
A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos - lingz
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/aug/09/a-phd-should-be-about-improving-society-not-chasing-academic-kudos
======
apo
_When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD
system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately
one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric
disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying –
and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on
average 50% of PhD students leave graduate school without finishing – with
numbers higher at some institutions._

The biggest risk factor I've found for a PhD student is lack of research
experience during the undergrad degree.

I've seen it over and over.

A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no
preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real
researchers face.

When it hits them, many discover they lack the temperament to actually move a
research project forward. By then, they will have sunk 2-3 years of their life
(or more) and a major amount of prestige into a failed attempt.

If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD,
drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to
join. You're going to need 2-3 years of experience actually doing research to
know if it's something you'll enjoy long term.

You may well discover that you don't like what you find. If so, better to know
that now than when you're in your late 20s.

If things do work out, you'll have a better idea of what to look for in
advisors and schools.

~~~
extralego
These phenomenons are interesting to witness for someone like myself who loves
doing research but followed a very different academic path because I felt
demonized by formal school systems in high school and at a state uni. Speaking
purely from observation of many peers, there were definitely some who
navigated the social and academic realms well, and garnered respect from
socially-encourageable and conformist mentors, but for some reason their
ambitions often lacked.

All my friends with PhDs are unhappy, and do not enjoy doing research. They
are all intelligent, some a little bit creative, and only curious when forced.
They are experts of citations (a tease that never gets old to me, sorry) and
I’m afraid are most concerned with not being _left behind_ or achieving
prestige.

Having had countless long late-night chats with them in empty bars about this,
I gather their habits of conformity got them that far and let them down once
they were on their own. They consistently think what I’m doing in my life is
more interesting than theirs. I think the opposite and would die to be in
their shoes.

These friends are all in mathematics or humanities, and for those in
humanities, I would especially die to be in their shoes. I recommend them
books on a regular basis, collaborate with them on papers for fun, sending
loads of notes that get chiselled down to whatever the editor is expected to
prefer.

The whole process is nasty from my perspective. A pile of people desperate to
wiesel off the next because that’s the skill they were selected for from early
on. In my best effort to put bitterness aside, I can only rationally conclude
it’s rotten to the core.

To be clear, these are _very_ intelligent people. But, the system of schooling
most go through selects fiercely _against_ curiosity at it’s earlier stages.
This is only a theory. Feel free to point to research on the topic.

~~~
tachyonbeam
I work in a large academic research lab and I'm with you on the lack of
creativity and conformism. Most people here don't have ambitious ideas. They
always think in terms of basic improvements to ideas that were recently
published about. They seem to automatically think that progress can only be
made in the direction of the latest cool papers from well-established authors
in the field. Me, I'm with Peter Thiel... Don't compete. Differentiate
yourself. Try to find a niche that everyone isn't already trying to fill.

People here are also seemingly very conformist. For the most part, they work
extremely long hours, are in hetero-normative relationships, with similar life
goals (get a high paying job, buy a house, have kids), they don't do drugs or
rarely even drink. If they have any hobbies, it's going to be your typical
going hiking and camping sort of deal.

I'm surprised that STEM research doesn't attract more "freaks" and free-
thinking people. People who want to challenge assumptions and do things
differently, explore new possibilities. Unfortunately, I guess where I am, the
main draw is prestige and the possibility of getting a high paying job when
you finish.

~~~
dagw
_I 'm surprised that STEM research doesn't attract more "freaks" and free-
thinking people._

At least when I was at university, those people generally didn't have the
focus to graduate with good grades (or graduate at all for that matter). It's
one thing to sit around and talk about all the 'out there' implications of
quantum physics. It's an entirely different thing to get your quantum physics
course work in on time and study enough to pass the exam.

~~~
WalterSear
I think I'm one of the freaks in question. I'm not one to sit around pipe
dreaming, but I've found a vastly better fit writing code at startups than I
ever did in grad school.

I get to invent, experiment, learn, and at a vastly faster pace. I'm even
working in the same field, solving similar problems to the ones I worked on in
school.

~~~
vkou
This is great if the problems you want to solve have direct business
applications with a turnaround time of tomorrow.

There aren't very many startups funding basic research, though.

~~~
WalterSear
I know. That's why I went back to grad school in the first place. Big mistake
:)

------
fhood
Man, this view of getting a PhD, which seems fairly common, is so alien to me.
Both my parents are research professors, both regularly have students, and I
have never seen any of the misery or stress that people keep bringing up.

Sure, if you are unprepared to do research then you shouldn't do a PhD, but my
parents' students are hand picked, and it is very rare that they end up with a
student that doesn't want to, or is unprepared to do research.

Being a PhD student should be one of the most fun parts of an academic career.
You get to focus on your research, and are mostly removed from the politics
and stress of securing funding. You aren't constantly being barraged by
requests to review papers or having your time used up by a myriad of other
responsibilities.

I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up
around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier,
but my impressions of getting a PhD were always positive, and the reason I
never did it was because the part after your PhD seemed like it sucked.

~~~
baby
I guess it depends on your field, but I've definitely seen that happening in
Physics and Math. I have many friends who continued school to pursue a PhD
while I left to work in the industry. It's a mix of:

* dropped out (some changed field completely)

* failed to pass their defense

* were miserable until they obtained their PhD

* managed to obtain their PhD after a looooong time and a lot of financial trouble. After that followed a long quest to look for a job (humanities).

* was uber successful and loved it

Note that these are people I know from all over the world, not just one
country or one school.

The one guy that was uber successful absolutely loved what he was doing. The
others either did not have the passion, or found out later that they did not
enjoy doing research that much, or worse loved it but could not afford being
poor.

~~~
brandonjm
> The one guy that was uber successful absolutely loved what he was doing.

This is the absolute most most important thing. I could have taken an
increased scholarship however I would be bound to researching what the top-up
provider wanted. Instead I opted to be on a base level scholarship but I got
to choose exactly what path I wanted to take.

------
andreyk
This is a rather poor essay.

"Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. Yet it can
often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Most
academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather
than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from
practice.

...

This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to
practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first
year (or more) reading obscure academic literature."

So... do industry research? Let's be clear: a PhD is a training program for
research. As such most research done during a PhD is generally not that
impactful, certainly not to go beyond fellow academics and to non experts. In
my experience most people who go into it don't have much of an idea of what
they want to do afterward -- they mainly know they enjoy research and are
interested in the topic. AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to
influence society using their skills, or not.

~~~
jvanderbot
> AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using
> their skills, or not.

Exactly this. The primary skill developed during a PhD (for me, and those
around me), is knowing the difference between:

1\. solutions that can be pulled from literature (bake),

2\. solutions that should be easy to assemble from existing solutions (buy),

3\. what technology requires a small-to-medium delta above and beyond the
bleeding edge (build)

All those are research, but far too often (3) is what everyone targets.

~~~
frankling_
If all three of these are research, what is engineering?

~~~
ThalesX
I guess research deals with solutions under ideal conditions while engineering
deals with real life constraint solutions?

------
knappa
A lot of this seems ridiculous:

> Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are
> at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression.

The baseline percentage of the population which experience depression (and
other mental illness) each year is known to be pretty high -- and highest in
for people in their 20's. One third sounds fairly normal; at any rate, there
is a burden here to show that this is an exceptional proportion.

> For instance, a PhD in Germany is supposed to take three years, according to
> university regulations, but most students need five years to complete one.

If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least
two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program
might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about
social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data
collection is going to take longer than that.

> In the US, meanwhile, the average completion time for a PhD in education
> sciences surpasses 13 years.

These programs are dominated by people who are working teachers, working on
PhDs part-time.

> One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven
> will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor.

Being a professor is only one possible goal and for some fields, it isn't even
the primary one.

~~~
jderick
According to this website, the baseline for depression in America is 6.7%.

[http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/depression](http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/depression)

1/3 is not normal at all.

~~~
MrEfficiency
Ive theorized the people getting a PhD are not your average american. Most
college grads finish school and go into industry.

My peers who went onto get PhDs without going to industry were... different.
Not necessarily super smart, but not the best socially or in leadership
positions.

I can think of 3 people that were getting their PhDs in engineering, but I
thought they were average students at best. One was an average to below
average working with me on labs. Another was just a goofy weirdo, I couldnt be
friends with him because he'd shoo me away. Another was somewhat a brainiac,
but to a fault, He'd get As, but didnt really have friends from what I could
tell.

I imagine lots of this is correlation not causation, and that things are
different at big names schools.

~~~
rotexo
My experience was the opposite. The people in my PhD program (at an upper-tier
state institution) were far better thinkers in my field (biology) than the
people in my major at an upper-tier liberal arts college (who, granted, were
largely pre-med).

------
wuliwong
>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to
practitioners from day one of their research

I don't think this applies well to all fields of study. I have my Ph.D. in
physics and there are loads of people researching problems that don't really
have counterparts "in the field." I'm assuming "in the field" means industry
or possibly a government service. I would think the same is true for
mathematics at least.

>I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams.

Of course in this case, contact with people in the industry makes lots of
sense. In fact, I'm not sure how this research would be conducted without this
contact.

I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic
motivation for students. For me, I think of academia as having the goal of
advancing human understanding of the universe. Whether or not that has a
social impact is probably up to some debate. I believe that one of the cool
things about academia is allowing some people the ability to pursue ideas and
work on problems that don't have obvious, short-term impacts.

~~~
drb91
> I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a
> monolithic motivation for students.

Well, there is chasing funding. In your area of the universe, does the money
follow worthwhile problems?

~~~
chengiz
Funding is simple. It's all about experience and prior use. Funders fund what
they did before, what the fundees did before, and did they use up the funds
from last time.

~~~
drb91
My question stands. :)

------
PurpleBoxDragon
Replace 'academic kudos' with 'the metric which we measure to check if you are
improving society' and the issue becomes more apparent.

>A PHD should be about improving society, not chasing the metric which we
measure to check if you are improving society.

It seems to be Campbell's law in action. Of course you can determine a
different metric to use, or just tune the current metric some, but you'll
eventually see the same problems emerge, maybe worse, maybe better.

I also think this issue shouldn't be viewed in isolation of other related
issues, such as how the current system discourages reproducing the research of
others and of publishing trivial results (we tested to see if we found this
unexpected thing and we didn't).

Figuring how who is a good scientist, given that some theoretical good
scientist could spend a decade chasing down an issue that ended up being
nothing, is not an easy problem to solve. Tenure is one attempt to fix it, but
it largely just re-frames the problem into deciding which scientists deserve
tenure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

>Take my example. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower
dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in
the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from
assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations.
As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions
of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th
definition of this term.

>In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its
publication. It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by
Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social
media. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to
congratulate me. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything
that’s broken in the academy. Academics love definitions, not solutions.

This feels like the pure distilled essence of Campbell's law.

------
mnl
I don't understand how it's possible that a "social scientist" thinks that he
has identified the great problem and its solution in every other academic
discipline. Well, actually I do understand that, I've been around
sociologists. I wonder if there's any chance that people that simply feel
something about a tiny corner of the whole picture start speaking just for
themselves. Maybe he's realized that his field is organized BS, but I don't
think that makes a case for destroying modern science in order to build this
society where laypersons decide what is worthwhile knowledge and what's not,
in the newspapers. That's a great recipe for going back to those several
centuries in which the rationale of doctorates was "improving society" as
well.

~~~
delib
> people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture

Why is this about the author's feelings? There are plenty of links in the
piece to underlying data sources, and these show that the problems mentioned
don't vary a lot by discipline. For instance:
[http://phdcompletion.org](http://phdcompletion.org)

------
shoguning
I disagree totally. A PhD should be about curiosity and asking the most
interesting scientific questions you can think of, also known as 'basic
research'. You have the rest of your career to have as much impact on society
and commerce as you want.

Unfortunately, the social impact factor has been creeping in, in the form of
more 'applied research' funding which is not fundamental and does not move
scientific knowledge forward. The government has limited role in funding
applied research, since industry is better positioned to understand what
applied research is important and has a strong incentive to fund it.

Academia is imperfect, but the genius of the system is that letting scientists
chase down interesting things _does_ end up improving society dramatically in
the long run.

~~~
fullshark
Who is paying to support you while you explore some curiosity of yours? A PhD
program is not a summer camp, it's a social tool and the public is paying
money in order to grow the human knowledge base. I don't get this attitude,
appreciate the fact that the public is giving you grants and funding because
the alternative is you get nothing.

~~~
shoguning
Perhaps you misunderstand. Scientists should study important _topics_
(virology, human genetics, materials science etc.), but within that, research
direction should set by scientists not bureaucrats.

Many people share your view, though, and it's a shame. We have all of private
industry to focus on short term benefits. Grad school is one place where the
grinding expectation of immediate return-on-investment can be suspended. PhD
students take low compensation hoping they can use curiosity and passion to
direct their research. Increasingly, that's not the case.

>> appreciate the fact that the public is giving you grants and funding
because the alternative is you get nothing.

This is cutting off the hand to spite the face. Taxpayers get an _unbelievable
bargain_ for the work of PhD students and postdocs. Gutting research funding
won't hurt them for long, they'll easily move on to much higher paying work,
it's future society that will suffer.

I'd argue you get the best and most significant contributions to society in
the long run with stable government funding of basic research. Don't believe
me? Ask Steven Chu, Nobel Prize winner and energy secretary:

[https://www.amacad.org/multimedia/pdfs/wsjoped.pdf](https://www.amacad.org/multimedia/pdfs/wsjoped.pdf)

------
chriskanan
It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate
for _impact_. If you are doing research, the goal is to do research that
matters and citations are one way to measure that people cared about the work
(of course, once something becomes a measure people start optimizing for that
instead of the original objective).

A PhD is a degree in doing research. When students start, it is true that many
think they want careers in academia. Many then realize that academia isn't
what they want after a few years in and seeing how their advisors live,
realizing salaries are lower, and realizing how competitive it is. There are
plenty of amazing career doors that open with a PhD besides being an
academic... any career that requires the ability to conduct, interpret, and/or
communicate research.

The comments about meeting practitioners are pretty foreign to my experiences
doing a PhD (in AI) and being a scientist. If anything, when I meet people in
industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it
might have long-term value.

~~~
TearsInTheRain
> "It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a
> surrogate for impact."

I think the author would agree, although he is making the distinction between
impact in academic circles vs impact in society. His claim is that impact in
academic circles has become out of touch with impact in society.

> If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical
> research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value.

Is there a way to measure how much non-practical research ends up having long-
term value? Intuitively, the marginal utility of a 115th definition of a
circular economy doesn't seem worth the academic man power yet that is what
the author is being incentivized to work on because citation culture in
academia.

------
jonchang
Great idea! Pay me for improving society rather than chasing academic kudos
and I'll gladly spend my time doing that instead of writing grants and papers.

------
gnicholas
> _Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to
> pursue a career in science, their enthusiasm typically wanes to the point
> that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation_

These seem like different questions to me. There are plenty of ways to "pursue
a career in science" that don't involve academia.

------
wsy
This article has some true observations, but the conclusions seem to go in a
totally wrong direction.

Writing a PhD is a very ambitious endeavor. You will inevitably have your
downs and crises, because research is hard. This is independent of the
research topic. Now asking that the PhD thesis should not only advance
research, but also 'improve society' will only increase the pressure.

The author also has the purpose of a PhD wrong: this is your research
journeyman time, and delivering the PhD thesis is like creating your
masterpiece as craftsman (in the original meaning where you create a fine
piece of work which earns you the right to call yourself master of a craft).
The real, unsupervised research career starts after PhD. This also means that
it would be a very bad idea to start with high-risk research. Do this as
PostDoc, when you have acquired all the necessary skills.

Not focusing on publications is the worst advice one can give aspiring
academics. Research is about advancing _shared_ knowledge, and the only way to
do this is to share your results. If you don't manage to publish, either your
results are not relevant, or your work is not considered sound by your peer
researchers. Successful publishing in reputable venues validates your
research, and is the most effective way to disseminate new insights. I agree
that the publishing system is broken. You have to work around that by choosing
the right venues. This is another academic skill you need to learn.

If you really want to improve society and feel insufficient if you 'only'
improve your research field, then don't pursue a research career. Better go
work for some non-profit organization, or found one.

------
moh_maya
What are the politicians there for then?

I'm not being facetious here. Politics is one of the primary avenues of
bringing about social change. Ditto civil service.

A PhD should be about novel contributions that increase the sum total of human
knowledge.

~~~
TearsInTheRain
Ok but we shouldnt pursue knowledge haphazardly for knowledge sake. There are
an infinite number of interesting avenues of inquiry we could send our
academics down that would be completely useless. The paths we choose should be
guided by the needs of practical application. How else can we value
information if not practical application?

~~~
nakashimakid
"Practical application" is the domain of the engineer, the business person,
the sales department, etc. Science and pure curiosity are one and the same.

------
mattkrause
Great! Except that if you stop chasing those kudos, you will promptly find
yourself unemployed and thus unable to do any research at all.

~~~
nakashimakid
Exactly, while imperfect, these kudos are one of the only measures of academic
ability.

~~~
mattkrause
That’s not even close to true.

However, these “kudos” are the principle measure of academic
ability/productivity used by those making hiring and funding decisions
so...barring a top-down change, we are stuck with them.

------
dagw
A PhD should primarily be about learning how to do research in your chosen
field, not the research itself.

~~~
auggierose
That's what the diploma was for once ... (at least in Germany).

------
fastaguy88
A PhD should also be about being honest in ones arguments in the popular
press. PhD's in Education may take 13 years (is that the median?) because most
students are part time. In good graduate programs that provide guaranteed
funding for students, 4-6 years is customary (and funding sometimes runs out
at year 5). It's hard for me, as an academic, to trust an author who twists
statistics to make his case.

And what does it mean to improve society? Basic biomedical science rarely
promises improvements, but has given us revolutionary technologies (the
structure of DNA, the genetic code, cloning, transgenic animals, etc, etc).
The essence of basic science is that you do not know what you are going to
learn, or whether it will be useful. You cannot plan unimagined discoveries.

Should graduate students start doing "research" sooner? That is certainly the
standard in biomedical research, where very few courses are required. But the
consequence is that students know a lot about what they have done, and very
little about other disciplines. How does a graduate student in biology become
a computational biologist without learning programming and algorithms?

The comments about having research experience are spot-on. And many of the
frustrations people describe could be reduced by learning more about one's
advisor before joining the group.

------
jderick
I agree that the PhD system needs some rethinking but I don't think focusing
research on more 'practical' problems is necessarily a good idea. I have seen
'practical' research going on in industry labs and I think it often falls into
a no man's land of neither being practical nor advancing the state of
knowledge in any meaningful way. Citation counts are problematic in some ways,
but they do approximately measure what the research community thinks of as
important work. I agree they seem to suffer from overly promoting "what's in
fashion." OTOH, there is benefit to having a community of researchers all
focusing on one topic at a time so that ideas can be exchanged and build on
one another. Just like with startups, for some good ideas, it may just be that
they are being proposed at the wrong time or haven't found the exact right
form yet.

------
brandonjm
> Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community,
> rather than policymakers or businesses...

The university where I am currently doing my PhD has a very heavy focus on the
outputs of a PhD contributing something worthwhile not only to academia but
also to industry or the world. It isn't a massively high ranking university
but it does force academics to think practically as well as theoretically. We
are required to have an industry (non-academic) advisor on our supervisory
panel who helps guide the research so it can be useful and not just gather
dust once finished.

------
philipov
A corporation should be about improving society, not chasing shareholder
value.

~~~
drb91
Well, that’d be great!

------
131012
I totally agree with the problems of academia chasing citations, but the
solution sounds odd to me. There are plenty of applied master programs aimed
exactly at what is proposed: engaging with the professional community and
fixing simple stuff.

But I still think some people should be isolated from the daily torment of
humanity to push us forward. Maybe we just need less PHD.

~~~
dagw
At least here in Sweden there are also PhD programs where you do your research
at a company and split your time 50-50 between that company and the
University.

------
jderick
One thought I had about this was related to a book I was reading recently
about the Math Olympiad. It was discussing how in the US the way math is
taught never allows the students to struggle with any hard problems. That
experience of going up against something potentially intractable is totally
foreign to most students, even at the undergrad level I suspect. When you
throw someone into a totally new environment where their life revolves around
doing something they have never done before, it is kind of a shock. I think
part of the solution here would be to introduce harder problem solving earlier
into the standard curriculum. For this reason, I would be curious if PhDs in
Russia or Eastern Europe, where the school systems are known for being more
mathematically difficult from an early age, suffer from the same level of
problems that exist in the US system.

------
fixermark
Basically every human endeavor "should" be about putting the general good over
the individual good. After all, it's in one's own selfish interests for that
to be the state of affairs; there are far more people not-you doing things
than people who are you doing things, so you stand to benefit more if all
those not-you people are doing work that indirectly improves your quality-of-
life. ;)

The (sometimes literally) million-dollar question is: how do you align
incentives to bring about that desired end-state? Ph.D's are not unique in
struggling with this age-old conundrum; if the government is willing to pay
for robotics research for drone warfare but nobody is putting up the cash to
pay for nursing-care robot research, then we can make some pretty firm
predictions what kind of robots we'll see mature and reliable in twenty years.

~~~
nakashimakid
I posit that "one's own selfish interests", which can include pursuing a
research topic for the "general good", is a major driver of scientific
inquiry.

The evaluation of whether "general good" is advanced when answering a
scientific question is subjective. Might I remind you that our foundations of
probability - a pillar of mathematics and more - was furthered with the
intention of winning gambling games? Or that our understanding of the limits
of human physiology - how much force a skull can withstand, time before death
under hypothermia - was furthered by Nazi scientists at the expense of Jews
and other minorities?

While born out of sin, these two examples of science unequivocally better the
"general good" \- now...

------
agustinbena
Fourier or newton did not persue improving society, and they did.

~~~
warent
To my understanding, Newton was motivated by trying to decode the Bible among
other occult studies which he thought would unlock some mystical knowledge of
the universe for humanity. So in that respect, he did sort of pursue improving
society? Albeit perhaps in a misguided way. But hey, it yielded massive
benefits

------
warcher
The only real rot I see in the PhD track is the dangerous imbalance of degrees
to jobs in certain areas (not STEM usually, although STEM is pretty
uncompromising for tenure track). IMHO in the humanities the PhD is some kind
of sick ponzi scheme, where advanced degrees serve to subsidize tenured
faculty's careers with little to no hope of going on to anything of their own.
(I know STEM isn't _much_ better, but it's a _little_ better, especially with
industry being willing to assume some risk.) But I've got friends $100K in
debt for an art history PhD, and that's craaaaaaaaaazy given what awaits on
the other side.

~~~
Miltnoid
I don't know a single reputable program that makes you pay for a PhD.
Typically the salaries are subsidized through the school, that gets it's money
from taking a cut of stem grants, donations, masters tuition, and
undergraduate tuition. Saying that most humanities professors get their
salaries by doing some sort of ponzi scheme of charging their advisees is just
spreading misinformation.

~~~
rhino369
That is mostly true for reputable programs. But there are a lot of unreputable
Ph.D. programs. They may even graduate the bulk of PhDs.

And even some reputable programs will let some people "buy their way" if they
don't qualify as for a fellowship/funding.

~~~
overeater
The annoying thing, is since there are more unreputable programs out there,
all the stats about PhD students are heavily skewed by those students.
Basically this rhetoric about 1/1000 phd students landing a job, or phd
graduates being $100,000 in debt, or 9/10 students drop out or have mental
health issues, are not about the usual PhD program we think about at
universities that are household names and hear about in the news.

------
yumario
I don't understand this system at all. Only 1 in 200 Phd student ends up
becoming a professor, yet in college we have classes of 200-250 students per
professor. And some of the older professors have been teaching the same class
for many many years, without attempting to change the material. They are just
repeating the stuff the already know, over and over again. It seems for me a
waste of human resources, for me, to put some of the smartest people in to
such repetitive task. Instead, I think the hiring bar for academia positions
should be lower, the classes should be smaller, and the student should receive
more customize experience.

------
yalph
The reason I completely hated my phd program:

\- it was incredibly political, much, much more than companies I worked at.

\- most students were just trying to tweak some equations and get the hell out
of that place.

Overall it was a very unhealthy environment and wasnt worth It.

------
Nokinside
Academic kudos should be realigned better with scientific achievement.

Academic kudos translates directly to money (tenure, research funding) and
power (gatekeeper positions) and that makes it microeconomics problem. Highly
competitive person with high scientific achievement may not be the best person
to judge and distribute kudos of others.

We should find a way to quantify kudos distribution to create good incentives.
Researchers should get impact factor for mentoring, accepting papers to
journals or giving voting for tenure to others who produce high impact studies
after they get the tenure.

------
Vivtek
This could literally be said about any other human endeavor. I mean, Comcast
should be about improving society, but I don't see articles in the Guardian
shaming _them_.

------
nakashimakid
Academia has always been, and always will be, about new knowledge. The article
laments the pursuit of citations but fails to note that it is today's primary
quantitative measure of new knowledge - though imperfect.

"Improving society" as academia's objective will have its own set of
misaligned incentives, potentially much worse than the pursuit of "academic
kudos". How would this be measured?

------
bradhoffman
You all are kind of scaring me a bit...

I just finished my Bachelor's and am starting my Master's this month. I have
no formal research experience, but I planned to dive in during my Master's.
For anyone who has done/is doing there PhD, if there is any advice you all
could give me in order to get the most out of this next year before I apply
for PhD programs, that would be great.

~~~
godelski
Apply straight to a PhD program. Don't pay for a graduate degree.

~~~
glitchc
I disagree. A Masters with thesis is more directed, a good way to learn how to
do research, and not hinged on a novel contribution for a successful defense.
My PhD went much faster and smoother because I had learnt the ropes and
decided it was something worth doing.

I think part of the problem is people jumping straight into PhD without any
research experience. I watched quite a few students struggle when taking this
road.

I do agree that it's a problem if grad school costs money, but a large stipend
is only really available in STEM or medicine.

~~~
godelski
In my experience PhD candidates always get paid, and Masters don't. They do
sometimes, but you aren't priority and guaranteed. I do always suggest getting
the Masters on the way though. 5 years is a long time, and if you decide it
isn't for you, well you come out with something (and it was paid).

------
ppeetteerr
To be a psychologist in Canada, you have to earn a PhD. It's neither about
improving society or chasing kudos. It's just a job.

------
JadeNB
Great, I can play too! Corporations should be about improving the public good,
as they used to be [0], not chasing monetary value. Your turn!

[0] Not just "in my day"-ism. According to "We the corporations",
demonstrating this was originally part of the legal requirement for many
governments' approval of articles of incorporation.

~~~
JadeNB
(I forgot to link to "We the corporations", which is an interesting book, and
far from the screed its name suggests:
[http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473](http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993473)
.)

------
j7ake
"They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real
world."

By that metric, most fundamental discoveries in the last 200 years would not
have been enough to finish a PhD.

Even Hamming's error correcting codes took 10+ years for Bell Labs to
implement it. And even then it was because they had no other alternatives and
were in a bind.

------
modells
The two aren’t mutex. And _publish or perish._ The suggestion is that academia
should be utilitarian and short-term focused. This will never happen. It’s
tantamount to saying “we should get rid of archeologists because they aren’t a
profit-center department.”

~~~
nakashimakid
^ this guy. exactly.

Measuring the utility of academia is futile. If anything should be said about
utility it is that empirically, the average ROI on academia from the point of
view of The State is always net positive: economically, culturally, socially,
etc.

------
thrwaway11
How much of this argument should apply to more theoretical areas of research
like pure mathematics?

~~~
abnry
I used to be in a math PhD program. Probably would still be if not for some
life circumstance.

I think it is worth taking a hard look at the value all of this mathematical
research actually produces.

I understand how number theory has been useful to cryptography. I understand
how branches of pure math can have a surprising influence.

But when these examples are given by pure mathematicians, it often strikes me
as anecdotal and motivated reasoning. Where are the hard numbers? Where is the
cool-headed evaluation?

They very much want the NSF to continue giving them grants so they can keep
funding their mathematical interests. Because it personally and immediately
benefits them.

It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to
society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost
by reducing research funding.

This is how I look at it: Funding mathematical research means your society is
wealthy. When the vast majority aren't worried about putting food on the
table, it is a privilege when you can get paid by them to pursue your
mathematical hobby. A hobby that has some relatively low chance of impacting
society.

~~~
CJefferson
Your claim we could reduce mathematics research misses one big step -- that we
can tell, in advance, which mathematicians (and researchers in general) are
doing the "useful" research. In my experience that is very hard to predict.
Also often researchers are "standing on the shoulders of giants", so the
people who look most real world useful are extending earlier, "not useful"
research.

~~~
JadeNB
In perhaps pithier words, accepting abnry's figures

> It may be true that 80% of the mathematical research that is valuable to
> society is done by 20% of mathematicians. In this case, not much can be lost
> by reducing research funding.

, you can probably get 80% of the return by cutting the _right_ 80% of
research; but, if you cut the _wrong_ 80%, then you might be left with just
the 20% return on the remaining 20% of work, or 4%.

(Also, there're lots of ways to cut the wrong 80%, and only one way to cut the
right 80%.)

~~~
abnry
Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be
producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at
name state university 145.

I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was
less than 25% of math PhDs who go on to get a research job in math. How much
are we funding these students here? I was on the receiving end of some NSF
money for a semester. Was it worth it for the NSF? I barely contributed much.
Granted paying a grad student is relatively cheap. But I wouldn't hold it
against the NSF if they were more stingy.

It may be that we really are funding the right amount and the benefits to the
whole ecosystem are great. But I want someone to give a cool-headed discussion
of the numbers, not some vague persuasiveness motivated by job security.

~~~
JadeNB
> Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be
> producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at
> name state university 145.

On average, maybe … but, if we just axe those at NSU 145, then we're
_definitely_ not going to be funding the proof of the bounded-gaps conjecture.
Now, Zhang managed to prove it anyway
([https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_be...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_between_primes.html)),
but who knows how many people at small universities have a big proof in them,
if they could only get the funding to have time to explore it?

(I would also argue that this is dangerously close to the point of view that
big companies obviously know something about doing business successfully, so
the best way to save government money spent on business is to cut out small-
business loans.)

> I don't know what the exact figure is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was
> less than 25% of math PhDs who don't go on to get a research job in math.

Did you flip a 'not' there? I suspect that it's the other way around, that
less than 25% of math Ph.D.s _do_ get a research job in math, or perhaps even
worse. (At least, that's if by "research job in math" you mean "academic job
in math with research expectations"; if you count industrial research, then
maybe I believe it.)

~~~
abnry
Zhang is an outlier. From what I followed when his proof came out, there were
actually very similar ideas being developed by Terry Tao at UCLA and by a PhD
student at Oxford. The sort of places you'd expect. And IIRC, Zhang actually
come from the top math department in China. He just had trouble getting a good
job in the U.S.

It is also fair to wonder just where this twin prime conjecture is leading us
in terms of usefulness. I know it's hard, but we should be able to draw direct
comparisons to how something like RSA panned out. Though RSA is pretty easy to
understand. Maybe a better example is elliptic curve cryptography, though I
know nothing about that. Can we at least provide a road map for how
understanding the twin prime conjecture will lead to useful, practical
techniques?

(And yeah, I accidentally added a "not" there. Will edit.)

~~~
JadeNB
> Zhang is an outlier. … And IIRC, Zhang actually come from the top math
> department in China.

Well, sure, and that's my point; there _will_ be outliers. They'll probably
have some indicators, like coming from good schools, or prior good work, even
if they are currently in lower-ranked places. Every time an outlier comes
along, one can certainly _retroactively_ find something that reveals all along
that he or she was going to excel; the challenge is finding the people with
this potential in _advance_. (You don't want to fund only the people who
_have_ done good work; eventually you'll just get an unduly privileged class
of people who did a lot of good math now and no longer can.) So we should have
some way of finding these outliers by evaluating their academic history and
apparent future potential … and that's a grant committee. (Hey, I hate to find
myself defending them! I'm an academic and grant writing is low down on my
list of favourite things to do; but it's better than being told that, since
I'm not at Princeton, I won't even get a _chance_ to seek funding.)

> From what I followed when his proof came out, there were actually very
> similar ideas being developed by Terry Tao at UCLA and by a PhD student at
> Oxford.

I don't know about the Ph.D. student at Oxford, but (although I can't find it
now) I am pretty sure I remember reading a post on Terry Tao's blog in which
he was much more charitable than this; essentially, his view (I believe,
though I can't find it) was that commonalities could be found between his work
and Zhang's, as there always can between even the most revolutionary work and
its predecessors, but that Zhang's work represented a genuinely new idea and
huge step forward.

> It is also fair to wonder just where this twin prime conjecture is leading
> us in terms of usefulness. I know it's hard, but we should be able to draw
> direct comparisons to how something like RSA panned out.

RSA took essentially from the dawn of recorded mathematics (Euclid) to about
70 years ago; it's now the prototypical example (second, perhaps, to
Riemannian geometry) of apparently "purely pure" mathematics that turned out
to have applications. I think that's an excellent argument for taking the long
view.

------
programminggeek
A PhD is about getting paid, like any other job. This should be pretty
obvious.

------
diego898
I think changing the PhD system is a great target, but how can you identify
that as the culprit without changing the professoriate/tenure system?

~~~
IggleSniggle
That system has already changed. Tenure tracks are largely phasing out as
older professors retire. They are being replaced with part-time adjunct
teaching positions, supplemented by big name researchers that bring in grant
money and institutions can write marketing articles about. Those big names are
not incentivized to stay by a tenure system, as they can easily accept
positions at other institutions or in private industry to continue doing their
research.

~~~
diego898
Can you give me a few examples of major universities that have moved/are
moving to this system?

------
pvaldes
A PhD should be in fact about earning a decent living and secure a better life
for yourself and your relatives.

------
pastor_elm
Maybe the solution is to allow fewer people into Phd programs?? Not everyone
needs a phd.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
From the comments, one of the "Guardian picks":

 _I strongly, strongly disagree. A PhD should be about science. Not about
utility for society. I am pretty sure that Max Planck did not think about the
utility of computers when he proposed this completely absurd, little
mathematical trick of discretising energy. Still, without quantum theory: no
computer, no laser, no magnetic resonance imaging...and I could go on forever.

Progress in science is necessarily chaotic - if you disallow incoherence,
absurdity, non-applicability, you will kill science. The author is
conceptualizing "science" (maybe he talks about engineering and not science?)
only as a tool of problem solving for the society - that is actual the role of
science in Orwell's "1984" and that was the role of science to a certain
extent in socialism. By making science teleological, one makes science ready
for totalitarian abuse. Thank you very much!

By the way, comparing PhD systems from different countries is absolutely
rubbish. In Germany, it is already rubbish to compare PhDs from different
faculties from the same university...._

------
gp7
Bizarre. This is coming from someone presumably embedded in the grant-writing
machine that is modern academia. How do grant proposals justify their cost,
exactly? Academia would be healthier if some back slaps at the next conference
was all it took I think

------
DSingularity
100%

------
guessthejuice
No. PhD should be about truth, research and advancing knowledge.
Knowledge/science shouldn't be politicized.

It's such an absurd assertion when you consider that different people have
different ideas on how to improve society.

------
braindongle
Wait. Incentive structures in academia are screwed up? No. It can't be.

