I have heard this many times, especially when I was going to graduate school. However is this true if you control for SAT scores? I bet it is not.
First congratulations.
I am curious what you think would be a good middle path?
I imagine this forum is filled with people who loved to get paid to do research on computer games. Being able to pick your own subject of research would even better. I know of one guyEd Castronovathat actually has been doing this for a number of years. In order to get to the point where society would pay him to study the economics of MMOs, he had to complete a PHd in Economics.
I am sure in his case the credential was probably much more important, than any stuff he actually learned in school. I also imagine that this forum has people that know as much or more than Ed on the subject. However lacking a PHd and professorship, they are forced to do grunt work, or for those with a lot of talent they are able research on subjects that the industry found profitable. For those without a strong programming background, they make living (and not a high paid one) by writing about computer games. Finally, if we can’t program or write we have to pay money to study computer games and hang around forums like these :).
No doubt that getting a PHd requires a lot of sacrifice, and for most people you probably come out economically behind. However, it potentially gives you a tremendous opportunity to work on things that you are interested and passionate about. I’ve been retired for a number of years but I would, trade retirement for being a tenured professor in a nanosecond. It is really a sweet “job”.
I don’t know, but that’s getting at the much more difficult question of the causal effect of education on earnings. The raw averages demonstrate the simpler point that it isn’t like PhDs typically have poor labor market outcomes.
In order to get to the point where society would pay him to study the economics of MMOs, he had to complete a PHd in Economics.
I am sure in his case the credential was probably much more important, than any stuff he actually learned in school. I also imagine that this forum has people that know as much or more than Ed on the subject.
The professor in question earned a PhD (not “PHd”) in 1991, long before MMOs existed. Fairly recently he started doing research using data from virtual worlds, but the methods he uses are drawn from conventional econometrics. Econometrics is stuff that graduate students in economics learn—no one could do this research without a strong background in a branch of mathematical statistics, nor could anyone just intuit the results. The questions he asks really do require fairly advanced analysis.
A PhD is a research degree: you learn how to do research. Professors are primarily researchers. For research positions, a PhD is certainly not just a credential you get while learning irrelevant stuff. The first two or three years of a PhD are courework bringing you to the cutting edge of your field, and the remainder you’re actually doing research.
We have a new “Director Of Web Technology” at work. He has a physics degree. He’s useless at the Director job. Therefore, I believe a physics degree is useless.
It would help if you would stop being so wrong so often.
Sure, but that’s not really an interesting point since people in PhD programs are, generally, pretty bright people and, generally, they would have pretty solid labor market outcomes.
Further, I wonder if you take out all of the people who got into a tenure track position (IMO, this is the brass ring) and then look at the rest and controlled for SAT scores (or whatever is your metric of choice) if they would have done better had they not gotten the PhDs? Hmm … upon further consideration this is probably not fair since I am eliminating the brass ring from one side and not the other. I suppose one could strip out the top N% on both sides.
But then he wouldn’t be arguing with you would he?
I guess we just gotta tell people, stop staring at the stars, we need nurses to wipe old peoples behinds.
The point of the article is that the idea that you get a PhD and this enables you to “work on what you want” simply isn’t true, or anywhere close to true, in a system which produces far more PhDs than has waiting grants/available faculty jobs. Its great if you can become a tenured professor, but statistically speaking, most PhDs these days can’t. There’s no particular institutionalized setting that absorbs the excess “unlucky”. So you’re left with, at best, getting into an industry job. But at that point, are you really better off having gone for a PhD? Perhaps, if you can use that to leverage yourself into the research you want to do in industry, but that’s a whole lot more hit or miss.
In academia, to research your desired area you have to convince a grant review committee that you are qualified (generally moreso than most others) and have an interesting idea. No small order, but it at least tends to pass good ideas through. In industry, it doesn’t matter how good my idea is; if it has nothing to do with my employer’s economic interests it’s not happening. There are effectively no real pure research labs left in industry (PARC perhaps?). Lucent/Bell and IBM Research are things of the past.
So the end result is you can pursue a PhD and hope you get lucky enoughto land a faculty job that makes it worthwhile, but the numbers say you won’t, or you can get a PhD and go to industry and hope you have more latitude than you would as a senior employee and that this will make up the economic difference, or you can just get a job straight out of your undergrad degree and build up a career that way, for similar or better economical benefits and questionably lesser opportunity within the industry.
Phew. Glad I’m getting an English degree!
Well, no, I have been wrong before, and will be again. Just not on anything that ckessel’s ever attempted to argue about. At least, not yet.
All this tells me is that we need to loosen up the H1B visas even more, because, no matter how many highly educated Americans we have out of work or how low the pay scale slides for highly educated positions, we can always make it worse for those of us not at the absolute top. Flat earth and all that.
Not a PhD, but I’ve worked at both start ups and in academia as a geneticist/computational biologist. I did a round trip from a very academic lab @MIT to a pure start up (I was brought in with some other people from the lab), then moved to a research hospital, then back to MIT. Seems like academia around here (MIT/Harvard) is more than willing to hold hands with industry to get some extra money out of the deal. We generally provide infrastructure for data generation, and expert level analysis, and in return industry gets some lead time (2 months) on data that then goes public. Our partners get first pick of the drug-target litter, we get extra funding and publications.
Here’s the flaw in the entire article: it presumes that people getting a Ph.D. in science are doing it because they want to get an academic job. Very, very few of the people in my graduate program considered a professorship as their #1 choice. The majority didn’t “settle” for a job in industry - they wanted it. To portray Ph.D.s taking a job in industry as having failed and settling is just purely false and makes me doubt the credentials of the person writing the article.
As far as “working on anything you want” - man, you want politics, go into academia. Kissinger said the politics in universities are so nasty precisely because they are over such trivial matters, and my experience is that this is true. Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to being a prof. But there are a lot of downsides. Most professors I work with work on the projects they work on because that’s where they can get funding, not because it is their life’s interest. And I run quite a few programs in which profs are doing R&D for us (a company in industry) and turn down more proposals from profs, by far, than I accept.
The idea that the majority of Ph.D.s who go into academia with, say, a Ph.D. in Chemistry and just work on whatever they like is very flawed. As is the premise that most people getting their Ph.D.s in the sciences, such as Chemistry, Material Science, etc., with the goal of becoming a professor and only take a job in industry as a alternative or as a failure (I was just at the U of Michigan and the U. of Minnesota talking to grad students - I only ran into 3 out of about 100 who were looking to become profs.)
I fully admit this could just be my myopia, since no one here even acknowledges industry exists. Also, the discipline you work on will determine how fluid the barriers are. Chemistry PhDs probably all go to pharma to turn out drug products, while Cell Bio PhDs may have more difficulty transitioning. How translational your work is also probably matters a lot.
This is all true, but my point is that there’s at least still some latitude there. There’s a lot of “We’ll underpromise and deliver what they absolutely require, but in the meantime we’ll do this sideproject that’s stuff we’re interested in and justify it as being vaguely tangentially related.”
You’re leaving out the biggest benefit of an industry job, though: Not having to fucking write. God, I love science but I -hate- writing. (Which is just great since I’m a computational/theoretical type of person, so those industry jobs are exceedingly rare. :/ )
The idea that the majority of Ph.D.s who go into academia with, say, a Ph.D. in Chemistry and just work on whatever they like is very flawed. As is the premise that most people getting their Ph.D.s in the sciences, such as Chemistry, Material Science, etc., with the goal of becoming a professor and only take a job in industry as a alternative or as a failure (I was just at the U of Michigan and the U. of Minnesota talking to grad students - I only ran into 3 out of about 100 who were looking to become profs.)
My viewpoint is probably skewed because there’s not much of an industry inpath for me (or at least if there is, I sure as hell haven’t been able to find them). But over on the theory/computational (non-bio… comp bio right now is teh hot shit!) side of stuff, the academia level life is all the same, but the industry side of things has not been as you’ve described. I would guess that the article viewpoint is more from a pure science standpoint whereas what you’ve previously described sounds to me like “applied science” even though you’ve called it “fundamental research”. I’d further guess that what you consider “more applied” is basically what I would consider non-scientific grunt work.
(That’s not to be a denigration, btw; we all have our particular biases and what one person considers interesting work someone else doesn’t. I can’t really get excited about the thought of hands on work, while other people would be bored silly sitting behind a computer all day. Science interlocks like that, it’s cool.)
Ah ha ha ha… My BS is in BioEngineering. Although it was a great major, and I learned a lot, it’s not the most easily marketed Engineering degree. (I have two MS eng degrees on top of it).
If you go for a Biomedical type of engineering degree, you have to be able to really sell yourself and your talents. Many recruiters don’t really understand the course work and how it can apply to industry. You need to get creative.
In the US, we woefully under-educate people in Science and Technology. We would be better off if we increased science and engineering literacy by at least 10x. That said, not every one with a science and/or engineering degree is going to be able to do design / development work. However, having your sales, marketing, finance, law, political etc. people understand how things work leads towards less scientific misunderstanding of how our world works.
What industry are you in, where you don’t have to write? That’s just crazy talk. Granted, we don’t have to write dissertations, but myself and my employees have to write specs, reports, white papers etc. We need to communicate to those who come after us (or who work with us) what we were thinking at the time. Luckily for me, our admin. is a great writer, editor and grammarian, and she loves reviewing our work. I don’t expect quality writing out of engineers, but I do expect them to write down what they are doing.
Most people pursuing PhDs do intend to get academic jobs. It is at the same time true that that proportion is lowest in your particular field, but even there it’s over one-third, not a vanishingly small fraction. In my own anecdotal experience, non-faculty positions were definitely consolation prizes, and even colleagues who now work on Wall Street and make multiples of my salary entered grad school intending to be profs. Putting anecdotes aside, the statistical evidence suggests most grad students do intend to be profs, some data are presented in this report. (“Unmistakably, the vast majority of students enter a doctoral program with a faculty career in mind… Although students also reported interest in research-related jobs, and reported increased interest in such positions, this interest is clearly secondary to faculty careers.”)
I don’t agree with you that academics don’t get to choose what they work on. Sure, you are constrained to do work which will be publishable (and hence can attract funding), but you have wide leeway even under that constraint. Nor do I agree with you that office politics are worse in academia than in the private sector—tenure and non-hierarchical organizational structure tend to reduce such conflict. As someone, I forget who, recently put it on this forum—
My ideal outcome of this would actually be a real change. I’d LOVE to be a professor, and there’s actually a prof job opening at the place I got my Ph.D. Don’t know if it’s my age, or what, but I’m weary of the dog eat dog world of industrial product development… And associate prof job is something that typically goes to a young person, with the corresponding pay, but I’m pretty convinced that if I managed to figure out how to live on a lot less, my quality of life would be MUCH better if I was in a professor role.
Such benefits are why we see the features of the academic job market highlighted in the article—faculty positions, and a small army of post-docs and other young researchers vying for those positions. If an academic job weren’t a prize, we wouldn’t see people paying large opportunity costs in the hopes of winning the lottery.
However, the inference the author makes from this observation that there are too many graduate students in science is mistaken. The number of science grad students we “need” is an ill-defined concept, and that there are more grad students who want faculty positions than there are faculty openings is not evidence that there are too many grad students.
Someone else addressed the writing part: all of my folks are required to write research reports, presentations, and many write papers to be published in journals - many of those journals the same ones that the profs write for.
The range of R&D varies by company and by company philosophy, to be sure. But, while the technicians do what might be called “grunt work” (but even with them, I work on career development in which they grow to own full fledged scientific projects,) almost all of my chemists (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) do real research. For example, fundamental structure property relationships in complex catalysts, physics of fracture mechanics and the contribution of certain molecular motions, etc. That’s applied for us, in that it will provide the tools we need for our product lines. But it’s hardly grunt work. I did some work with Flory (he was at another school, but I had developed a chemistry in my grad work that was enabling for some work he was doing) when I was in grad school that was pure fundamental (Flory won the Nobel, for those who don’t keep up with such things) but I’ve done work in industry that was every bit as fundamental and in many cases more interesting.
Not to say there isn’t some drudge work in some labs in industry, but as you say, some people without deep science backgrounds find some of that work fascinating.
As for the stats on most people entering to get their Ph.D.s with the intent of being profs, I guess my personal experience is just very different. Almost all the folks I knew who went in to get their Ph.D. had no desire to work in academia, and most kids I talk to at a number of Chemistry, Polymer Science, and Material Science grad schools have no intent to go into academia. Perhaps it’s just the fields I’m in.