Débat sur le doctorat

[Chitah]

Il se trouve que je donne des cours dans mon ancienne école d'ingénieur, en dernière année. La première fois que j'ai fait cela (après environ 7 ans d'expérience pro), j'ai eu un choc énorme. J'avais en face de moi des branleurs absolus (j'exagère un peu). Non mais l'hallu totale. Des gars qui quelques mois plus tard étaient supposés décrocher un job et entamer leur vie professionnelle. Je me suis dit qu'en sortant d'école je devais être exactement comme eux, sans même m'en être rendu compte.

[Randian shithead]

Je ne comprends plus de quoi parle ce fil.

[neuneu2k]

J’ai eu, il y a deux semaines une conversation hallucinante.

Moi : ‘il suffit de … bla bla bla… matrices… bla bla’ (détails secrets et non pertinants).

Lui : ‘Tout à fait, mais on ne peut pas mettre en place un système ou il faut bac+5 pour comprendre le fonctionnement’

Moi : ‘euu, on recrute en dessous de Bac+5 ?’

Lui : <pokerface>’oui, bon, tu vois ce que je veux dire’</pokerface>.

[Nartreb]

S'il y a ici des gens qui passent ou sont déjà passés par le doctorat (je vais entrer en Master l'an prochain, sauf imprévu, et je ne sais pas encore si le doctorat est fait ou non pour moi - quand bien même j'aurais la possibilité d'en faire un), leurs témoignages sont les bienvenus.

J'ai failli me lancer dans un doctorat à la fin de mon DEA, encouragé par mes profs. J'étais même en train de remplir un dossier CIFRE quand certains aléas de la vie m'ont fait prendre une autre voie.

Je le regrette aujourd'hui.

Sachant qu'on donne un bac+5 à peu près à tout le monde aujourd'hui, je pense que si on a les moyens, autant aller au bout.

En ce qui me concerne, je me suis retrouvé dans une situation personnelle un peu particulière où mon parcours m'a desservi : trop diplômé (des recruteurs me l'ont dit, et par d'autres sources proches de ceux-ci j'ai même appris qu'ils considéraient que ça pouvait mettre en péril leur propre situation). Du coup quand j'ai voulu taper plus haut, pas assez de crédibilité, puisque n'ayant pas assez d'expérience. Je pense que le doctorat m'aurait été bien utile à ce moment là.

[xavdr]

Absolument pas.

+1

En France!

+/- 1

Même s'il y a une grande différence d'approche entre les entreprises françaises et les entreprises US, il y a une base commune considérable. En particulier un PhD aux USA est souvent perçu comme étant un excès d'étude, d'une personne qui au lieu d'avoir cherché à être optimalement productive a privilégié son développement personnel ce qui est souvent ressenti au mieux comme un luxe inutile, au pire comme un vice dangereux.

Ceci dit, les USA sont plus ouverts à la créativité, je suppose initialement dans une perspective d'excellence charismatique (au sens religieux), d'esprit pionnier et de respect de la diversité du à son patchwork culturel et immigratoire, puis dans la foulée par observation des résultats souvent positifs. En outre le succès des USA et de son marché durant le 20ème siècle a attiré capitaux et chercheurs à l'échelle mondiale.

Donc oui il y a une plus grande densité de postes à forte créativité aux USA mais les réflexes franchouillards et faveur des "bêtes" masters contre les PhD n'en sont pas absents pour autant.

L'équivalent d'un diplôme français d'ingé de Polytechnique ou de Centrale c'est un master d'ingé du MIT.

Le pouvoir opérationnel US est dominé par les juristes et les MBA, même si les universités et les médias ont une influence importante.

[xavdr]

La réalité c'est qu'en France la thèse est une auberge espagnole.

Entre les disciplines où il est quasi-impossible de faire une thèse sans être au top de son master et celles où on fait une thèse parce qu'on n'a pas eu de mention au master, entre ceux qui ont eu une bourse ministérielle, les CIFRE et ceux qui travaillent au mac do (un indice : pour moi, la hiérarchie est inversée, car faire en thèse en bossant au mac do faut le vouloir), entre ceux qui gèrent leur temps eux-mêmes et ceux qui restent dans une logique de subordination à leur directeur de thèse, un RH doit vraiment examiner au cas par cas.

Les travaux de toute façon, pour la plupart des jobs en entreprise, ne pourront pas être compris par un non-spécialiste, et n'importe quel thésard en sait assez pour pipoter un ingénieur moyen qui n'a pas le temps de se tenir informé des dernières évolutions de la recherche de pointe, même dans son propre domaine.

+1

Les PhD anglo saxons sont plus homogènes, avec une soutenance que l'on "défend" face à un jury qui ne fait aucun cadeau car le diplôme accordé engage la réputation des PhD de l'université… à commencer par ceux du jury.

Disons pour faire simple que les universités française ne sont plus depuis des générations de véritables universités selon les critères d'indépendance, de responsabilité et de diversité d'excellences initiaux.

[xavdr]

la deuxième compétence, tout aussi importante : être capable de créer des techniques avec 3 bouts de scotchs et un élastique pour faire tenir le bazar, des techniques suffisamment créatives pour durer le temps de valider/invalider tes hypothèses.

Oui, et parfois cela pose des problèmes de reproductibilité !

Au final, une thèse, ce n'est pas tant proposer de nouvelles idées (ça, c'est facile, Bébert au PMU en sors 10 avec chaque ballon de rouge cuvé), c'est construire un protocol reproductible par un autre chercheur pour valider/invalider l'idée. Et c'est ça qui bouffe un temps incroyable.

+1

C'est peut-être un peu déprimant, mais le chercheur qui révolutionne son domaine avec ses recherche, c'est fini depuis 150 ans. Aujourd'hui, avec la nuée de labos et de bonhommes derrière leurs plan de travail, chacun amène sa petite brique pour faire avancer d'un pas le travail du chercheur qui était là 3 ans avant. Et tous les 10 ans en moyenne, un crack arrive et produit quelque chose qui est plus avancé de la longueur d'un bras ou d'une jambe plutôt que d'un pas, et qui donne un coup de fouet au domaine. Puis les suivants font à nouveau un petit peu avancer cet apport. (Comme lorsque tu creuses une mine : un des ouvriers fait exploser le passage à la TNT, et les suivants doivent étayer le tunnel.)

+/-1

C'est souvent vrai.

Cependant j'ai eu la chance de faire mon PhD dans un labo (disons pour simplifier : stats & logiciels) où la science a soudainement progressé sous l'influence de quelqus uns mais surtout un d'entre nous qui a récidivé ensuite dans d'autres labos en travaillant dans des domaines connexes. Un mélange de chance et de compétences : il fallait des machines performantes qui commençaient tout juste à exister, il fallait s'inspirer de méthodes un peu zarbi et désuettes mais épistémologiquement intéressantes, il fallait être capable de relier la théorie mathématique la plus ardue à la pratique logicielle la plus basique (ou C comme on voudra ^^) en passant par plein d'ingrédients ayant l'utilité d'une large culture mathématique et algorithmique et aussi il fallait être honnête avec l'interprétation de ses propres résultats pour pouvoir les faire progresser.

Ce chercheur génial que j'évoque, en arrivant dans une nouvelle équipe de recherche met quelques minutes à poser des questions intéressantes, quelques jours à en poser qui méritent recherche, quelques semaines pour imaginer des pistes de recherches pertinentes avec une esquisse de réponses plausibles, quelques mois pour obtenir des résultats intéressants attirant l'attention internationale, quelques trimestre ou années à révolutionner le domaine de sa recherche. Évidemment cela suppose que le terreau soit fertile ce qui est le cas dans certains domaines notamment en analyse de données, ou tout était à inventer avec les nouvelles capacités de calcul, de stockage multimédia et de collecte de données internet.

[Nirvana]

The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s

By LAURA PAPPANO

William Klein’a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.

It wasn’t that there weren’t other jobs out there. It’s that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master’s. “It’s pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to,” Mr. Klein says.

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers’ new master’s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he’d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master’s. Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.

The degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills. Where only a handful of programs existed a few years ago, there are now 239, with scores in development. Florida’s university system, for example, plans 28 by 2013, clustered in areas integral to the state’s economy, including simulation (yes, like Disney, but applied to fields like medicine and defense). And there could be many more, says Patricia J. Bishop, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at the University of Central Florida. “Who knows when we’ll be done?”

While many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math — humanities departments, once allergic to applied degrees, are recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for résumé boosting.

“There is a trend toward thinking about professionalizing degrees,” acknowledges Carol B. Lynch, director of professional master’s programs at the Council of Graduate Schools. “At some point you need to get out of the library and out into the real world. If you are not giving people the skills to do that, we are not doing our job.”

This, she says, has led to master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music). Language departments are tweaking master’s degrees so graduates, with a portfolio of cultural knowledge and language skills, can land jobs with multinational companies.

So what’s going on here? Have jobs, as Dr. Stewart puts it, “skilled up”? Or have we lost the ability to figure things out without a syllabus? Or perhaps all this amped-up degree-getting just represents job market “signaling” — the economist A. Michael Spence’s Nobel-worthy notion that degrees are less valuable for what you learn than for broadcasting your go-get-’em qualities.

“There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on,” says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master’s extra signaling power. “We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,” making a bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.

Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master’s is essential for job seekers to stand out — that, or a diploma from an elite undergraduate college, says Richard K. Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Not only are we developing “the overeducated American,” he says, but the cost is borne by the students getting those degrees. “The beneficiaries are the colleges and the employers,” he says. Employers get employees with more training (that they don’t pay for), and universities fill seats. In his own department, he says, a master’s in financial economics can be a “cash cow” because it draws on existing faculty (“we give them a little extra money to do an overload”) and they charge higher tuition than for undergraduate work. “We have incentives to want to do this,” he says. He calls the proliferation of master’s degrees evidence of “credentialing gone amok.” He says, “In 20 years, you’ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor.”

Among the new breed of master’s, there are indeed ample fields, including construction management and fire science and administration, where job experience used to count more than book learning. Internships built into many of these degrees look suspiciously like old-fashioned on-the-job training.

Walter Stroupe, a retired police first lieutenant and chairman of the department of criminal justice at West Virginia State University, acknowledges that no one needs to get the new master’s degree in law enforcement administration the school is offering beginning this fall. In fact, he concedes, you don’t even need a college degree in West Virginia to become a police officer, typically the first step to positions as sheriff and police chief.

Still, Dr. Stroupe says, there are tricky issues in police work that deserve deeper discussion. “As a law enforcement officer, you can get tunnel vision and only see things from your perspective,” he says. “What does a police officer do when they go up to a car and someone is videotaping them on a cellphone?” The master’s experience, he hopes, will wrangle with such questions and “elevate the professionalism” among the police in the state.

These new degrees address a labor problem, adds David King, dean of graduate studies and research at the State University of New York at Oswego, and director of the Professional Science Master’s Program, which oversees P.S.M. degrees across the SUNY system.

“There are several million job vacancies in the country right now, but they don’t line up with skills,” he says. Each P.S.M. degree, he says, is developed with advisers from the very companies where students may someday work. “We are bringing the curriculum to the market, instead of expecting the market to come to us,” he says.

That’s why John McGloon, who manages the technical writing and “user experience” team at Welch Allyn, the medical device company, helped shape the master’s in human-computer interaction at Oswego. He says employers constantly fear hiring someone who lacks proper skills or doesn’t mesh. Having input may mean better job candidates. This summer, Mr. McGloon has three SUNY Oswego interns. “We plug them right into the team,” he says. “Not only can you gauge their training, you can judge the team fit, which is hard to do in an interview.”

While jobs at Welch Allyn may not require a master’s, the degree has been used as a sorting mechanism. After posting an opening for a technical writer, Mr. Mc- Gloon received “dozens and dozens” of résumés. Those in charge of hiring wondered where to start. “I said, ‘Half of our applicants have master’s. That’s our first cut.’ ”

Laura Georgianna, in charge of employee development at Welch Allyn, confirms that given two otherwise equal résumés, the master’s wins. A master’s degree “doesn’t guarantee that someone will be much more successful,” she says. “It says that this person is committed and dedicated to the work and has committed to the deep dive. It gives you further assurance that this is something they have thought about and want.”

The exposure to workplaces, and those doing the hiring, makes master’s programs appealing to students. “The networking has been unbelievable,” says Omar Holguin. His 2009 B.S. in engineering yielded only a job at a concrete mixing company. At the University of Texas, El Paso, which is offering a new master’s in construction management, he’s interning with a company doing work he’s actually interested in, on energy efficiency.

There may be logic in trying to better match higher education to labor needs, but Dr. Vedder is concerned by the shift of graduate work from intellectual pursuit to a skill-based “ticket to a vocation.” What’s happening to academic reflection? Must knowledge be demonstrable to be valuable?

The questions matter, not just to the world of jobs, but also to the world of ideas. Nancy Sinkoff, chairwoman of the Jewish studies department at Rutgers, says its master’s, which starts this fall, will position students for jobs but be about inquiry and deep learning.

“I would imagine in the museum world, I would want to hire someone with content,” she says hopefully. “To say, ‘I have a master’s in Jewish studies,’ what better credential to have when you are on the market?”

“This will make you more marketable,” she is convinced. “This is how we are selling it.”

Whether employers will intuit the value of a master’s in Jewish studies is unclear. The history department at the University of South Florida has learned that just because a content-rich syllabus includes applied skills (and internships) doesn’t mean students will be hired. “Right now, yes, it’s very hard to get a job” with a master’s in public history, says Rosalind J. Beiler, chairwoman of the history department, noting that the downturn hurt employers like museums and historical societies.

The university is revamping its master’s in public history, a field that interprets academic history for general audiences, to emphasize new-media skills in the hopes of yielding more job placements. “That is precisely the reason we are going in that direction,” she says.

“Digital humanities,” as this broad movement is called, is leading faculty members to seek fresh ways to make history more accessible and relevant in their teaching and research. A professor of Middle Eastern history, for example, has made podcasts of local Iraqi war veterans in a course on the history of Iraq.

It may be uncomfortable for academia to bend itself to the marketplace, but more institutions are trying.

In what could be a sign of things to come, the German department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is proposing a Ph.D. aimed at professionals. Candidates, perhaps with an eye toward the European Union, would develop cultural understanding useful in international business and organizations. It would be time-limited to four years — not the current “12-year ticket to oblivion,” says John A. Stevenson, dean of the graduate school. And yes, it would include study abroad and internships.

Dr. Stevenson sees a model here that other humanities departments may want to emulate.

It does, however, prompt the question: Will the Ph.D. become the new master’s?

Laura Pappano is author of “Inside School Turnarounds: Urgent Hopes, Unfolding Stories.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?_r=2

[Nirvana]

I have a PhD in Molecular Biology.

If you want any kind of actual Research or Academic job you need a PhD.

Your future career opportunities will be severely limited without that PhD.

In fact I can't really recommend trying for a top level career in any science without a PhD degree. It really is expected in any but the most junior jobs. And forget about climbing the ladder without having to go back for that degree at some point.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=29546201&postcount=212

[Nirvana]

Les avis sont contradictoires :

Doctoral degrees

The disposable academic

Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

Dec 16th 2010

ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

Rich pickings

For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world’s university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world’s students.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.

A short course in supply and demand

In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.

In America the rise of PhD teachers’ unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers’ union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.

In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.

A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master’s degree. It can even reduce earnings

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.

A very slim premium

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses. Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one course on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr Schwartz.

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.

The interests of universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD students

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn’t in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.

Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will step in to offer them instead.

Noble pursuits

Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more structured learning that comes with an American PhD.

The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD claims to develop just such skills in graduates.

Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223/print