Economics of PhD training

My wife and I did our PhDs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It took us five years after we finished undergrad.

“Typically, the philosophy department at Boston University funds PhD candidates for up to seven years. Grippo, who uses they/them pronouns, started PhD coursework in 2019, and as of September, still had a dissertation to finish and undergraduate writing classes to teach before graduating, likely in spring 2027.

 

“That was until a few weeks ago, when Grippo was told they were expected to graduate this coming May — a consequence of BU’s decision to tighten funding for PhDs beyond their fifth year. 

 

“There was suddenly a hard line that no post-fifth-year PhDs should be eligible” for university funding or teaching opportunities on campus, Grippo said. “If I knew that I was meaningfully going to have five years to finish my PhD earlier on, I would’ve done a lot of things differently.”

 

Time from BA/BS to PhD in the life sciences was seven years back in the day. In humanities, it was nine years. Much of that has to do with the fact that most humanities grad students support themselves on teaching assistantships, which consume a lot of bandwidth that could otherwise be used for research and writing.

Research at universities is always and everywhere a cost center. The difference between grant funding and the actual cost is made up in three ways: tuition, philanthropy and licensing.* When research support contracts, graduate programs contract.

“Brown’s expenses for its PhD programs, for example, would increase by 7.3 percent if the university did not pause doctoral admissions this year, an uptick the institution cannot afford, Doyle said in a faculty meeting. A piecemeal move last year that reduced doctoral admissions by no more than two people per department proved “unsustainable,” the Brown Daily Herald reported.

 

“Even the fields that have been spared from pauses in PhD admissions are looking to trim costs. The economics department at BU is enrolling fewer than half its usual number of students. And in the astronomy department at Dartmouth, a rollback in PhD admissions is not a mandate, but a cost-saving strategy from inside.”

The market for PhDs has been contracting for decades. In his 2015 book “The Graduate School Mess,” Leonard Cassuto referred to PhD programs in the humanities as “minting expired passports.” Even in STEM programs, a shrinking minority of PhDs get tenure-track faculty positions. While one might observe that other career paths have long had more applicants than positions, the opportunity cost of a PhD makes the economics of the investment more problematic than ever. 

*at universities with medical schools, this can include the margin on the practice

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/25/business/phd-programs-harvard-bu-brown/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more