Here is some perspective from a current PhD student. Others please also share your experiences:
I do think that the current PhD system is broken. As pointed out very correctly in a comment above: "I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success."
However, all is not lost. I have made a conscious effort in my PhD to not end up super specializing. I have tried to take up a problem that requires me to learn about multiple different computer science areas (compilers, architecture, machine learning and graphics currently). This has made my PhD a lot harder as I have to spend considerable amounts of time reading while others are publishing papers and getting better scholarships, I do think this is better for me in the long term.
Overall, while I no longer recommend anyone else to do a PhD, on the flip side if you work hard enough you might still gain value out of a PhD. Whether that value is enough is debatable, and requires considerable effort, but it is also possible to not super-specialize by picking your research topic wisely.
I do agree with the article in general and do think that more cross disciplinary stuff needs to happen. The academic system is currently largely unsympathetic towards trying to cover multiple sub-areas even within computer science with people in other sub-areas often being unwelcoming. Funding agencies are also unhappy with the much larger "startup time" spent in cross-disciplinary projects during which you spend time reading and not publishing.
You aren't really at the center of the problem though, because a PhD in computers can still get a non-academic job as long as they have been even a bit careful not to overspecialize themselves, as you mention. It isn't automatic, but you're not in a hopeless situation, either.
In sciences, the real problem is things like the biology PhD whose training ends up being "working in this lab on this piece of equipment with this species for these tasks", or so I have heard from the other articles on this topic. And then there's the humanities, where a PhD is all but useless for anything that isn't teaching. There's varying levels of truth for this with other disciplines as well.
> In sciences, the real problem is things like the biology PhD whose training ends up being "working in this lab on this piece of equipment with this species for these tasks", or so I have heard from the other articles on this topic.
I'm not sure how much this is a widespread problem, to be honest. In preparing for my qualifying exam next month, and going to other peoples qualifying exam practice talks, there is a huge focus on making sure that people are asking relevant, interesting questions, and thinking through the analysis and interpretation of (as yet) hypothetical data. Those are skills that are broadly applicable, not just in biology specifically or science as a whole. People from my own lab have gone on, not just to academic jobs, but also science publishing and various startups (more and less biology related).
As pointed out very correctly in a comment above: "I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success."
I don't think this is that big a problem. Publications are what science is made of. If you do research and don't publish it so that other people know about it, you're just engaging in a colossal waste of time.
I agree that disseminating your results is important. However, in computer science at least, "publication" in academic community is applied very narrowly. I think incentive needs to be given for "dissemination of useful knowledge and artifacts" rather than only "publications".
You open-sourced your source code? Sorry, source code is not a publication. You improved your source code so that it is less buggy and acutally usable by industry? Sorry not a publication. You want to travel to PyCon to actually talk about your work to a wider audience? Sorry no travel funding available for such "non-academic" conferences. You want to cite an open-source work that did innovative work but not in academic setting? Sorry that is not a good enough citation ("who is this _why anyway?"), please include more citations of "academic" papers.
Funding incentive is only there for publishing your results but less incentive is there for building of useful working systems.
I would love to see the day where having a successful library on github being used by other researchers would be valued as much as publishing a paper or two.
As a counterpoint, I’ve heard of individuals building entire careers by making obvious and incremental improvements to current methods; each increment is at least one paper and they add up fast. Then the methods and all its improvements are discarded once a more ambitious (and therefore risky) line of research yields entirely new methods with orders of magnitude improvement over the old ones.
Results based funding (and tenure granting) promotes these more conservative and obvious projects. Proposals for more risky, and therefore potentially more rewarding projects aren’t submitted as no one wants to gamble with their own career.
Yes, but the metric should be quality, not quantity. Both do matter to the current system, but there is a perception that it is quantity that has taken precedence.
The lasting record of science is made of publications. The process of science is made of people. If our current system is making scientists who are too specialized to do the science we will need in the future, we're doing it wrong.
The complaint is that there are too many PhDs: grad students invest many years at low salary, and most (in all fields) are not able to find permanent employment which uses their specialized training.
Unfortunately, there is little push for change from anyone but the students: in the existing system, grad students and postdocs provide research and teaching at lower cost than alternatives which are more humane to students and less wasteful of human capital.
Prospective students need realistic information when they are choosing to enroll, but people choose to follow their passions at long odds in many fields (entrepreneurship, Hollywood, pro sports...). The mental model many have of PhD programs is apprenticeship; a more appropriate model might be an extended audition.
This is quite different in CS programs though. Where (a) there are few post-docs. (b) grad school is a great place to connect with bright hard working CS students. It's a place where a lot of great ideas and companies come from.
In some ways its a "low risk" incubator. You get paid to attend, and a stipend, in most cases. A lot of research ends up being the basis for a startup company. And if it doesn't you get a PhD, which is still very marketable.
The downside of doing a PhD in CS, especially at a top 20 program, is really just the possibility that you may have hit it big in the 4-6 years you were getting your PhD. But of course you have to factor in the fact that being in grad schools opens new doors to hitting it big.
Plus, at least for me, the college life is just fun, and something somewhat hard to replicate a few years out of college.
True, the transition into industry or a startup spinoff is much more direct in CS, making it a lower-risk enterprise.
Even so, Matt Might (who is a CS prof) writes, 'There are few good reasons to get a Ph.D. "Because you want to become a professor" might be the only good one.' [1]
The system is so broken that I don't even know how to begin thinking about fixing it.
1) A PhD prepares you for academia. However, due to the market being flooded with PhD's, industry won't accept you for a research position without one, even if you don't need it. In a perfect world, a Master's should suffice if it gave you any lab experience at all (at least in science). If industry does accept you despite not having a PhD, your salary will be lower, your career will be capped, and you won't move as quickly through the ranks.
2) The incentives are in all the wrong places. Schools want funding. They get funding by writing grants, which requires research. They want to do the research as cheaply as possible so as to maximize how far each dollar goes. So, they have a very strong incentive to keep grad students in limbo as long as possible, delaying graduation. Since grad students often have major loans left over from undergrad, and the additional degree keeps them from having to make payments, they'd rather be stuck in grad limbo for years than be stuck without a job. This is especially true since student loans (both public and private) in the U.S. are inescapable (you cannot bankrupt your way out of a student loan).
3) Even afterwards, really badly paid postdoc positions keep you in academia for 3-4 more years before you can do anything with your education. It's almost indentured servitude with the "promise" of a better future (by the time you're 35). Unlike MD's who actually have a good salary in sight after they graduate, PhD's (after several postdocs) can only hope to make up to $120-130k after all is said and done (unless they climb corporate ranks in industry).
4) Research is fraught with politics. Instead of trying to actually contribute to the human knowledge pool, you compete with other labs for funding, for research (to be the first one that discovers something), and for spots in the best journals. When you discover a neat paper, it's a game of "what can I do bouncing off of this research that will get me published in an awesome journal" instead of "let's collaborate with this lab, leveraging our strengths to contribute to human progress". Quite often, several labs are running the same experiments just because they want to be the first to make a critical breakthrough. Competition can be great, but it can also result in wasted effort and bitterness at life.
However, due to the market being flooded with PhD's, industry won't accept you for a research position without one, even if you don't need it. In a perfect world, a Master's should suffice if it gave you any lab experience at all (at least in science).
For a research position in industry, your job is to create new knowledge, and that's really hard to do. It's partly a matter of knowing what's already known, partly a matter of understanding how to do research, and partly a natural skill of just being "a good scientist" -- i.e. someone who can pick the right hypotheses, make the right approximations, and turn experiments into understanding. These are all hard skills, and I wouldn't be especially confident in someone having developed 'em in only a Master's.
The incentives are in all the wrong places. Schools want funding. They get funding by writing grants, which requires research. They want to do the research as cheaply as possible so as to maximize how far each dollar goes. So, they have a very strong incentive to keep grad students in limbo as long as possible, delaying graduation.
This much is true, especially in the US. In Australia, where I did my PhD, the funding agencies solved this problem by declaring that all PhD students should finish within four years, and that every semester after that results in certain funding penalties for the hosting university and department. (In case you think that this provides an incentive to grant undeserved PhDs don't worry, theses are marked by three examiners of whom only one can be at the student's university, and one of whom has to be in a different country).
Some parts of Europe are even stricter -- finish your PhD in three years or you're out the door. In fact my last department (in the US) lost a promising prospective PhD student to France after she realised she'd probably have her PhD three or four years earlier if she did it in Paris instead of California.
So actually, to anyone considering doing a PhD in the US I do heartily recommend checking out your options in other countries. Nobody wants to be a 30-year-old grad student.
> In fact my last department (in the US) lost a promising prospective PhD student to France after she realised she'd probably have her PhD three or four years earlier if she did it in Paris instead of California.
I'm really glad to hear that. Hopefully it will keep happening, and US universities will realize that they have to fix things if they want to keep the best candidates.
I guess my conclusion here is that just like most of the problems I see in the U.S. socio-econo-political system, the issue is rooted in money. The system is so biased toward allowing those with money to exploit those without, that it makes me want to go back to Canada.
I would take some of this with a grain of salt; I distrust a religion prof who says academic research needs to solve more practical problems. The main practical problem he's trying to solve is selling more copies of his book.
I think it would be quite practical if some religion researcher could prove once and for all whether there was one or more Gods, and if so what His and/or Their properties might be.
I'm surprised there isn't more research along these lines, since it would seem to solve an awful lot of practical problems here on Earth if we could get that particular question sorted out once and for all.
> I think it would be quite practical if some religion researcher could prove once and for all whether there was one or more Gods, and if so what His and/or Their properties might be.
Your petition reveals the extent of your knowledge of Religious Studies.
1) The system only trains PhDs for academic research.
2) A PhD does not guarantee an academic job.
PhD skills, particularly in technical fields, can be quite valuable in non-academic careers. To make that transition, though, students need to do the legwork themselves to gain relevant experience and contacts. (e.g., want to move into a programming gig? Do some open-source work and put it on github to build credibility.) Peter Fiske's "Put Your Science to Work" book is a good resource for navigating the culture shift.
1) The system only trains PhDs for academic research.
There's lots of research jobs in industry and government, and a PhD is excellent preparation for them. Who else but a PhD-trained researcher would know enough to be able to run the research programs at Intel or Genentech? Come to think of it, who but a PhD-trained researcher would know enough to be able to start a company like Intel or Genentech?
Many large corporations have decreased their investment in pure R&D. (Intel just closed its Berkeley research lab [1].) Yes, PhDs can make great contributions in industrial and gov't settings, but they are certainly not trained with those applications in mind. In most fields, professors are producing new academics.
Yes, PhDs can make great contributions in industrial and gov't settings, but they are certainly not trained with those applications in mind.
I'm not sure what it means to be "trained as a professor" rather than "trained as an industrial/government researcher", because I don't think I've ever been trained as either.
Certainly (and this is actually a problem) there isn't enough training of PhD students in key professorial skills such as "how to teach a class" or even "how to write a research grant" -- this is something which freshly-minted professors have to figure out on their own.
I do believe that word is spreading amongst possible students about the actual value of a graduate education. I feel that my PhD is valuable, but not execptionally so. I could be earning much more now had I just gone into the job market. However, it is very difficult to get funded as a researcher without a PhD. That's probably the most valuable component of my degree. It's a certificate in that sense.
That said, funding is decreasing and the number of people fighting for it is increasing, which makes it less valuable.
All this aside, a PhD is worth next to nothing in my eyes. I know brilliant, capable people without them, and dull incompetent people that have earned them.
> That said, funding is decreasing and the number of people fighting for it is increasing, which makes it less valuable.
How does that make sense? If the supply is decreasing and competition for it simultaneously increasing, how does that make it less valuable (even in the cynical view of the PhD as a commodity)?
> All this aside, a PhD is worth next to nothing in my eyes. I know brilliant, capable people without them, and dull incompetent people that have earned them.
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, unless the PhD in question scammed the system (it happens), it at least proves that they have the focus to go deep. It's not a double implication though, which is what people seem to forget and then go on hyperbolic rants.
>How does that make sense? If the supply is decreasing and competition for it simultaneously increasing, how does that make it less valuable (even in the cynical view of the PhD as a commodity)?
A degree is a commodity. The education behind it might be less so. I don't see it as cynical. The funding system requires a PhD, which confers a type of value on the degree. As you describe, yes, funding is currently very valuable, the degree has become less so.
>As I mentioned in my earlier comment, unless the PhD in question scammed the system (it happens), it at least proves that they have the focus to go deep. It's not a double implication though, which is what people seem to forget and then go on hyperbolic rants.
It doesn't necessarily require a scam. For example, sometimes the candidate of an advisor that is not very involved, but brings a lot of money and/or reputation, can slip through without proper scrutiny. Sometimes the committee is dysfunctional. There are many reasons why it happens.
I'm not certain education ever had financial value. Certainly the experience itself is valuable for personal growth, and should not be discounted for that reason, but there was never much reason to be there just for future job prospects alone.
Generally speaking, the qualities in someone that lead to success in business are the same qualities that leads one to succeed in their educational pursuits. It stands to reason that historically those who have higher education will do better in business. However, those qualities do not come from the education itself and any connection is merely correlation, not causation.
The whole system needs to shrink. Less undergrad students, less Phds, less research (most of it is useless crap anyway). Everything needs to be more efficient.
I say this as a Phd student who is "on leave" and instead doing a startup. I spent about a year as a Phd student and I thought the whole system is mind bogglingly inefficient, I felt like I'm wasting my time. This was in E.Europe, so not at a top US school --- I'm sure doing a Phd there is great.
Coupled with low pay and the lack of a payoff at the end just made it a very easy decision to do a startup instead: ultra efficient mode of operation, equally low pay, but at least there is the slim chance of a payoff.
I think the mentality that most of the research done is useless crap is a common mindset that can hurt the entire field of science if too many people believe it. There is already a feeling among the general populace that most research is useless, and that we should be investing more money elsewhere.
Research (as a whole) is a lot like mining. The human race can put in so many hours of work researching new areas, and the majority of it does not produce immediately fruitful work. Only a very small percentage of the work done results in "breakthrough" technologies that are the main reason money is invested into research anyway. But I don't understand why people think that if we put less time into it, we will cut out all of the garbage and only bring out the really good stuff. You have to wade through a lot of dirt to find a diamond, and cutting your crew down won't help that. It helps to look in the right places, but at the end of the day, you really don't know what will end up producing magnificent results.
I think that many researchers, given that they're very smart people, know the real value of their work. But even if they know it's not very good, they keep doing it, because, what else are they going to do? After all, it's a comfortable life.
In other words, not everybody is doing great research work, and they know it.
This is exactly the same problem faced by people in every domain. It's hard to make a dent in the universe regardless of your mode of attack. Activists often become jaded for exactly the same reasons that academics do. It's hard to do something that is manifestly meaningful, yet occasionally it does happen.
As somebody doing a PhD at a top university I can assure you that all the same anxieties exists here too. The only thing that is mildly comforting is that job prospects aren't as poor. The question of impact always remains.
Personally, I don't think anyone should do a PhD for getting some monetary benefit. People should do a PhD out of passion to expand the horizons of the subject they are interested in.In India, we have an opposite problem.There is a big need for qualified PhDs in Universities and Colleges.But there are not enough to go around especially in CS.So Universities have started churning out sub standard PhDs. Just try to search for any recent PhD thesis in any Univerisity(Other than IITs) and you will know what I am talking about.
Well, I was offered partial funding to any canadian phd program and I turned down the offer. I found that even in "applied science" (engineering) the problems of real-world relevance persist. We hyper-specialize and gain little broad general knowledge.
I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success. The entire publication system is also broken but that is beside the point. We need to have more industrial and governmental collaboration between local, national, and international actors and academics. Doctoral students, should then have the option to hyper-specialize (as is necessary in some fields) or be allowed to focus more on broad interdisciplinary studies focusing on problems faced by policy makers and other organizations.
> Doctoral students, should then have the option to hyper-specialize (as is necessary in some fields) or be allowed to focus more on broad interdisciplinary studies focusing on problems faced by policy makers and other organizations.
I believe you have some misgivings about what a PhD is.
The mandate of the PhD is to create new knowledge (independent research) in a particular, self-chosen area. That's difficult to do when you're focusing on breadth rather than depth. Once you've proven that you can go deep, by all means, get a faculty position and start your own (broad) research program, or get a job in industry and go broad. The PhD is about proving that you can go deep, which usually also involves some breadth.
I can't agree more. If you want to go broad, get a masters (or two or three!), but a PhD is if you want to push the boundaries of what we know. I can't help but be reminded of this visual explanation of a PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
While I wouldn’t say I agree with it, I’ve heard the argument that high specialization strongly selects for a student’s technical proficiency. As a PhD student myself, I’ve seen examples of this phenomena with highly intelligent individuals leaving our program as they couldn’t foster the drive to learn the requisite highly specialized technical skills. In contrast, I’ve also met individuals who developed their technical skills with rabid obsession, but who had trouble grasping the general significance of major publications in their field when the paper didn’t fall exactly within their own line of research. The second type of individual makes for a wonderful post doc or research scientist, but only until the techniques they’ve master are automated or funding for their specific lines of work goes dry.
Still, I’d say the best researchers/professors that I’ve met combined a deep understanding of the techniques in their own line of research with a broad understanding of their field and adjacent fields. Personally, I’d fear that removing technical proficiency as a requirement for a PhD would eliminate an essential bullshit detector that filters out certain people; people who do a great job speaking in broad generality but are incapable of formulating a path to accomplish these grand aims.
(As a quick anecdote, I once saw a research presentation from a grad student who made broad claims about his project’s direct role in curing many forms of cancer. As he progressed, we learned he was only exploring strategies to synthesize a potential ligand that some other researchers would consider using in imaging a specific cancer within rat models. To this end he showed very little progress, but continued to speak at great lengths about the imminent eradication of cancer as he concluded his talked.)
I do think that the current PhD system is broken. As pointed out very correctly in a comment above: "I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success."
However, all is not lost. I have made a conscious effort in my PhD to not end up super specializing. I have tried to take up a problem that requires me to learn about multiple different computer science areas (compilers, architecture, machine learning and graphics currently). This has made my PhD a lot harder as I have to spend considerable amounts of time reading while others are publishing papers and getting better scholarships, I do think this is better for me in the long term.
Overall, while I no longer recommend anyone else to do a PhD, on the flip side if you work hard enough you might still gain value out of a PhD. Whether that value is enough is debatable, and requires considerable effort, but it is also possible to not super-specialize by picking your research topic wisely.
I do agree with the article in general and do think that more cross disciplinary stuff needs to happen. The academic system is currently largely unsympathetic towards trying to cover multiple sub-areas even within computer science with people in other sub-areas often being unwelcoming. Funding agencies are also unhappy with the much larger "startup time" spent in cross-disciplinary projects during which you spend time reading and not publishing.