be irrelevant in industry. I'm talking about things like physics or biology.
At least in my field, doing a PhD in the U.S. was essentially the same as what the author described for their country. Freedom of topic choice comes with independent funding, otherwise your advisor will be telling you what is consistent with their funding, and among those projects what they believe is a good fit for you. Unless your advisor is made of research grants, that won't leave much choice for you. In the meantime you are effectively an employee (I like to think of it as an apprentice), you are learning your trade while providing a service for which you are usually compensated.
Depends on the particular PhD program, but if you are in science or engineering in the US then you should be able to be a teaching assistant, research assistant, or both and have free tuition and a stipend. If the author is solely talking about humanities PhDs or other types of graduate school (law, medical) in the US, then maybe the author has a point.
This whole article seems like its being informed by some very specific views or experience with the academic system.
The idea that students should be free to choose their own topics is...odd. You choose your topics based on choosing your lab and the projects on offer - at least in science.
The observations from the author in the comments section that they know people who want to do a PhD (in Arts/Humanities) but can't because they can't find an offered project seems more like the system working properly - professors, who can be presumed to be aware of their field and by extension national interests via grants, offer projects to hopefully efficiently allocate the research dollars of the nation.
Which leads back to my first paragraph: in science I really don't know what you'd get out of students making up their own projects in a vacuum. Which makes me think the author has a very narrow perspective on PhD research.
I chose my own research questions for my PhD. So did many people I know. And, when supervising my own PhD students, I preferred them to work on their own problems, all other things being equal [1].
The reason is that choosing what problems to work on is a fundamental research skill. Someone who doesn't learn that skill hasn't really learnt to do research.
This isn't to say that a student shouldn't spend time talking with their advisor about choice of problem. Of course they should -- they should talk to as many people as possible! But the responsibility for the choice of problem should be theirs. If that's not the case, then they're missing much of what it is to do research.
"I had another Ph.D. Student (Albert Hibbs) [who worked on] how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on..."
[1] This is actually pretty complicated. Many students don't have ideas they're confident pursuing. Some don't grow into it, even after gaining some experience solving research problems. That presents challenges. And sometimes students badly misjudge what is important or interesting to work on. Should a supervisor interfere when that's happening? It depends. Making mistakes in choosing which problem to work on is an important part of learning to do research. So some floundering around is fine. But allowing it to go on for years and years is just cruel.
You're probably among the top 5% (if not top 1%) of people in physics, and you attended top institutions. That's fantastic (I really mean that), but it gives you a skewed view of academia.
Most physics PhD candidates do not have free choice of research questions (or, at best, they are spending their "10% time" on their own questions, which is what I did).
On institutions: I did my PhD at the University of New Mexico. A fine institution, but also not Harvard / MIT / etc. I went there because Carl Caves had created a great environment to work on quantum information. Carl encouraged me to work on whatever problems I wanted, but was also happy to provide advice upon request. My fellow PhD students enjoyed similar freedom, and I believe it benefited them enormously as well.
Edit: To clarify my earlier comment: I am certainly _not_ saying that it is universally the case that people are able to choose their PhD project. That's not true, especially in fields involving expensive experimental equipment. I'm saying that someone not able to choose their project is being badly trained. It should count as a very heavy mark against doing a PhD when the advisor believes they should control the direction of the project.
I bet you work in an inexpensive paper/theory field (math, theoretical physics, CS), and your parent poster works in an expensive wet lab field (bio, chem, eng).
You're right about my background. Still, I know many experimental PhD students who enjoyed great freedom in deciding what to work on. It's not always possible in the most expensive experiments -- a student probably can't easily repurpose the LHC for their own ends. But outside those huge experiments there's often a lot of flexibility, provided (a big caveat!) the PI is on board, and the student has ideas of their own.
Yes - the subjects of advanced study should be selected by the government. Individual researchers should operate like an army, going where they are told.
Why not? You at of course free to fund your own research with whatever patronage you can arrange. You'll need to convince convince people you are worth it though, and an apprenriceship is one well understood way.
In my PhD field (physics), there was a middle ground for most students.
Proposing a research project is a lot like pitching a product idea. If you bring your own money, or don't need any, then you can do whatever you want, including failing. If you need funding, space, collaboration, mentoring, whatever, then your pitch has to mesh with the interests with other people.
But even if given a project, it's not really a "project" in the sense of having a plan, budget, and timeline. Depending on the professor, the project may just be a vague concept, with no idea of how to carry it out. That was the case with my thesis project. I started with an inchoate idea, and ended up developing an experimental technique that opened up a new research program for my advisor.
There are professors who assign cookie cutter projects, and I think it's a disservice to their students.
I think the author has a very inaccurate impression of how PhD's work in the US, the way he thinks is better because it works so well in the U.S. -- is not the way it works in the U.S.. He also has an overly optimistic view of how well it works in the U.S. or how happy people are with it (in both areas where it's somewhat like he thinks and not).
Agreed, at least in my field it's almost exactly like he describes in the Netherlands - you get funding via professor's grants, and that means you work on a project related to their work. Additionally, my university pays social security, healthcare, dental, etc.
I think that for humanities things tend to work differently (I'm in a STEM) in the States though.
My impression is that humanities PhD students in the U.S. tend to be fully funded as well, although with smaller stipends than STEM PhD students.
I'm not sure where the OP gets the idea that PhD students in the U.S. usually have to pay their own way entirely and do not receive employment benefits (healthcare etc).
Humanities PhD students in the U.S. probably do have somewhat greater leeway in choosing/defining their projects, although they still need to pick one that their advisor approves and is comfortable with.
I am not from the NL but I have moved here to attend a MSc program (Computer Science department), I am not pursuing a PhD myself but I know a lot of people that do.
I think that the system has its pros and cons, as always, although I don't agree with the part about not choosing the topic because (as also other people pointed out) policies can often vary from supervisor to supervisor, and in any case a student basically chooses, more or less, the boundaries of his/her topic when he/she decides to which position apply, positions that always have fairly clear project descriptions and include contact details of professors that are generally open about clarifications. Also, even if it is formally difficult to change supervisor, in fact if a student decides to work more with another professor for any reason, the original supervisor does not usually raise any practical problem.
However, a big problem that I have experienced and seen is that PhDs negatively impact the quality of teaching. Master programs in the NL aim at being very high level (often succeeding), offering also courses on specific advanced subjects. Usually, PhDs have no control over what they will teach, they are simply allocated as "resources" by the faculty, even just to cover a minor part of a course or to supervise/correct practical assignments. This leads to ridiculous situations with courses that, for example, teach advanced rendering techniques but for supervising the practical part allocate a PhD candidate that has clearly never ever rendered a triangle on a screen in his/her life, and who had no time to properly prepare beforehand. I think this is a visible "weak point" of the whole system, and it should be addressed, somehow, also because I have noticed it being treated as some kind of "taboo argument" in the past.
Another thing I find interesting about "PhD-employees" in the US is that we are considered students when it helps the government and employees when it helps the university. My main complaint has to do with the nature of taxing research/teaching/fellowship income as "income", and then turning around and not allowing those students to invest the money in IRA accounts (according to the tax code, any money eligible for IRA contributions must be on a single box on a W-2 form, which many students do not get)
This is deeply troubling to students like myself who would like to invest and save a significant part of our salary for the future, as we would if we were truly employees in industry.
I know of schools that don't give W2s, pretty sure that is just illegal and also pretty sure those schools get dinged by the IRS regularly for this.
some student friends of mine get paid in very sketchy ways, like in personal checks from the department administrator, and don't even know if the university has done withholding. these are ivy league schools too! every few years there is a big IRS thing but nothing changes.
Fellowship income (for example from the STEM fellowships) is not reported as earned income for sure. It's less clear for other positions. Consider this from IRS publication 970:
“Scholarship and fellowship payments are compensation for IRA purposes only if shown in box 1 of Form W-2.”
That sucks; my experience in Canada is that the student/employee duality is usually spun to help us - hence, we're university employees in terms of labour protections, but as far as student loan repayment and income tax goes, we're 12-month a year full time students, and most of our income is non-taxable scholarships.
Ph.D. programs vary a lot by country, school, and department. They mostly appear uniform from the outside. Big variabilities include: funding, status, teaching load, qualifying exams (these are after you are in), amount of choice, publications, expected level of choice/originality in thesis topic, writing, and open/closed defense.
Very, very true. To see it most clearly, compare a physics Ph.D. to a psychology Ph.D..
EDIT: to readers, the reason posts like this are downvoted is not because they're false, but because they're true. The anonymous downvoters are trying to conceal the truth.
The government has carved out a special status for these Phd "employees", which means that social security taxes are not paid for these employees, and of course the resulting burden is carried entirely by the employee. Ironically, and because this results in a higher effective wage for these young people, who are too young to care about pension and generally don't need health insurance, they actually like this part.
a) you can't get unemployment if you get fired, or after you "graduate" (which amounts to firing with a nicer pink slip for 9/10 Phd employees)
b) you don't build up pension rights
c) health insurance is the employee's problem (though many universities "solve" this through private means, but it means significantly less coverage)
c) No paid holidays (again, universities sometimes make up for this, but not the same as private sector. This is pretty much the only European job I know that doesn't come with 4 weeks paid holidays. This is legal, because it's not a "job", legally speaking)
d) very few other employee rights (e.g. no rights to unions, even though I doubt any union would stand a chance their anyway). No rights if you get fired. If a university downscales (thankfully, doesn't happen often), these people are treated worse than contractors.
2) They are most definitely not "civil servants"
The legal differences and problems this poses are too numerous to go into. Let's just say, once again, the Phd student is the loser here.
3) about the one thing these people do have going for them is that government sponsorships are tied to the person, and include a (small) amount to the university and the pay for the Phd student him/herself. So if the university fires a Phd student, they lose the funding.
In other words, unless you commit a crime or something as a Phd student, if you're on a government scholarship, getting fired is not a concern.
Being a Phd student on either a university or private scholarship ... you don't want that. Or, at least, make DAMN sure you like your promotor.
These points are not true for the Netherlands, at least: a PhD student is a real employee with the same rights as any other employee. So, after you lose a job you'll get support, if you get sick, you get support, if you get a child, you get support and (maternity) leave, you're part of a pension plan as well, and so on. (Source: I've been a PhD student for 4.5 years in the Netherlands till this summer and got all those rights, benefits, whatever, just like any other employee)
And yes, there are organisations for PhD students, which are employee organisations not student organisations, by the way.
There are some universities that are trying to change the status from a real employee towards a funded student, but that's not happening very fast, as of now.
I'm a PhD student in the US, and the author's view of PhD students, at least among R1 institutions, is not accurate for most disciplines. In most of these programs, a student is guaranteed a salary for 5 years, given health insurance, tuition benefits, and in many cases quite a lot of freedom.
The guarantee of funding doesn't mean that you won't have to work for your income. In my field, it is common for theorists to teach for much of their graduate career in order to support themselves.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 97.0 ms ] threadThis is nonsense. Although my PhD was in a project with a predefined topic, many of my colleagues were doing a PhD in a topic of their choice. The faculty would have N open PhD positions every year, and people could submit proposals.
Also, the primary argument set forth in this post is financial. If you avoid paying income tax (through scholarships), you can spend your money on other things. No shit. If you change the amount of the scholarship to $500 per month, you can also spend more money, but you'll only get garbage. You have to find some level of compensation where you still get good candidates. In some fields, candidates will go to industry at the proposed compensation level (I would).
Another problem that is not taken into account is how government budgeting works. They won't see a switch to a bursary system as a way to save money to hire more faculty staff. They will see it as a way to save money, period. Especially in economically difficult times where we have to increase our military spending because of conflicts in Ukraine and the middle east.
Changing supervisors (at least in my experience) is not a problem, and this happens fairly regularly. It is better for a university to change supervisor than to lose a PhD student, as that happens often enough.
The salary here ($4500 or so per month, pre tax) for a PhD at a university is enough to lure those interested in academic work (especially after spending 5 years on Student payments of around $1k/month), whilst not being incredibly high. Of course, if you go into the private sector to do your PhD, you can expect a higher salary.
In the US, in the labs I am aware of, most of the student stipend for the experimental work is paid by the lab from its funds. As a consequence most of the time it is on the grant's topic. Choosing the lab is a way of choosing the range of the topics.
"Our proposal would give PhD-students decent wage contracts for the research assistance or teaching which they would do"
PhD students do not merely provide research assistance. They design protocols, carry them out and ask new questions, at least the good ones. The only thing that most PhD students lack is the ability to safely shift focus since most of their ideas have already been done but they don't know that since they are not aware of the literature.
What I don't like about the articles on academics lately is that on the one side they are focusing on how to keep highly educated people with low salaries and on the other hand how to bring more people in academia. Increase the salaries and more smart people will come, it is as simple as that... instead they are trying to get more people in academia so more people get trapped by inertia in bad paying jobs...
About the freedom of choosing a thesis topic, I think this depends on both the style of supervision (controlling boss vs. laissez-faire situation) and the funding project (some have vague goals and can accept a wide range of topics, while others are very focused on mini areas).
And I think danieldk is right about the money: you are welcome to accept less of it, this doesn't mean that the money saved by the state is really going where you want it to go...
I do think that PhD students need to be paid a living wage, because of practical considerations, but you definitely don't need to pay anywhere near a normal wage. Your job as a PhD student is to get your degree and graduate, not to make anyone else money directly with your labor.
A PhD student should get a "living wage" as you say -- enough compensation to be able to continue and finish. Industry wages and research wages are different: being paid to work on a product which has a financial plan behind it works differently from trying to improve the state of the art, which can lead to small contributions or even a mathematical proof that it cannot be done :-)
Here's what I mean by that: The opportunity cost of a Ph.D. in physics, in terms of foregone salary, earnings on tax-advantaged savings accounts, stress, etc., is north of half a million dollars (and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life). Talking to people I know from my own department, and those I've met at conferences, and such, the lifetime value added to one's salary from having a Ph.D. is probably greater than the opportunity cost. But it's not obviously greater--a Ph.D. is a pretty good signal for "smart and gets things done."
In other words, it tells you "this person was probably going to do well anyway." You can't compare the mean or median salary of Ph.D.'s with those of, say, people with a Bachelor's in some STEM field. If you were to compare median STEM Ph.D. salaries with same-field top-quartile (or maybe top-decile) Bachelor's salaries, you'd find there is not much difference.
Am I just a bitter washed-out Ph.D.? Hell no! I did all sorts of fun things (like intermural sports and traveling) that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I cherish those memories. But, if someone asked me "Should I go to grad school to improve my chances of earning a decent living?" my answer would be "Hell no!"
"(and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life)" I'm not sure about a physics Ph.D. but most of my friends who are finishing up their Ph.Ds enjoyed their mid 20's more than the ones of us who decided to did the daily work grind.
I love teaching, and I hate fighting with the computer (especially for dull line-of-business CRUD apps), so I don't particularly want an industry job, but the fact that I'm spending most of a decade (counting Master's) in grad school working well below the market wage for someone of my skillset still rankles. The fact that I'm going to spend 3/4 of my PhD taking no courses, but paying $12,000 a year in tuition grates too, as it's essentially a quarter of my salary clawed back for "job training", which in my case is a (very supportive) mentor and a desk in a windowless room - I may as well be a miner in a company town paying the company for pickaxes and head lamps (on the other hand, I also get all the same tax breaks I did in undergrad, so at least I'm not paying income tax).
When I describe my job to friends and family, I describe it as a sort of apprentice professor, because that's much closer to the truth than some sort of super-student. I'd rather be paid like an apprentice professor too, rather than a ramen-eating subsistence wage, as the original poster suggests.
And I am again, not talking about PhD's in computer science, which seem to be irrelevant in industry. I'm talking about things like physics or biology.
The idea that students should be free to choose their own topics is...odd. You choose your topics based on choosing your lab and the projects on offer - at least in science.
The observations from the author in the comments section that they know people who want to do a PhD (in Arts/Humanities) but can't because they can't find an offered project seems more like the system working properly - professors, who can be presumed to be aware of their field and by extension national interests via grants, offer projects to hopefully efficiently allocate the research dollars of the nation.
Which leads back to my first paragraph: in science I really don't know what you'd get out of students making up their own projects in a vacuum. Which makes me think the author has a very narrow perspective on PhD research.
The reason is that choosing what problems to work on is a fundamental research skill. Someone who doesn't learn that skill hasn't really learnt to do research.
This isn't to say that a student shouldn't spend time talking with their advisor about choice of problem. Of course they should -- they should talk to as many people as possible! But the responsibility for the choice of problem should be theirs. If that's not the case, then they're missing much of what it is to do research.
To quote a letter of Feynman to a former student of his ( http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr... )
"I had another Ph.D. Student (Albert Hibbs) [who worked on] how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on..."
[1] This is actually pretty complicated. Many students don't have ideas they're confident pursuing. Some don't grow into it, even after gaining some experience solving research problems. That presents challenges. And sometimes students badly misjudge what is important or interesting to work on. Should a supervisor interfere when that's happening? It depends. Making mistakes in choosing which problem to work on is an important part of learning to do research. So some floundering around is fine. But allowing it to go on for years and years is just cruel.
Most physics PhD candidates do not have free choice of research questions (or, at best, they are spending their "10% time" on their own questions, which is what I did).
On institutions: I did my PhD at the University of New Mexico. A fine institution, but also not Harvard / MIT / etc. I went there because Carl Caves had created a great environment to work on quantum information. Carl encouraged me to work on whatever problems I wanted, but was also happy to provide advice upon request. My fellow PhD students enjoyed similar freedom, and I believe it benefited them enormously as well.
Edit: To clarify my earlier comment: I am certainly _not_ saying that it is universally the case that people are able to choose their PhD project. That's not true, especially in fields involving expensive experimental equipment. I'm saying that someone not able to choose their project is being badly trained. It should count as a very heavy mark against doing a PhD when the advisor believes they should control the direction of the project.
The cost/benefit tradeoffs are atrkly different.
/s
Proposing a research project is a lot like pitching a product idea. If you bring your own money, or don't need any, then you can do whatever you want, including failing. If you need funding, space, collaboration, mentoring, whatever, then your pitch has to mesh with the interests with other people.
But even if given a project, it's not really a "project" in the sense of having a plan, budget, and timeline. Depending on the professor, the project may just be a vague concept, with no idea of how to carry it out. That was the case with my thesis project. I started with an inchoate idea, and ended up developing an experimental technique that opened up a new research program for my advisor.
There are professors who assign cookie cutter projects, and I think it's a disservice to their students.
I think that for humanities things tend to work differently (I'm in a STEM) in the States though.
I'm not sure where the OP gets the idea that PhD students in the U.S. usually have to pay their own way entirely and do not receive employment benefits (healthcare etc).
Humanities PhD students in the U.S. probably do have somewhat greater leeway in choosing/defining their projects, although they still need to pick one that their advisor approves and is comfortable with.
However, a big problem that I have experienced and seen is that PhDs negatively impact the quality of teaching. Master programs in the NL aim at being very high level (often succeeding), offering also courses on specific advanced subjects. Usually, PhDs have no control over what they will teach, they are simply allocated as "resources" by the faculty, even just to cover a minor part of a course or to supervise/correct practical assignments. This leads to ridiculous situations with courses that, for example, teach advanced rendering techniques but for supervising the practical part allocate a PhD candidate that has clearly never ever rendered a triangle on a screen in his/her life, and who had no time to properly prepare beforehand. I think this is a visible "weak point" of the whole system, and it should be addressed, somehow, also because I have noticed it being treated as some kind of "taboo argument" in the past.
This is deeply troubling to students like myself who would like to invest and save a significant part of our salary for the future, as we would if we were truly employees in industry.
some student friends of mine get paid in very sketchy ways, like in personal checks from the department administrator, and don't even know if the university has done withholding. these are ivy league schools too! every few years there is a big IRS thing but nothing changes.
universities are shady as hell.
“Scholarship and fellowship payments are compensation for IRA purposes only if shown in box 1 of Form W-2.”
EDIT: to readers, the reason posts like this are downvoted is not because they're false, but because they're true. The anonymous downvoters are trying to conceal the truth.
1) social security taxes
The government has carved out a special status for these Phd "employees", which means that social security taxes are not paid for these employees, and of course the resulting burden is carried entirely by the employee. Ironically, and because this results in a higher effective wage for these young people, who are too young to care about pension and generally don't need health insurance, they actually like this part.
a) you can't get unemployment if you get fired, or after you "graduate" (which amounts to firing with a nicer pink slip for 9/10 Phd employees)
b) you don't build up pension rights
c) health insurance is the employee's problem (though many universities "solve" this through private means, but it means significantly less coverage)
c) No paid holidays (again, universities sometimes make up for this, but not the same as private sector. This is pretty much the only European job I know that doesn't come with 4 weeks paid holidays. This is legal, because it's not a "job", legally speaking)
d) very few other employee rights (e.g. no rights to unions, even though I doubt any union would stand a chance their anyway). No rights if you get fired. If a university downscales (thankfully, doesn't happen often), these people are treated worse than contractors.
2) They are most definitely not "civil servants"
The legal differences and problems this poses are too numerous to go into. Let's just say, once again, the Phd student is the loser here.
3) about the one thing these people do have going for them is that government sponsorships are tied to the person, and include a (small) amount to the university and the pay for the Phd student him/herself. So if the university fires a Phd student, they lose the funding.
In other words, unless you commit a crime or something as a Phd student, if you're on a government scholarship, getting fired is not a concern.
Being a Phd student on either a university or private scholarship ... you don't want that. Or, at least, make DAMN sure you like your promotor.
Is there not a student union in the Netherlands?
And yes, there are organisations for PhD students, which are employee organisations not student organisations, by the way.
There are some universities that are trying to change the status from a real employee towards a funded student, but that's not happening very fast, as of now.
The guarantee of funding doesn't mean that you won't have to work for your income. In my field, it is common for theorists to teach for much of their graduate career in order to support themselves.