Too many PhDs?


Kevin Drum asks “Do we mint too many PhDs?” His answer is in the link below, which links to other links that link to other links.
Unlike Drum, I have a PhD. So did both my parents and so does my wife and younger brother. I’ve mentored seven PhD students and served on the dissertation committees of over 35 PhD students, both US and international. Needless to say, I have an opinion on this.
My answer is “no.” The PhD degree, despite the designation “Doctor of Philosophy,” is awarded based on the demonstrated ability of the graduate to contribute significant new knowledge in their discipline. But at its best, the PhD means that the holder has mastered a level of critical and analytical thinking that can be applied to a wide variety of tasks.
If the question were “Do we mint too many PhDs for the academic tenure track market, then the answer is yes. Even STEM PhDs have less than a 25% chance of landing a tenure track university job (and not all of them will get tenure). As for humanity PhDs, in his book “The Graduate School Mess,” Leonard Cassuto described the practice of training humanity PhDs for nonexistent academic jobs as “minting expired passports.”
But the reality is that PhD unemployment rates hover around 1%. There are jobs for PhDs in pharma, investment companies, patent law, product development and the military, to cite just a few examples. Just like the JD degree.
Now not everyone who has a PhD is working at a job that requires that level of training. Unfortunately, in many STEM fields, PhDs are doing jobs that could be done by a person with a masters degree, but the masters isn’t respected as much as it used to be.
In the end, what we need is better job counseling. Students pursuing the PhD need to understand the opportunity cost of staying out of the job market for 5-10 years, and question whether they’ll get the salary that will compensate for that opportunity cost. Students need to be shown examples of success beyond becoming their mentor’s “mini-me.” In addition to being exploited as research cannon-fodder, they need to be trained to be adaptable, entrepreneurial and ecumenical in considering career paths. https://jabberwocking.com/quote-of-the-day-do-we-mint-too-many-phds/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more