Another way to state the conservation of professors: in the lifetime of a tenured professor, of all the grad students (s)he suppervised, the number that will succeed in getting a tenured position is (on average) equal to 1.
And yet governments provide incentives to train ever more PhDs as though that will somehow turn into a knowledge economy rather than just producing a plethora of unemployed researchers. I would be much happier to cut funding for and limit the number of graduate students in exchange for more permanent research positions.
Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.
Some PhDs are useful outside of academia. Many are not. It really depends on what you work on, your personality, and what other skills you have. I have spent much of my career in academia adjacent roles, and most of the time, there is far too great of emphasis on the PhD and not enough on the skills to do the job that needs doing. I think our researchers would benefit greatly from better support staff in the form of engineers, programmers, and so on rather than letting those tasks fall to postdocs or even grad students. I suspect your "research division of a big corporation" had those other roles supporting you and your colleagues. Academia generally does not.
I often see PhDs filling roles that really do not require a PhD. Does that mean that the PhD was a waste? No, not necessarily, but was it the best allocation of resources?
Where I work I've had to hire people who can write well about complex computer science topics. The nice thing about PhDs is that they typically know how to write well. Most software engineers are terrible writers. In general, most engineers are terrible writers.
When I look at a resume and I see that someone has a PhD and has published a few papers I am much more comfortable hiring them. They almost definitely know how to approach a large writing project and break it up into smaller pieces. They've had training in how to work on large writing projects and they have atleast 1 experience of doing so and finishing it. Of course I've encountered PhDs that are terrible writers, but they're an anomaly.
I doubt this transfers well into other fields or positions where writing matters less. Most programming positions don't require strong writing skills, for example. All other things being equal, when I am hiring I prefer PhDs over non-PhDs, because in my experience they're better writers.
That’s horribly inefficient economically. Sure, some jobs benefit from PHD adjacent skills and companies can employ such people cheaply, but the time and cost to train a PHD is extreme.
The other half of this is many people put PHD’s at the bottom of the pile as a sign of poor judgement, or just anti intellectual bias. Which plays into why employing PHD’s is so affordable.
Agreed. If we had a European style system where a master's + PhD could be done in 4 years versus the insanely long duration of American PhDs, the whole system would be better off. Of course, faculty have no incentive to graduate their students quickly (they are trying to amortize the year or so of ramp up time). It really has to be up to the funding agencies to refuse to fund any students beyond year 4 unless there are extenuating circumstances.
It is a quite sad situation when the skill required to write a smallest publishable unit for the publication mill compares favorably to other writing skills. Wasting the time of the competition in the publishing rat race is actually incentivized now...
That's a good point, but again this only applies to some types of PhDs. Maybe a computer science PhD would be useful to you in a position like this. But a literary criticism PhD would not.
The con is that this can create a form of credentialism. As the number of PhDs rises, some roles which previously required bachelors move to PhD - creating artificial barriers to forward advancement.
Would these positions have existed as experienced Bachelor's positions before? would companies have directly trained industrial researchers?
Exactly. And let's not forget that the "training" is actually new scholarship, not just learning an existing skill, so even if the PhD doesn't do anything after earning their degree, human knowledge has expanded ever so slightly thanks to their years of effort.
> Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.
Why do they have so many more PhDs now? Because PhDs are a now a dime a dozen, not because a PhD itself is valuable. The opportunity cost of a PhD is four years of lost income during prime employment age, plus extra student loan debt.
Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime. If you don't come out on top, it's a waste, unless maybe these years you spent doing your PhD were the best years of your life (probably not).
Because these jobs are researcher jobs, and research is a distinct skill-set than what is learned in the typical undergrad and masters program. Could we train researchers in another, more efficient way? Maybe, but PhD program are the current means of training specialized researchers.
> plus extra student loan debt
For researcher jobs, this will almost never be true. The vast majority of STEM PhD students are fully-funded and given a stipend (although usually small). The dynamics of course change if the student has to support other dependents.
> Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime
For fields like Computer Science, there are many viable and high-salaried career for non-PhDs, so a PhD will likely lose lifetime money. For other fields like biomedical research, then they will probably profit over a full career. But really, people don't do PhDs for the money, people like their fields, they like the university environment, they like being around other researchers, or they like the independence—all of these things can be valuable beyond lifetime salary.
In engineering possibly not. Often tuition is paid for plus a stipend.
>If you don't come out on top, it's a waste,
I don't know. I didn't get a PhD but I did spend a couple of years getting a Masters. I didn't really use what I specifically researched but, who knows, may have helped me get a couple jobs and I enjoyed the time well enough. Of course, engineering salaries tended to be a lot lower then relative to what many CS people today consider normal so I don't think losing out on a couple years salary was a big deal.
Well, in sympathy with those governments, you have to ask what else can they possibly do?
The response I heard directly from the head of PPARC (defunct UK research body) 10 years ago was, "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" This was in response to the question, why aren't we funding more permanent positions in proportion to the number of students we're training.
It's not an easy situation to solve. You end up having to trade off permanent positions against students. But in some countries, including a lot of EU countries, training students is a hidden way to prevent unemployment. And would you say that denying willing people a useful education just for less competition for faculty jobs is the ideal outcome? What would the best choice be? Not clear.
When a pie isn't increasing, but the number of people is, things get uncomfortable.
"so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?"
Instead of training and producing large numbers of capable but underemployed researchers, I would definitely spend more on permanently employed researchers. I am certainly not advocating one student per permanent position: some of those excess PhDs will go into important roles in industry, but most will not:
I'm ok with grad students not having a shot at an academic position, and not getting paid much, since it's an internship really. The problem is that postdocs also don't get paid much (last I checked the mandated maximum salary for postdocs in biosciences was ~45k/year), and they're being strung along with the hope of professorship. Even worse, a lot of professors will take as few grad students as they can get away with, and mostly use postdocs, since they're only about 50% more expensive, but they're much more productive from a research standpoint. Also, a lot of professors will string grad students along for a while towards the end, since that's when they're the most productive, but they're still cheap.
We need to have fewer postdocs, and pay them more. We also need to make grad school follow a more regimented timeline, with raises over time, to protect the students' interests.
There's a reason miserable grad students are such a meme, it's a terrible system.
Is it easier to start a research lab when you are competing for a small pool of researchers with a bunch of already established labs, or when there are 3 underemployed PhDs at every coffee shop in town?
If a world war lasts 4 years, and a typical PhD takes 5 years, which country can more easily spin up research: the one with an excess number of PhDs at the start, or the one which waits for the outbreak of war to fund more PhDs who will graduate 1 year after the war is done?
Yes, some resources are spent on training a PhD who doesn't use it, but there is also a cost to not having enough PhDs available when you need them. If the latter is greater than the former, excess PhDs are optimal.
Not sure how useful the PhD who's been serving coffee for 10 years will be to the next Manhattan project.
Perhaps we should initiate some moonshot projects or something to keep the skills sharp. Low pay but you get to do (perhaps self-directed) work on the coolest problems. You would need an army just to process the applications I believe.
If you only produce just enough PhDs, then when you start the next Manhattan project you need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and grab someone who's been out of the field for 10 years, or wait several years for the rate of PhDs being completed to increase.
If you produce a substantial excess, on the other hand, you can instantly scale up to meet increased demand. It's all about that pipeline.
But yes, moonshot projects can also be utilized so that past PhDs can be kept sharp. Indeed, a huge number of science programs currently do exactly that - society may see little direct benefit to discovering methane in the space around Uranus, but the people optimizing those radio telescopes are pretty nice to have around if you think you'll ever need people to optimize radar systems.
There's a fair bit of truth to this, but it does leave out the fairly substantial number of faculty who teach in undergraduate or Masters-level institutions. I teach physics at a small liberal arts college so I never train grad students myself, but I definitely needed a Ph.D. to get this position.
That said, even if there were just as many of us as there are faculty at Ph.D. institutions, that would only raise your number who get tenured positions to 2.
This is not true because it is a multi-agent problem. There is not just one professor, but there is a competitive pool of professors working in different areas. In some highly productive (or otherwise "hot") areas, some profs place every student in faculty positions. In some areas, this number is almost zero. So it is a competitive field.
The problem of pyramid-scheme, etc. occurs when people don't realize this and enter academia with an expectation of entering the tenure track. I find biomedical academia to be the principal culprit in this academic Ponzi scheme. They require high skilled labor, which they procure in the form of underpaid grad students and permanent post docs. Only a small minority of biomedical faculty care about their students entering the tenure track.
The other set of fields that are bad for post-PhD careers is liberal arts. Mainly because colleges started lots of liberal arts departments to boost enrollment and inflate grades. So the demand is artificial.
On the other extreme is b-school and econ PhDs who almost all enter academia.
Other hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) fall in the middle: it is a struggle, but people end up landing well after PhD. Physics folks get finance, developer, etc. jobs. Chemistry folks are usually absorbed into pharma/chem companies.
Math and engineering academia works pretty well too: almost all engineering PhDs get good R&D/developer jobs that are reasonably high status and pay well. I don't know any super-star PhD in engineering who didn't get a reasonable academic position.
The defense industry is another big employer of math, engineering, and sciences PhDs.
Good point. Assuming a 30 year career, the US population grew from 250MM in 1990 to 330MM today. So it could average as high as 1.3, maybe rounded up to 1.5 considering an increase in average educational achievement.
