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With ever-lengthening PhDs, it's getting hard to see many grad programs as not exploitative.



There's a reason that we've all been screeching "Grad workers are workers!" as a slogan.


Yeah, nowhere else can get away with paying people 20 hrs/week and making them work 50.


50? You must be joking. It's 80+ these days at R1s.


This is the first time I've heard of this. Do you have any data to support this claim? None of the places I know about have lengthening PhDs, in fact the opposite -- they are decreasing PhD lengths from 6+ to 5-6 being the norm, because that's a key factor in how applicants choose PhD programs so they need to do this to remain competitive.


5-6 years is far far too long. It doesn’t take that long to learn to do research.


American PhDs applicants typically don’t have Masters degrees, so 5-6 years elapse between completing undergrad and finishing the PhD. This appears comparable to the 1-2 + 3-4 years for masters + PhD in Europe.

If you want to assert that this process is universally too long, what makes you think that?

Not to get too personal, but I notice that you got your PhD 8 years after your Masters, albeit in 4 years after starting. Are you sure the intervening extra 4 years didn’t help?


In the UK you generally either do a masters or a PhD, but not both. So you’d usually do three years bachelors, three or four years PhD, then done.

> If you want to assert that this process is universally too long, what makes you think that?

If the goal of a PhD is to teach someone to research, introduce them to the community, get them to make their own unique contribution, and have it tested by publishing something good, ready to start doing unsupervised research full time in academia or industry, then they've usually done that by three or so years. What are they doing after that point?

> Are you sure the intervening extra 4 years didn’t help?

You mean because I was more grown up? Maybe, but I also had a wife and house and later a family to worry about - most students can just focus on their research.


> If the goal...

I disagree here. This is not always the goal of every research student. Some set the bar at solving a problem, and not going through a fixed number of mechanical steps of learning how to do research.

I think otherwise too, your statement misses a lot of nuances. Publishing "something good" can take drastically different levels of effort based on where you want to publish, what area and problem you are working on, who you are collaborating with, whether your problem is interdisciplinary, empirical or theoretical etc

You could say "schools should ensure PhDs finish in fixed x number of years" (with the understanding that it will change research outcomes) but to say that a PhD program naturally fits into x yr long time span is wrong IMHO.


> usually done that by three or so years. What are they doing after that point?

This seems like an incredibly optimistic timeline, especially outside of computer science. In some fields, you might finally be able to start collecting data after a year or two of experimental design/setup/optimization, even if things go perfectly. Of course, they often don't: trained animals die, instruments fail, and so on.

On top of that, it depends on the "scope" of the PhD. Some of the short PhDs (and postdocs) seem to involve parachuting someone into a functioning research program and having them run a slightly different version of the last study. This certainly gets you /some/ research training, but maybe not enough to actually run a group lab on your own. In fact, I think some of the most useful parts of my (much longer) PhD and postdoc were seeing many things go wrong and then learning when/how/if to fix or salvage them. This necessarily takes time though...


Germany, France, the US etc. all disagree with you.




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