
The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time - billswift
http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223
======
Loic
This article only take the money value of PhDs. It forgot the most important
stuff in doing a PhD: Networking. Doing PhD is like doing SEO in the real
world.

First, you need to pay attention to your supervisor, select a good one, one
ready to trust you and give you freedom of action.

Second, grab a university where there is effectively budget for you to travel
to conferences and meet people.

Then, work hard and network a lot.

I am French but did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), it was 3 years with a very good
salary, with a lot of travels all over the world, with an insane level of
networking. Now, after some work in a company, I have setup my small
consultancy, the quality of the network I have from my PhD is a gold mine.

If you do your PhD to just enter in a company with a higher salary after some
years of feeling like a slave, you are doing it for the wrong reason.

~~~
timr
Your experience is completely atypical.

Most PhD students -- at least the ones I know in the states and overseas --
spend most of their time in school trapped in a lab or office. A few make time
to "network" with people outside the department, but most have to be forced to
socialize with a broader audience than can be found at the weekly beer hour.

The far more common pattern for a PhD student is to spend years busting
his/her ass in near-isolation to accomplish research goals and graduate, only
to find that it's hard to get a job without real-world contacts. So you're
absolutely correct in the sense that PhD students _should_ be networking, but
it just doesn't seem to happen very much in practice.

~~~
harshpotatoes
So the PhD students you know don't go to conferences and the like? Odd.

~~~
timr
They did...but the one or two conferences you attend a year as a student isn't
even close to what I'd call "networking". And frankly, that kind of
interaction doesn't get you closer to a job, and it doesn't matter even a
little bit for getting a professorship, unless you're giving a major talk
(which, in all likelihood, you aren't).

The best networking I did in grad school was attending startup-related events.
That got me my first paid gig, which led to greater street cred as a
developer. Attending events held by the career center was a close second,
because those led to interviews. Everything else was fluff.

~~~
cdavid
Although PhD is a lot of work, its non-fixed schedule allows for some kind of
freedom that you can use for networking. For example, PhD is a great time to
be involved with open source projects where you can significantly contribute
to, which can bring a lot of valuable opportunities if you're good at it and
the project fills a marketable niche.

I know that my PhD completely changes the nature of jobs I can hope to get -
not really because of what I learned directly at my PhD, but for everything
else.

------
pierrefar
I've always explained to my friends and family that the only real requirement
of one passing a PhD is stubborness (or tenacity if I'm feeling charitable).
It's certainly not intelligence that's the determining factor, although there
is a minimum threshold you need to be over. You have to be stubborn enough
that despite all the crap the Economist article is describing, you still want
that certificate.

But there is real value in doing a PhD at a prestigious university: it opens
doors. Many many doors. I think of it as a cognitive short cut for others
that, magically, you're now someone worth listening to. I actually don't like
this, but that's what I've observed on multiple occasions.

~~~
PaulHoule
I dunno. I think they let me out with an honorable discharge because I might
have made too much trouble for them otherwise.

------
danieldk
On underpay: this varies highly by country. I am a PhD candidate in The
Netherlands, and am employed by the university for four years (as most PhD
candidates here). This gives around modal income, a 13th month of salary,
holiday allowance, and about two months of holidays per year.

This is a bit less than one would earn going into business immediately, but it
buys you a lot of freedom. The education/research split is 0.2/0.8 FTE. There
are specific goals with respect to the research project, but other than that
there is plenty of time to pursue your interests.

Our university tried to implement a scholarship/bursary system, which was not
welcomed by potential Dutch PhD candidates. Foreign candidates do not seem to
mind as much, since such scholarships are common in other countries. In my
opinion, the scholarship system was a bad move, since pursuing a PhD becomes
less attractive to the best of students, due to higher wages in the industry.
In the end the scholarship system was shot down by the court (they see a PhD
as a normal employment), and seems to have vanished for the time being.

Conclusion: you get what you pay for. Higher PhD candidate wages equals less
PhDs, but more high-quality PhDs. With lower wages or scholarships
universities can have more PhD candidates, but you will probably lose out on
talent who'd rather go to the industry, and the PhD population has a miserable
life (low income, long working hours).

~~~
gizmo
It kind of depends on your point of view, I suppose. Let's take a look at two
examples.

> Example 1: Highschool dropout with no advanced education earning minimum
> wage; 23 years old:

Gross minimum wage for 23yo and above € 1424,40 per month, assuming a 40h
workweek. Usually with paid overtime and some benefits depending on employer.

> Example 2: Student who excelled at high school until 18, completed bachelor
> at 21, completed master in science at 23, started PhD at 24:

Gross wage[1] €2000 per month, with realistically a 45h to 50h workweek.
Better benefits and usually a 13th month. Intellectually more challenging work
(probably), but few career possibilities in the academic field.

\--

Also you have to take into account that the grad student has to pay
substantially more in taxes than the minimum wage employee. The difference was
only 1.5x to start with, after taxes the PhD student will probably only earn
25% more than the minimum wage employee. Just for the record, I'm not arguing
against education here, or even making any statement about whether it makes
sense to do a PhD. Just adding some numbers because your message makes it seem
like PhDs are well compensated given their intelligence and the work they have
to put in. From my point of view they're ridiculously underpaid.

A few of my friends are grad students, and they all live in 600 square feet
(55 meter squared) apartments. It kind of sucks to live a 600 square foot
apartment until you're 29-30, with no substantial savings for a down-payment
on a house for after you graduate.

Source 1:
[https://intranet.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=91ae4d5c-5d21...](https://intranet.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=91ae4d5c-5d21-418c-ac03-e5b56efcd202&lang=en)

~~~
maurits
As a phd in Switzerland, one can only dream about a 55 square meter apartment.
O well, doing research is good for the soul, isn't it?....

------
jmount
Nice read. Speaking as a PhD I am okay with the PhD certificate having no
value (you don't deserve extra earnings for having the certificate). It was my
intent to learn some valuable things during the degree process, and I did.

~~~
grav1tas
Exactly my sentiments. I'm currently in a PhD program, but not because I
intend to be in academia. I love the field I'm studying, and I just felt like
doing it instead of joining the workforce. I'll probably learn a cool thing or
two. Why not?

There are a decent number of ding dongs in PhD programs too. The level of ding
dong-ery doesn't seem to change wherever you go.

~~~
Saad_M
For me earning a PhD was not about the money or wealth creation. It was about
the chance to work on a exciting research project that could make a real
difference and contribution to scientific knowledge.

Besides, in the UK at least the scholarship funding is not bad at all. I found
the £12K per year tax free funding was easily enough to be comfortable on
whilst doing my research.

~~~
grav1tas
Agreed. PhD's in the US that pursue the hard sciences and engineering are
generally funded fairly well.

~~~
RK
I think you could say that they are funded well, in the sense that no one
should be paying out of pocket, but that is different than saying that they
get paid well. It depends a lot on school, location, and (possibly) subject.

~~~
grav1tas
I think the typical engineering PhD major makes close to the equivalent of
12,000 Pounds. It's usually around 16-18 starting from what I know. When
you're doing something that benefits mostly yourself (getting a degree),
making that kind of money is getting paid well, in my opinion.

------
impendia
(Crosspost from my comments at economist.com:)

Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates
who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them
the same advice: "No."

Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would
cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted
that they really wanted to do academic research.

I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to
slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision
of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning
prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do
anything else.

The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and
prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem
whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but
they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.

~~~
jforman
The problem is that the people who are doing it to become a professor are
playing a game that is stacked against them. And if/when you lose that game
you're well behind your peers in opportunity cost (see my other post).

I know several brilliant scientists (postdocs and PhD students) from my time
at Princeton who had / are having a very hard time finding an academic job. At
some point even the purest motivations will succumb to feeling used in these
circumstances.

~~~
impendia
Fair point.

In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to
people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were
getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other
disciplines.

------
gruseom
The assumption in the article, and in most of this discussion, and of our
society if not our civilization in general, is that the only things that
matter are money and jobs (a.k.a. money). What pinched, impoverished excuses
for human beings we are.

~~~
j_baker
Really? The article makes it sound to me like a PhD isn't a good idea either
from a monetary standpoint or from the standpoint of being satisfied.

"One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe
their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and
uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes
one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a
favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is
discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for
free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked
out of reach.”"

"Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are
likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are
going to leave their jobs."

~~~
cma
The article also talks about having an office with better decorations than
one's house! Now they'll never get asked to the school dance!

------
johnswamps
If anyone is curious, here are the median starting salaries for graduates from
Stanford's CS/EE departments (survey was self selecting so the numbers are
probably skewed up, but there were a large number of responses):

Undergrad: 80k Masters: 87k PhD: 114k

~~~
potatolicious
The PhD hits the workforce ~6 years later than the undergrad. It is entirely
feasible, in fact most probable, for a 80k undergrad to hit ~115k in 6 years.

~~~
Confusion
However, salary usually climbs fastest in the first few years after starting,
so if they are both at 115K at some point, the next year the PhD may be at
126, while the undergrad get stuck at 118. This difference only increases and
the end-of-career opportunities for the PhD are also larger: on average, he
can attain jobs for which he will be preferred above the undergrad, who gets
stuck at a lower rung. Of course, this is all 'on average'.

------
naveensundar
A PhD is all about wealth creation [1]. Also many of the technologies we take
for granted were due to "lowly" PhD students toiling away. I can't even
imagine how without decades of dedicated academic effort we can have
semiconductor based electronics, massively layered software that work
seamlessly, etc. Maybe the author can. "The fiercest critics compare research
doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes." The "fiercest critics" don't want to
and can't see or think beyond their noses.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

~~~
blackguardx
Actually most semiconductor technology was developed by industry. Nowadays it
is often too expensive for a university to do any cutting edge IC research
without industry partnerships.

~~~
Lewisham
Yeah, I'm beginning to worry about some CS disciplines, especially Software
Engineering. SoftEng appears to be playing catch-up to industry in a number of
sub-disciplines, due to the pace of knowledge sharing across the net
exponentially increasing. It feels like unit testing might be the last huge
thing academic SoftEng contributes.

There's going to have to be a little bit of realignment, I think, and some
disciplines are going to have to start letting go of being "we're the
practical ones and you could deploy our tech tomorrow" to pushing out a little
bit, maybe incorporating things like AI and stuff.

------
TomOfTTB
_PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A
study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard
Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those
who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a
PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished
in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%._

I wonder what this number would be like if you cut the number of academic jobs
in half. Because that's what I see happening in the future.

I mean, I don't want to say the people on HN are smarter than the rest of the
world but we do tend to spot trends earlier only because of the collaborative
nature of the site and that people here actually evaluate the world around
them. Which means societal trends can become apparent here before the rest of
the world realizes they're going on.

So I think it's instructional that we see a "Higher Education is broken" item
about every couple of days. In the years to come I suspect we'll see a lot
more competition from lower priced options that provide education using online
tools and who don't need armies of research fellows and "postdocs". Combine
that with Governments making serious budget cuts and I think you'll see the
demand for PhD's plummet.

~~~
grav1tas
I have a feeling that you're equating a PhD with a Master's or Bachelor's
degree. The ultimate goal of a PhD is to prepare you to do 'real research' in
that you're trained to collaborate with academics, dig through academic
materials, compile results, and ultimately add to the knowledge of mankind.
This is fundamentally different from a BS or MS. Replacing the academic
setting for this, in my opinion, would be suboptimal, if not detrimental. This
is academia in its purest form almost...basically what it was originally
intended to do! Not train people for the job market, but to further the actual
academic studies of everything!

What you're forgetting is that if there are a ton of hungry PhD's running
around looking for work where your Joe-Master's Degree or Jim-Bachelor's
Degrees are looking for work, chances are they may displace quite a few of
those guys if they look to enter the standard work force. Not because a PhD
makes one inherently better, but because it seems like so many employers look
at paper qualifications, and actually a lot of PhD's did work REALLY HARD to
get their PhD...so at least they've shown they can work really hard on
something and come up with a contribution.

Also, government budget cuts never seem to affect military research, where a
TON of research dollars stems from. I have a feeling that the government will
get its house in order without massive research spending cuts.

------
jteo
The sole purpose of some PhDs is to serve as cheap labour for the research
efforts of a professor.

~~~
cperciva
Some, yes. But definitely not all. My supervisor only had a very vague notion
of what I was doing most of the time (to be fair, _I_ only had a very vague
notion of what I was doing most of the time).

~~~
RK
Did your supervisor think your work was good enough to attach his name to? I
think that counts in the cheap labor argument, even if you aren't just a
worker on the assembly line.

I think good advisors (should) enjoy supervising for the sake of supervising,
but that doesn't mean it doesn't also boost their CV's.

~~~
cperciva
_Did your supervisor think your work was good enough to attach his name to?_

We did co-author a paper later, but it wasn't about anything in my thesis. I
certainly didn't hear any indication from him that he disapproved of my
thesis, though -- he was just happy to let me work independently, and it would
have been entirely improper for his name to appear on work he hadn't
contributed to.

~~~
RK
_it would have been entirely improper for his name to appear on work he hadn't
contributed to._

I do agree with that, but I think it's far from rare in academia.

------
Aloisius
Not all PhDs are the same. They vary in duration and difficulty from country
to country, school to school and field to field.

For instance, you are not guaranteed a PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley even if
you go for 8 years. You don't get one until your research pans out.

This is very different from some countries where you're essentially guaranteed
one after 2-4 years.

~~~
RK
In the US (and other places I assume), the endpoint of your PhD is determined
by two things: successful completion of your research and your advisor's
approval. (You could argue that your advisor's approval is the only thing).
That means that the time to completion is an unknown.

This is a such a different feeling to what students I have met from the the
UK/Europe experience, that it's almost like a different degree. They typically
have 3 years to complete their projects, but I have no idea what "completion"
means in that context.

The other one is funding, in that American PhD students could potentially be
funded indefinitely, but that's a different issue...

~~~
arethuza
Certainly in the UK (based on my experience in the 90s) completion of a PhD
meant getting a thesis written up, getting it approved by your supervisor and
then sitting an an oral examination with your supervisor, an internal academic
from the same department and an external examiner who is an expert in that
field. The usual rule of thumb was that you probably should have published 3
decent papers in that time.

The "3 years" came from the length of time the standard PhD student was funded
for - there was no guarantee that you would finish within the three years.
Quite a lot of people did PhDs while working as Research Associates - where
you were typically on a 3 year fixed contract, paid a decent salary but your
focus then was the research project paying your wages - not strictly your own
research. Most people I knew doing it this way took between 4 or 5 years -
some as long as 7 or 8 years.

------
billswift
Found it from a post on Overcoming Bias
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/how-hopeless-a-
phd.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/how-hopeless-a-phd.html)
Robin's last line is: "Overall, my estimate of the chances of success went up
after reading the article."

------
zmmmmm
I'm interested in doing a PhD and I'm not concerned if it doesn't increase my
salary - I'm totally happy if it just opens some doors to work in interesting
fields.

However - I am quite concerned that it may _decrease_ my salary or even make
me border line unemployable. Right now I have a good number of years
experience in software development under my belt. I can search for jobs on any
given day and find hundreds or even thousands of opportunities that I would be
able to make a credible application for. I'm quite concerned that once I have
a PhD many of these people would look at my PhD and turn me down as
overqualified.

I'm curious if anyone with strong software skills has any experience in what
the effect of a PhD is on employability?

~~~
robinhouston
I did a PhD after working in the web/software world for a few years. I'm now
back in software, and the PhD doesn't seem to have done my employability any
long-term damage. But of course there’s an opportunity cost.

------
kyleniemeyer
A lot of the issues raised in this article (low or zero stipend, poor job
prospects after graduation) are more appropriate if you're talking only about
the social or life sciences.

In science and engineering (engineering in particular), PhD students rarely
have to pay their own way, with stipends around $25000 or even up to around
$30000 with a fellowship. The job prospects are certainly a lot better as
well- since research funding in the US is very much focused on science and
engineering.

------
giardini
Philip Greenspun has addressed this to some extent, although focusing on
graduate study and advanced degrees in science and engineering:
<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

------
tluyben2
It's the economist (which I like and often listen to and read), however doing
a PhD, imho, is not about money. More extreme; if you are doing a PhD for the
money, you are not really worthy. It's about getting an academic career, which
means research, which means going hardcore deep into the things you value and
are passionate about. It's about shaping your head to be a scientist, not a
millionaire. If you do the work to become get a PhD, you know that you'll be
in it for a long time and you do not belong to the 'normal workforce' or to
the 'become rich people'. PhDs hardly ever become rich, nor do they
particularly want to (at least not the ones I have met). In my experience a
PhD doesn't make you more qualified for software related jobs than a MsC,
probably less so actually. It's a different mindset; you are a scientist or
you want a good, commercial job. You can have both, but don't whine if the
effort of the study didn't pay off; it was not meant for that.

------
MoreMoschops
A phD; you put in time, humanity gets out knowledge. Presumably it's only
waste of time if the knowledge humanity gets out wasn't worth the time put in.
This article seems to think that a phD is for turning time into money.

------
m3mb3r
Depends on how you define waste. One might want a PhD because of the learning
involved. Not everyone cares about money.

Oh wait, but, it's The Economist.

------
wazoox
Hum, isn't a PhD about, you know, _learning_ something? The economist eyeglass
always wants to filter out everything that isn't money.

------
TheBoff
I intend to do a PhD for the intrinsic value of the research and learning
itself, not just to earn. There is more to life than money.

------
jaxtapose
Who does a PhD to get a job as an Academic? I did a PhD to have the
opportunity to learn something that nobody else did.

