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http://www.economist.com/node/17723223
The disposable academic
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
Doctoral degrees Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
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.
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.
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.
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