
A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs - jseliger
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/21/phd-cant-find-academic-job-university
======
analog31
_If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be
stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report
suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a
permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor._

Stale, as in, 70+ years old.

I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking
about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was
that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation,
and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.

I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my
lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."

I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.

~~~
frozenport
But industry also has the same problem with management positions. The real
problem is the terrible treatment of postdocs due to a lack of "non-training"
positions. Imagine if your boss made 5x as much as you because the only two
jobs at your company are intern and manager.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, post-docs are a whole 'nother ball o' wax. I skipped doing a post-doc
altogether. In fact, when I knew that I wasn't headed for academia, then
suddenly a lot of the hoops vanished, including the need to have a lot of
publications.

------
danieltillett
I finished a Ph.D and became a tenured professor (top of the greasy pole) and
I have no regrets despite not being part of academia anymore. The experience
of doing a Ph.D changed me for the better and gave me the confidence to take
the risk to start my company.

We don't train too many Ph.Ds, we just undervalue them outside of academia.
One thing I think would help is to not allowing someone to start a Ph.D until
they had a few years work experience outside of academia. Too many students
end up on the Ph.D railroad without experiencing anything outside of school.

~~~
paultopia
This too. IME, the phd students who do well are those who had a life pre-
academia, and hence didn’t get super-invested in aforesaid greasy pole, didn’t
get weird parental issues with their advisors, etc.

------
yeukhon
I come from a city university, and in my experience many of the master
students there (information system or computer science program) are not up to
standard when they leave the program (i.e. they can't really program, let
alone with theories). I think this is the problem with my school, but when I
had this conversation with an old friend he felt that his master classes
focused on theory, very little room for programming. He also had the feeling
that in PhD, unless one's research requires programming, theory is emphasized
over engineering. Perhaps this is an edge case... I don't know.

Then a long time ago, someone claimed to have PhD failed my interview. I asked
this candidate to pick a language and write a function to determine whether a
string is palindrome or not. He couldn't even start with a function
declaration (I don't even program Java but I know how to write a function
declaration). I was disappointed, but I gave him another chance. This time I
wrote the declaration on the board, and I asked him to write code to determine
whether a number is even or odd. He flunked again. Our recruiter never
followed up to request evidence for his PhD degree because he failed the
interview anyway. Even though I still believe he lied, but if he didn't, how
did this university, a university with good reputation, gave him his degree?

(btw, every single time I bring this up on HN, I get downvote, I never
understand. So challenge me if you think I am lying.)

~~~
pm90
A PhD does not guarantee good programming skills. I think you are mistaken in
assuming that and hence get downvoted.

I have personally found most people who finish/almost finish their PhD's to be
very good in describing problems, approaching solutions from different
paradigms and articulating their thinking in writing. If you're trying to hire
a PhD for a programming job, in most cases you WILL be disappointed.

That said usually they are fast learners and can quickly pick up good
programming skill pretty quickly. (Its not as hard as people imagine it to
be).

I was planning on doing a PhD but left after my Masters precisely because I
wanted to improve my programming skills, which I knew the PhD didn't care much
about.

~~~
yeukhon
I was disappointed that he couldn't even come up with a solution for odd or
even. I get it for some low-ranked schools, but if for example someone from UC
Berkeley can't do any decent programming (I don't expect everyone write a
transcompiler because I have no idea how to myself) I'd be very surprised.

~~~
AlphaSite
Transpilers are easy, algorithms are hard.

------
opportune
I'm surprised this article doesn't try to address the reasons this is
happening. It mentions that the employers (universities) benefit from students
funding themselves, and I'm not super familiar with the UK's academic system,
but this seems to be an oversight by the author/editor since most PhD students
(in the US, at least) are funded to do their research.

I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs who can't find
academic jobs are that

1\. Education is becoming more universally accessible and overall education is
increasing. This causes a larger proportion of the population to be interested
in getting PhDs and also to be qualified (academically) to do so. Similarly,
to stand out in the job market, some people may be getting PhDs to
differentiate themselves from people with masters/bachelors (or equivalents),
since there are so many people with these degrees now.

2\. A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of
professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of
professors: a graduate student will work for 10-25% of a professor's salary,
and without tenure. Maintaining this ratio requires having many more graduate
students than professors, but doesn't give those graduate students anywhere to
go when they graduate.

3\. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as preparation
for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so that they
could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-paying job.
I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.

4\. Research spending hasn't caught up with the increasing number of PhDs.

5\. Because of the research boom in the post world-war period (this occurred
in the US as well), most people getting academic jobs around then were around
the same age. Many of these people haven't retired yet, and they may
subconsciously have introduced a new part of academic culture: you need to be
old before you get a professorship.

6\. Many students graduate with PhDs but without having done significant
enough research to merit continuing in academia. This could have a variety of
causes: publish or perish, admitting unqualified/unmotivated candidates, the
academic "low-hanging fruit" getting harder to research with time.

~~~
zzz95
>>3\. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as
preparation for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so
that they could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-
paying job. I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.

I don't think this is true at all. Why do PhD (4-6yrs+), when a MS is enough
to find a job and get an H1-B/GC ??

~~~
opportune
Well for starters, an MS in the US may cost $40k-$60k/ year for a foreign
student (as funding is very hard to get for an MS student), whereas during a
PhD you'll get paid about $20-25k/year. Also, many universities do not offer
MS programs in more academic fields, or if they do, they do not allocate them
many spots in the graduate program compared to PhD students.

This fits my personal experience as well. All of the foreign students I know
who did MS's in the US were very wealthy, whereas only some of the foreign
students doing PhDs were.

------
ChuckMcM
The only time I have missed not getting a PhD was when lawyers have me explain
to someone who has a PhD what I mean so that they can bring my testimony into
an IP case by a more identifiable 'expert'.

That said, there is a particularly annoying type of PhD in the tech world, it
is one who assumes that the person they are talking to who doesn't have a PhD,
doesn't have that degree because they were incapable of getting it, rather
than they simply didn't bother. That is, I suppose, human nature. It is always
amusing when I encounter it because I know the person underestimates people.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I don't thing those kind of PhDs really exist in significant numbers,
especially in research. "Ya, that guy who just got that breakthrough in
machine learning? He only has a master degree" is so common it's already
normalized.

~~~
ianai
That’s funny because every “engineer” or “analyst” my job employs has that
exact attitude. They don’t even have PhDs.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I'm not sure I get what you mean? If the specific title of PhD is unrelated to
people using their titles as false sources of authorities, then what I said
isn't wrong. I guess you could argue that in research many people have PhDs,
so whether you have one or not is no longer a big deal.

~~~
ianai
The average occurrence of that sort of mentality across the population
suggests most PhDs would have at least that majority view as being a subset of
the larger. There’s also no reason to assume the factors that lead someone to
obtain a PhD counter an elitist attitude. If anything, it certainly bolsters
the odds through sunk cost and other psychological factors.

Put another way, it’s been my experience that nearly everybody has a view that
they’re better than average or different in some positive, unique way. The
worlds full of hostie personalities as well.

------
TimPC
I'm not sure we have a glut of PhD's at all. At least not in fields where
there is actual research in industry. I work in industry on a team where
almost everyone has a PhD and those that don't have a Master's degree (or
two). The team I'm on publishes research, reads papers regularly, attends
research conferences, has visiting professors and researchers give talks, but
also ships product. Maybe CS and AI is an outlier in terms of having huge
demand in industry (relative to the work available, there is a huge shortfall
of AI PhD's), but I wouldn't be surprised if much of industry is like this.
Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry in a research-oriented
role. The claim that we would be better off with a less educated society is so
extraordinary it requires extraordinary evidence. A handful of cherry-picked
data points and a skewed interpretation is very unconvincing. Yes there is a
cost in an investment of time. But for many PhD students these are happy years
they remember fondly for the rest of their lives, even if they end up outside
academia. If we have an actual genuine glut, show me a survey with good
methodology showing that most PhD graduates regret doing their PhD's. We don't
have anything close to that.

~~~
mikebenfield
> Maybe CS and AI is an outlier

Yes, it is a huge outlier. Probably the most extreme outlier there is.

> Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry

In CS? Yes. In most other fields? Absolutely not.

~~~
Cyph0n
It's also common in EE/CE, but to a lesser extent. Here in the US, PhDs
usually go to e.g.: Intel, AMD, Samsung, Qualcomm, defense contractors.

------
kchoudhu
I'm probably going to go back to get a PhD at some point in my 40s. Not
because I want to become a professor, but because I think it'll be good to sit
down for a period of four or five years and just _think_ in the company of
other agile minds.

Of course, this is only possible because I'll have made sure to have had an
entire career behind me, and I will not be worrying about putting food on my
family's table or keeping a roof over their heads. A PhD is to me, therefore,
not a profession but an avocation. Something to do after you've done
everything else. The idea of doing it a few years after college, with the
intention of making academia your profession? That's terrifying to me.

~~~
msb
This is me. I am 43, entering my fourth year of PhD. If you have money saved
and want to challenge yourself in new ways a PhD is a worthwhile goal. A
couple of thoughts:

1) Many of my 20 something peers are struggling financially, 20-30k a year is
difficult to live on in CA. I made good money in my 20s and enjoyed life,
having less now does not bother me. 2) I don't have children. My peers with
children face a much different set of challenges than I do. I suppose it comes
down to the support structure in your life, but I am not sure I could do this
with school age kids. 3) I cannot stress enough the importance of a top tier
school and a strong advisor.

~~~
kchoudhu
Yeah, by the time I plan on heading back to school, I'm going to have a six
year old and a seven year old, and I don't think money will really be a
problem (I'm effectively coasting and working on random side projects now
anyhow, going to school won't really change anything).

I suspect that a lot of the stress of grad school goes away once money isn't
an issue, and your progress in school isn't an existential issue. I really do
wish mature grad students were more of a thing.

------
wbillingsley
PhDs are a research training scheme, not an academic training scheme. As the
economy has become more competitive, and more of the population has bachelor's
degrees, proven research skills (as well as proven skills at independent work,
dealing with complex unknown problems, sticking at a long and difficult task
for 3+ years to make a unique contribution, and solid evidence that you are at
the leading edge of your field) are quite valuable in the industry job market.

Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I
haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO",
followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching
and research academic".

The other side of the coin is that (in some countries) academic careers are
changing, in that things are becoming more specialised between teaching and
research -- funding crunches are pushing universities into letting teaching
loads increase, while research grant funding is competitive largely based on
"how many previous grants have you won" (which as it gets more competitive
depends on having a lower teaching load to focus almost single-mindedly on
research). A curious side-effect of which is that teaching posts are often
continuing (there's a steady flow of students to teach) while at the start of
a research career, research-focused staff may be on fixed-term contract
(research grants are time-limited).

In other words, your family situation (how much you can move around to build a
research career, how much you need a stable income) also has a big impact on
your pathway.

------
Gatsky
The real problem is the inverse. We have too many people ready to contribute
new knowledge.... and we think this is a bad thing? Because, all diseases are
cured, the jails are empty and we aren't actively destroying the planet?

I think this is actually how we want the future to be (we would prefer more
bankers and real estate agents?). The real problem is nobody has worked out a
humane way to fund it.

~~~
puranjay
While I appreciate the sentiment, making a living is a real concern.

------
chrisseaton
Why does everyone think PhDs want or need to go into academia? I never planned
to be an academic when I decided to start my PhD. I think that's fairly
common.

~~~
ineedasername
Probably because, outside of a STEM discipline and a few other exceptions,
there isn't a distinct non-academia/teaching career path.

Combine this with both a larger social push for higher education, declining
state support for local public institutions that in turn drive a need for
higher enrollments to cover costs without (even larger) tuition increases. And
add to that a k-12 educational pipeline that has failed in (fully) addressing
the need for quality STEM education.

This, of course, oversimplifies the situation to a large degree. But the above
factors contribute strongly. Intelligent and driven students, coming into the
Higher Ed community with an interest in advanced degrees but relatively weaker
STEM backgrounds, are disproportionately represented in humanities & social
sciences programs.

------
mhandley
I'm a CS professor, so take everything I say as biased or whatever.

We all know and expect that most PhD students will not end up in academia. The
best PhD students often aren't those who want to be academics, but ones who
are just insanely curious. There aren't many times in life when you can work
on something that just interests you in great depth and (hopefully) push
forward what we collectively know. A PhD allows that. If you're doing it just
for the qualification, you won't get nearly as much out of it, and may not
finish at all.

So, what should you get out of a PhD? If the advisor does it right, the PhD
student should learn what it is to do high quality scientific research. That
is, ask a question, figure out a series of experiments that might allow that
question to be answered, evaluate the data, and come up with conclusions
supported by evidence.

It turns out this is insanely hard to teach, and I've never seen a new PhD
student, no matter what their background, who can do this at the start. No
undergraduate or MSc programme manages to teach this, though some students
seem naturally somewhat better at it than others. We try only to admit those.

With a new PhD student, many of the ideas, most of the suggestions for
experiments to run, and much of the interpretation of the results will usually
come from the advisor.

As a PhD progresses, the student should be gaining experience in what it takes
to frame a good experiment that might actually answer the question you want to
answer. And they should be gaining experience on how to interpret results and
what you can conclude from them. During this phase, much of my role is staring
at graphs the student has produced, and asking "why does it do that?". An
experienced student would already have an answer, a semi-experienced student
will have noticed the anomaly, but not know how to figure out the cause, and
an inexperience student will not have noticed anything is strange.

By the end of the PhD, a great student will be ahead of me in suggesting the
experiments to run, and will have already run them before they come to see me.
Only about 10% of PhD students reach this point.

In the end, people over-rate what the topic of a PhD is in the educational
process. What most people get from a PhD is an apprenticeship in scientific
method. Those are transferable skills, and the reason PhDs have endured as a
qualification is we really don't know any other way to teach them.

Of course, no-one actually teaches professors to teach PhD students - we
learned it by osmosis too - so the quality of professors in teaching these
skills is pretty varied.

------
fspeech
Maybe academia shouldn't be considered a normal career. Rather it is a reward
for pursuing something you are passionate about. You are willing to do it for
free so anything you get is a bonus -- perhaps not literally, but that is the
yard stick one should use when considering an academic career. At least that
is what I am telling my older one who is applying to colleges right now.

~~~
Chinjut
Lots of people are passionate about academic research in their chosen field,
and extremely talented and qualified and even PhDed, and still don't get to do
it (certainly, it's difficult to get time to do things for free in a world
where one needs money to live), so, I dunno…

~~~
fspeech
That does sound sad. It could happen when your love becomes a profession and
you are pressured to do things that keep you the job rather than make you
happy. This is what I warn my son about. It may be a happier outcome if one
just focuses on using one's skills to make the best living and keeping one's
passion a hobby instead, except one may suffer excessively from FOMO (fear of
missing out). I really don't know what the answer is. Everyone has to make
their own choice.

------
steve_gh
I work in engineering consultancy. Some of our best consultants come from non-
engineering backgrounds. Two in particular - one is an architect by training,
the other an ancient historian, with a background in reconstructing ancient
power hierarchies from the inscriptions on funeral carvings.

In my field, the transferable skills from academic research are far more
important than the domain knowledge.

~~~
201709User
Do they get their hands dirty?

------
pacala
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one
to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate
5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of
these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education,
internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good
old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears solvable for a period of time.

Edit: It is pretty well known that there is exactly "One True Path" for a
research career. See [0] or [1]

[0] [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-
science/care...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-
science/careers-not-just-jobs-for-phds-outside-the-academy/)

[1] [http://ethicsandscience.scientopia.org/2008/11/20/excuses-
fo...](http://ethicsandscience.scientopia.org/2008/11/20/excuses-for-
discounting-people/)

~~~
chrisseaton
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor.

No it doesn't! It trains you to be a researcher. You can be a researcher
without being a professor.

~~~
whyever
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent
position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a
professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few
years.

~~~
chrisseaton
I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job
in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?

~~~
jccooper
As the first step on the path to understanding, first consider: "in what
fields do people get doctorates?" As a second step, consider for each of those
"what industry will employ them?"

If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the
answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".

------
euske
Guess it's more or less a management problem. I think it's possible to rebrand
a PhD program to be a more targeted education, not just "how to become an
academic". Specifically, a doctoral program could teach people how to:

1\. identify "known unknowns" and formulate the problem.

2\. search and study existing literature and properly cite them.

3\. cook up a clever way of evaluation and publish the results.

etc, etc. Unfortunately, in most universities, these techniques are kinda
sorta taught, but they're far from being systematic. And many of them don't
have the body of knowledge and staffers for this kind of things, probably
because they're incentivized for wrong goals (e.g. the number of papers, media
recognition, etc.)

------
dekhn
I worked with a japanese postdoc who, when he finished up, said he was
returning to Japan. I asked him if he was going to get a job as a professor
and he said "no, I have to wait for my current advisor to die before I can be
a professor".

I used to think that was just Japan, but then I tried to become a professor
(during the post-NIH-training exponential burst of the early 2000s) and found
that it's basically the same in the US now.

------
mercurialshark
A classic tale, where the product is valuable, yet the demand is scarce. A
system where there are few alternative avenues for those who place second or
third. It's disheartening to say the least. People look at Blade Runner 2049
and think dystopianism, yet here we are, a system over-saturated, yet,
inexorably undernourished.

------
smrtinsert
Why are these would be professors not reading these articles? It's well known
for years academia is no place to look for a great job. Find something else,
I'm sorry to be harsh, but for the well educated, you should be able to find
something else - especially given such early warning.

------
sitkack
Academia is one sink for PhDs. The whole idea of "too many educated people"
has to torn down!

------
watwut
The interesting part is that this coexists with "we need many more people in
science" narrative which pops up when talking about students choices ffor
major.

Nope, we don't nee more people aiming for science, we ain't got jobs for them.

------
amelius
From the increasing number of PhDs, can't we state that the PhD is the new
MSc? Shouldn't we define a new level?

------
2_listerine_pls
The positive side is that they can work for you in exchange for cereal and
milk.

------
frozenport
>>Despite our moans about hours of work, pay, and pensions, being an academic
is still the best job in the world for those of a particular temperament and
talents.

I have a slave temperment and enjoy being hauranged by my PI?

My talents include falsifying experiments and writing endless papers about how
our method is superior to all other methods? Yet we, much like the communist
revolutions in the 20th century, have been working on it for the last 20
years?

~~~
apersona
Have you actually been in a PhD program?

~~~
frozenport
Yes :-(

------
mrdrozdov
This article is outdated. From 2015.

------
Overtonwindow
I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the
workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research.
In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH.
Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities
are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and
lifetime tenure awaits them at the end of the PhD rainbow.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to
TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties.

No. PhDs are extremely specialized on a very narrow topic within a single
field. They spend years researching that topic to the exclusion of everything
else.

Asking PhDs to teach is like asking brain surgeons to treat common cold. They
probably can do it, but it's a gross waste of their skills and expertise.

~~~
barry-cotter
If there is no demand for your skills they can’t be wasted. There’s no
necessary reason why being really good at literary criticism is any more
socially valuable than being really good at Counter Strike. If no one’s
willing to pay you for it I hope you had fun learning to do it because
otherwise it was a waste.

