That graduate school is increasingly viewed as training for a professorial or teaching position is the greatest failing of the system. The noble pursuit of knowledge, which I think is the ideal of graduate study, has been supplanted by the stark economic realities, ie. you don't get paid to do research without producing anything. But research can sometimes yield nothing of significance for years.
So now academia has been reduced to an industry that produces mountains of useless, trifling research to justify the academics' own positions. The technocrats at the top of the system put unit prices on conference and journal papers, but they're not judged on quality, just the amount that can be eked out. To get more funding, you need to produce. I remember reading essentially the same paper 10 times from different conference proceedings, as the author managed to squeeze out one trivial variation on the same theme after another. Hell, my supervisor was a prime culprit (and I an accessory).
Any graduate student will tell you that the first (and most important) skill to learn is how to wade through all the bullshit papers and find things of value.
In some ways it's great that post-doctoral work (if you can get it) has become a middle class profession, spawning an industry that employs people, but the dilution of academic work has made research much more time consuming.
I never finished my PhD program, dumping my scholarship after a year for an engineering career in oil and gas. 7 years on, and I'm actually thinking of going back part-time. I like research... just at my own pace. Without being saddled with the constraints of money (which is every poor graduate student's dilemma), there's no pressure to produce. Now that's what I call the ideal research environment!
So now academia has been reduced to an industry that produces mountains of useless, trifling research to justify the academics' own positions. The technocrats at the top of the system put unit prices on conference and journal papers, but they're not judged on quality, just the amount that can be eked out. To get more funding, you need to produce. I remember reading essentially the same paper 10 times from different conference proceedings, as the author managed to squeeze out one trivial variation on the same theme after another. Hell, my supervisor was a prime culprit (and I an accessory).
Any graduate student will tell you that the first (and most important) skill to learn is how to wade through all the bullshit papers and find things of value.
In some ways it's great that post-doctoral work (if you can get it) has become a middle class profession, spawning an industry that employs people, but the dilution of academic work has made research much more time consuming.
I never finished my PhD program, dumping my scholarship after a year for an engineering career in oil and gas. 7 years on, and I'm actually thinking of going back part-time. I like research... just at my own pace. Without being saddled with the constraints of money (which is every poor graduate student's dilemma), there's no pressure to produce. Now that's what I call the ideal research environment!