> The “Holy Grail” of true education is exemplified by the professor-doctoral student interaction
I have only known a few people who were at all enamored by the PhD process. Even those who had an overall positive experience speak quite poorly of most of their student-teacher relationships, which seem to range from adversarial to abusive. The best professors are heavily overworked and seem to have little time left for close student interactions. But then all of the people I've worked with who had PhDs left academia, so perhaps it is a case of selection bias.
I had the total opposite experience - I loved my PhD. Getting a PhD is one of the last true apprenticeships. If you put a lot into it and are careful/lucky in your choice of professor it can be a unique opportunity to spend ~5 years digging into an open-ended project at the edge of what people understand while being personally trained by a great scientist. Highly recommend a PhD as an end in itself - it can make you a better, more thoughtful person. Of course YMMV, that was my experience.
I think I may have lucked out, my advisor was absolutely awesome. But, he only has 2-3 doctoral students at a time. I know in large programs, some advisors end up taking on far more than that.
I talked to a graduate college dean about this at a conference we both attended. His assessment is that graduate faculty have abdicated much of their advising responsibilities to the “process”: course work and comps. He wants to see more pure research, zero-coursework PhD programs.
At that same conference, another professor mentioned that she was currently advising 18 students.
no-one 'advises' 18 students... this professor has a successful small business producing publications with their name on them - this is both sufficient, and increasingly all, that is required of them in academia. if their reputation is high enough you can springboard from here into your own academia-small-business start-up YMMV but you can be sure of the up-front costs!
Agreed. In the fields with which I am familiar, professors rarely supervise much more than that number of graduate students over an entire career.
But, in case of the aforementioned professor, she seemed to deplore having that many students, and it was her remark about the number of advisees that prompted the comment from the graduate school dean.
I have only known a few people who were at all enamored by the PhD process. Even those who had an overall positive experience speak quite poorly of most of their student-teacher relationships, which seem to range from adversarial to abusive. The best professors are heavily overworked and seem to have little time left for close student interactions. But then all of the people I've worked with who had PhDs left academia, so perhaps it is a case of selection bias.