From Chad Orzel, writing about the overproduction of PhDs by American universities:
This is a topic where I’m so worried that something I write will be taken the wrong way that I often end up hedging so much that nobody finds it worth a response.
Hah hah, do you really think that hedging will prevent people from misreading you? That's adorable.
I, however, won't hedge: I think the overproduction of PhDs is fundamentally harmless and can go on forever. After all, nobody thinks the overproduction of college basketball players has any limit. Ditto for aspiring actors, hedge fund managers, and presidential candidates. There are lots of fields where the competition for a small number of highly desirable jobs is enormous—and has been forever. So why should PhDs be any different? The ones who don't get tenure-track teaching jobs are just like the cagers who don't get drafted by the NBA. They'll find something else to do.
More importantly, unlike masters programs, most PhD students are paid out of their PI's or the school's research grants. Low-wage relative to productivity perhaps, but at least they get paid to do the work instead of having to pay to do it.
As opposed to law schools where it's very expensive to get a degree and you still may end up doing something else.
In STEM fields, grad students get a salary. Everyone else--suck it.
OK, law, med and business schools have students taking on debt on the hopes a getting well paying jobs....
Grad students in humanities fields generally have funded Ph.Ds, too, particularly at top universities, Ivies, public Ivies, etc. It's doubly important in these fields, though, that you don't pay a cent for your graduate education -- the chances of not getting a tenure track position are quite high and you want to be able to pursue other career options w/o six figures of student debt hanging over your head.
Even back in the early 90s when I was getting an MA in English at a large state university I had a paid TA-ship. This is a good deal for the university. You basically have 5th year seniors getting paid a pittance teaching the thousands of freshman who were unable to "clep out" (as we said) of English 101. My takehome pay was something like $650 a month.
I must admit to having had some bitterness about the uselessness of my MA in the past but really I had a great time pursuing it and regret nothing. And I ended up as a computer programmer so all is well.
I had TA appointment in the humanities. I taught 3 classes per academic year, got free tuition, a livable stipend, and full health care. I per class, I made more as a TA than as an assistant prof.
Low-wage relative to productivity perhaps, but at least they get paid to do the work instead of having to pay to do it.
Unless they're lucky enough to get their degree and then go on to teach at UCLA!
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/21/ucla-criticized-advertising-adjunct-job-without-pay
There is definitely a problem when universities get away with doing this:
“ Help Wanted: Adjunct Professor, Must Have Doctorate. Salary: $0.
After protests, U.C.L.A. took down a job posting that offered no pay. But it turns out colleges often expect Ph.D.s to work for free.”’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/ucla-adjunct-professor-salary.html
Silly me — I thought it was illegal to expect people to work for nothing.
I am not sure if this has changed but back when I was in grad school in the 90s no one ever told students that there would be almost no university jobs available if they did get that PhD and that if what you really want to do is teach you will likely have to settle for being an adjunct making low pay and having no benefits.
I totally agree! Lots of aspiring poets, playwrights, artists, etc. A highly educated, literate and creative population makes for lots of great conversation, company, and a lot less belligerent anti-intellectualism and rampant idiocy.
What would be great is to greatly increase federal and state funding for preschool through 12 public education so teachers would be well paid, kids could learn music & art in addition to the three Rs, and the general public would be better educated all around.
They'll find something else to do.
Yes, this.
There are lots of fields where in-depth knowledge is helpful. Who says PhDs need to teach in universities? And a highly educated workforce is a good thing, especially in STEM fields where a lot of important research gets done.
I spent a successful career as an engineer in industry with a Ph.D. in physics. (I still consider it amusing when the trolls here accuse me of being ignorant and poorly educated). Getting the first job was a bit of a challenge, but good references got me in the door, after that it was fine. Getting a Ph.D. requires both being smart and persistent, but you can compensate for the relative lack of one with a lot of the other. The saddest thing I saw was not particularly bright Ph.D.'s. They were not competitive for the more challenging positions but were considered overqualified for the lower positions.
+1
Also note alot of science PhDs end up working for private businesses doing focused research and just highly technical jobs. If the US industry wants to keep up with China etc. it needs a highly educated workforce including PhDs.
‘Science’ includes social sciences. I started working in industry as a human-factors engineer while completing a PhD in experimental psychology; I spent my entire career in non-academic employment, except for a brief stint as an underpaid adjunct following a layoff. There are thousands of positions in industry for engineering psychologists. Lots of PhD economists work for private companies.
Orzel's piece apparently talks about tenure-track positions but not PhD's who are not on tenure track, that is adjunct professors. Isn't more teaching being done by adjuncts? If so, what is going on would seem to be a degradation of the position of faculty in terms of salary, not entirely an excess of PhDs. Neither Orzel nor Kevin give the numbers that would clarify this. The numbers in this piece
http://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/
are grossly different from Orzel's.
Yes. At my institution, non-tenure track instructors account for 30% of teaching faculty and the teach >50% of all classes.
Terminal degrees. Where you leave academia to get a job.
Chemistry: Ph.D. Get job in pharmaceuticals or plastics.
Engineering: B.S. in a program with a good internship (5 years total).
Physical Therapy: Moved to a doctorate degree.
Business: MBA
In some disciplines, a Ph.D. is needed for the most lucrative career path. In others, it's a road to academia or taxi driver or something else.
Roughly one-third of engineering degrees awarded in 2018 were Master’s degrees - https://ira.asee.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2018-Engineering-by-Numbers-Engineering-Statistics-UPDATED-15-July-2019.pdf
Cutting our PhD production would adversely impact our higher education field, our import of foreign students, and the overall research enterprise. It would also cap employee skill development. While most PhD candidates are straight out of college, a large percentage are seeking further accreditation, validation, skills, etc. by obtaining a PhD, particularly in fields where you can be a functional skilled worker without the doctorate, including many healthcare sciences, such as Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Nursing, and Hospital/Healthcare Management/Administration (names here vary a bit).
I think part of the problem is that people getting a Ph.D in economics or computer science or many other STEM fields don't necessarily imagine themselves doing so because they want to remain in academia. It's absolutely no big deal if you don't get a university position because that wasn't really your dream to begin with. But you don't get a Ph.D in comparative literature (e.g.) because you've always imagined yourself as a freelance writer, editor, or some other kind of underpaid content creator. You wanted to be a college professor, teach, and do the kind of research that only a tenure-track academic position can support. The private sector doesn't offer jobs for literary scholars that let them spend a year at Cambridge exploring the autograph manuscripts of some author's work. Now, there are career paths for smart people with good research and writing skills, and many humanities Ph.Ds have gone on to great things that didn't involve academia. But not landing a tenure-track position will always sting for them in a way it doesn't perhaps for STEM grads.
In his book “The Graduate School Mess,” Leonard Cassuto described the anachronistic practice of training PhDs for nonexistent academic jobs as “minting expired passports.”
I think Kevin is basically right. Possibly this is hard on some of the PhD students when they don't make professor, but it's probably a net benefit for society to have so many highly educated people and for our universities to have lots of PhD students to do the grunt work for the various studies and research projects top professors do.
"The ones who don't get tenure-track teaching jobs are just like the cagers who don't get drafted by the NBA. They'll find something else to do."
The difference is that professional sports is about the closest thing we have to a genuine meritocracy. Only in extreme cases does anyone who counts care about anything about a player beyond his productivity. This is, not coincidentally, why minorities do so well, compare to other endeavors. Does anyone want to make the case that academia is anything like as meritocratic? Raise your hand so I can point at you and laugh.
Why are so many people in this thread assessing the issue as: "the only reason for anyone getting a PhD is to get a high-paying job, or a prestegious professorship"?
Who decides how many PhD's in any field is "too many", and what are the criteria? I would turn it around: Why is our society unable to take advantage of all of the PhD level talent that is available in our society? Why can't we figure out a way that all of that untapped potential can have some financial compensation directed toward it so that we, as a society, can solve more of our problems?
Good point. But on the evidence, I'd say that most PhDs figure it out. I'm not convinced that there's that much untapped potential. Much of this has to do with unrealistic expectations on the the part of PhD students. The training programs have an obligation to prepare their students for the future.
I'd have more sympathy with this view were it not for the fact that so many programs seem to deliberately foster those those unrealistic expectations ... possibly to attract and retain cheap skilled labor for faculty. Yep, seen this one up close and personal many, many times.
I posted that training programs have an obligation to prepare their students for the future. I didn't say that they do, or do so honestly.
OTOH, if the idea of the PhD is to cultivate critical thinking skills, the best graduates will recognize when they're getting BS messaging and will find the facts elsewhere (not blaming the victims here, just sayin'). As a PhD who has been a faculty for 35 years and who has trained seven PhD students and served on over 35 dissertation committees , I too have seen this one up close many, many times.
My physics Ph.D. was only tangentially relevant to the work I did as a mechanical design engineer, but I still take pleasure in have a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics and the like. The only real downside are the bores at parties who want to explain to me how Einstein was wrong.
Why is our society unable to take advantage of all of the PhD level talent that is available in our society?
It's not the case that society is "unable to take advantage" of this talent. Very, very few PhD-equipped workers are unemployed.
I never even considered an academic position while I was getting my PhD, but biotech has a lot of industry offramps.
Absolutely, for STEM grads (humanities, not so much).
I think a lot of trainees set their sites on academia in part with the hope of winning tenure. There's no tenure in industry (or in most careers).
There used to be a degree of loyalty between the company and its workers, but that social contract has long since been cancelled. I always told younger associates to look out for themselves as the company sure as hell is not. I was fortunate to get to work the startup boom in electronic medical devices when I was young and cheap, and then go back to aerospace where at the time they were still willing to pay for talent and experience. Not sure that would be true today.
I've known several who taught high school; one in physics, one in history and another in ...home economics.
Produce “too many” of degree type X and you further the over-credentialing in fields where degree type X might indeed be helpful but is questionable as to being necessary.
The analogy with professional sports is false. Only a small percentage of college athletes have a successful career in professional sports or even expect to, but everyone who gets a PhD does expect to get a job which rewards them in one way or another for getting the degree. It may not be in money - maybe they only get some freedom to pursue their own interests in science, literature, arts or whatever.
Becoming a tenured professor is only attainable by a few, and as I mentioned in a previous comment the number of these jobs seems to be shrinking in favor of temporary workers such as adjuncts. When large numbers of PhD's are forced to go into jobs which don't really require the degree or don't offer advantages such as pay then there will be too many PhD's turned out. Orzel doesn't give the numbers on this. For example what is the ratio of tenured faculty positions to total PhD jobs? If institutions can take their pick of PhD's to fill adjunct positions at what is basically unskilled pay, that may be sign of too many being turned out. On the other hand it may just be that administrators do this for other reasons such having more money for their own pay, or because of decreasing efficiency of higher education.
To some extent, this reflects the loss of value for the Masters degree. Many people who get the PhD end up in jobs that could be done by someone with a Masters. The opportunity cost of the PhD is greater than for a Masters, and isn't justified by the long-term salary differential.
I agree with this view. I know many people with Humanities PhDs who are not in academia but are doing very interesting and important jobs. However, opportunity costs are high. The average MA degree takes 2-3 years. The average for a Humanities PhD is an additional 7-8 years. So you get a lot of newly minted PhDs whose first full time salaried job isn't until their mid-30s. That's a lot of missed earning years.
Step 1: Streamline PhD programs. The average should be 4-5 years, not 7-8
In the biomedical sciences 4-6 years from BA/BS to PhD is common.
They have found something else to do. It's to become America's Kommissar class, enforcing a particular belief system on the entire country, and constantly increasing their numbers as ever more belief tracking, judging, and enforcement mechanisms are invented. 470,000 such jobs in 2012, 50% more by 2020.
The perfect job for people with useless academic credentials, but very strong opinions about how to manage society and other people's lives.
Just where do you think all those extra non-teaching jobs that have so rapidly increased the cost of university are situated?
Peter Turchin could give you a long list of examples of exactly why this class is NOT benign, starting with the fact that they see a society which does not properly reward their talents (which they obviously have, doesn't the degree prove it?) as not worth protecting, as a society that should be torn down and rebuilt (rebuilt with the, of course, in charge). This is the class that has created most of the revolutions in history, most recently the liberation movements of the 60s, then the Arab tumult of the last two decades.
This is hilarious! Especially the pseudo-Bolshevik jargon.
liberation movements of the 60s
Those sure were terrible. How to tell me you're white without telling me you're white.
Looking at the comments, people seem to think this is an issue of engineering and physics PhDs.
Check out
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185353/number-of-doctoral-degrees-by-field-of-research/
Let's assume Health Professions is basically OK (though I'm not sure, I don't know how they differ from Biological and Biomedical sciences...)
But look at what comes next:
Law
Education
Psychology
Social Science
Social Services
English
Journalism
are all substantial numbers and likely, IMHO, to go into the problematic directions I described in the previous comment; either as Kommisars or as professional trouble makers working to remake society in a way more conducive to them being on top.
And remember those are annual numbers...
So PhDs are taking over the world? Who knew?
Always the snarky rejoinder, never engagement with the facts.
Snarky rejoinders may please the faithful, but they disgust those on the fence.
I used to be a lot more leftist, till I noticed that pattern of so much snark to so little actual refutation of particular claims and points.
For-profit universities are becoming an ever larger share of doctoral degrees, especially for black students. Those PhDs typically cost the students $100,000 or more, but are popular because they allow just about anyone in, and have flexible schedules. In a world where a PhD is considered standard, it just drives more enrollment in expensive programs like these.
A good example is in K-12 education where an EdD or PhD is becoming absolutely necessary to become an administrator or superintendent. But once you read a few EdDs (I have read far too many) you realize that they are mostly trash, and it's just a way to extract a bunch of money from people who are desperate to rise in the field.
As someone who was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley for eight years, the biggest issue that I saw was a failure to disclose to PhD students in the humanities what the actual rates were for (a) those who were awarded PhDs, versus those who dropped out, and (b) what percentage of those with PhDs ended up with tenure-track positions.
Consider what would happen if the department's acceptance notifications began "We've pleased to offer you entrance into our PhD program. We're required to disclose that of the 25 students who entered the program between five and fifteen years ago, ten left the program before getting a PhD, and five are still in the program. Of the ten who did get a PhD, the average time to a degree was eight years, three were offered a tenure-track professorial position."
I'm pretty sure that in this hypothetical world, the number of PhD students in the humanities would be considerably less, particularly in second-tier or third-tier universities.
I fully support that kind of disclosure. OTOH, I doubt it will have much effect. Most people who matriculate think they'll be the exception.
It seemed most of my humanities peers in graduate school knew their future prospects were grim in academia. They talked about it all the time. I actually admired 'frig it' nature of their efforts. It's when one complained about it that I rolled my eyes, "Yeah, who's fault is it?". Most learned how to read, write, and think which can be translated into a decent living. It's just unlikely to be as a professor.
But no one should ever pay for a PhD education. If you are not getting paid to do research/or teach in graduate school then you have made a serious mistake along the way. Even an MSc should never be paid for.
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