<i>When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave graduate school without finishing – with numbers higher at some institutions.</i><p>The biggest risk factor I've found for a PhD student is lack of research experience during the undergrad degree.<p>I've seen it over and over.<p>A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real researchers face.<p>When it hits them, many discover they lack the temperament to actually move a research project forward. By then, they will have sunk 2-3 years of their life (or more) and a major amount of prestige into a failed attempt.<p>If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD, drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to join. You're going to need 2-3 years of experience actually doing research to know if it's something you'll enjoy long term.<p>You may well discover that you don't like what you find. If so, better to know that now than when you're in your late 20s.<p>If things do work out, you'll have a better idea of what to look for in advisors and schools.
Man, this view of getting a PhD, which seems fairly common, is so alien to me. Both my parents are research professors, both regularly have students, and I have never seen any of the misery or stress that people keep bringing up.<p>Sure, if you are unprepared to do research then you shouldn't do a PhD, but my parents' students are hand picked, and it is very rare that they end up with a student that doesn't want to, or is unprepared to do research.<p>Being a PhD student should be one of the most fun parts of an academic career. You get to focus on your research, and are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. You aren't constantly being barraged by requests to review papers or having your time used up by a myriad of other responsibilities.<p>I guess it is totally possible that the corner of academia that I grew up around (ocean sciences at a lab removed from the main campus) is an outlier, but my impressions of getting a PhD were always positive, and the reason I never did it was because the part after your PhD seemed like it sucked.
This is a rather poor essay.<p>"Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. Yet it can often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from practice.<p>...<p>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first year (or more) reading obscure academic literature."<p>So... do industry research? Let's be clear: a PhD is a training program for research. As such most research done during a PhD is generally not that impactful, certainly not to go beyond fellow academics and to non experts. In my experience most people who go into it don't have much of an idea of what they want to do afterward -- they mainly know they enjoy research and are interested in the topic. AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not.
A lot of this seems ridiculous:<p>> Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression.<p>The baseline percentage of the population which experience depression (and other mental illness) each year is known to be pretty high -- and highest in for people in their 20's. One third sounds fairly normal; at any rate, there is a burden here to show that this is an exceptional proportion.<p>> For instance, a PhD in Germany is supposed to take three years, according to university regulations, but most students need five years to complete one.<p>If you are starting from an undergraduate degree, you probably need at least two years to take the PhD intro classes. One year to start a research program might work in a subject like the author's where your papers are chats about social implications, but there are plenty of subjects where even the data collection is going to take longer than that.<p>> In the US, meanwhile, the average completion time for a PhD in education sciences surpasses 13 years.<p>These programs are dominated by people who are working teachers, working on PhDs part-time.<p>> One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor.<p>Being a professor is only one possible goal and for some fields, it isn't even the primary one.
>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research<p>I don't think this applies well to all fields of study. I have my Ph.D. in physics and there are loads of people researching problems that don't really have counterparts "in the field." I'm assuming "in the field" means industry or possibly a government service. I would think the same is true for mathematics at least.<p>>I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams.<p>Of course in this case, contact with people in the industry makes lots of sense. In fact, I'm not sure how this research would be conducted without this contact.<p>I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. For me, I think of academia as having the goal of advancing human understanding of the universe. Whether or not that has a social impact is probably up to some debate. I believe that one of the cool things about academia is allowing some people the ability to pursue ideas and work on problems that don't have obvious, short-term impacts.
Replace 'academic kudos' with 'the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society' and the issue becomes more apparent.<p>>A PHD should be about improving society, not chasing the metric which we measure to check if you are improving society.<p>It seems to be Campbell's law in action. Of course you can determine a different metric to use, or just tune the current metric some, but you'll eventually see the same problems emerge, maybe worse, maybe better.<p>I also think this issue shouldn't be viewed in isolation of other related issues, such as how the current system discourages reproducing the research of others and of publishing trivial results (we tested to see if we found this unexpected thing and we didn't).<p>Figuring how who is a good scientist, given that some theoretical good scientist could spend a decade chasing down an issue that ended up being nothing, is not an easy problem to solve. Tenure is one attempt to fix it, but it largely just re-frames the problem into deciding which scientists deserve tenure.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law</a><p>>Take my example. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term.<p>>In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its publication. It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social media. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to congratulate me. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything that’s broken in the academy. Academics love definitions, not solutions.<p>This feels like the pure distilled essence of Campbell's law.
I don't understand how it's possible that a "social scientist" thinks that he has identified the great problem and its solution in every other academic discipline. Well, actually I do understand that, I've been around sociologists. I wonder if there's any chance that people that simply feel something about a tiny corner of the whole picture start speaking just for themselves. Maybe he's realized that his field is organized BS, but I don't think that makes a case for destroying modern science in order to build this society where laypersons decide what is worthwhile knowledge and what's not, in the newspapers. That's a great recipe for going back to those several centuries in which the rationale of doctorates was "improving society" as well.
I disagree totally. A PhD should be about curiosity and asking the most interesting scientific questions you can think of, also known as 'basic research'. You have the rest of your career to have as much impact on society and commerce as you want.<p>Unfortunately, the social impact factor has been creeping in, in the form of more 'applied research' funding which is not fundamental and does not move scientific knowledge forward. The government has limited role in funding applied research, since industry is better positioned to understand what applied research is important and has a strong incentive to fund it.<p>Academia is imperfect, but the genius of the system is that letting scientists chase down interesting things <i>does</i> end up improving society dramatically in the long run.
It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for <i>impact</i>. If you are doing research, the goal is to do research that matters and citations are one way to measure that people cared about the work (of course, once something becomes a measure people start optimizing for that instead of the original objective).<p>A PhD is a degree in doing research. When students start, it is true that many think they want careers in academia. Many then realize that academia isn't what they want after a few years in and seeing how their advisors live, realizing salaries are lower, and realizing how competitive it is. There are plenty of amazing career doors that open with a PhD besides being an academic... any career that requires the ability to conduct, interpret, and/or communicate research.<p>The comments about meeting practitioners are pretty foreign to my experiences doing a PhD (in AI) and being a scientist. If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value.
Great idea! Pay me for improving society rather than chasing academic kudos and I'll gladly spend my time doing that instead of writing grants and papers.
> <i>Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to pursue a career in science, their enthusiasm typically wanes to the point that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation</i><p>These seem like different questions to me. There are plenty of ways to "pursue a career in science" that don't involve academia.
This article has some true observations, but the conclusions seem to go in a totally wrong direction.<p>Writing a PhD is a very ambitious endeavor. You will inevitably have your downs and crises, because research is hard. This is independent of the research topic. Now asking that the PhD thesis should not only advance research, but also 'improve society' will only increase the pressure.<p>The author also has the purpose of a PhD wrong: this is your research journeyman time, and delivering the PhD thesis is like creating your masterpiece as craftsman (in the original meaning where you create a fine piece of work which earns you the right to call yourself master of a craft). The real, unsupervised research career starts after PhD. This also means that it would be a very bad idea to start with high-risk research. Do this as PostDoc, when you have acquired all the necessary skills.<p>Not focusing on publications is the worst advice one can give aspiring academics. Research is about advancing <i>shared</i> knowledge, and the only way to do this is to share your results. If you don't manage to publish, either your results are not relevant, or your work is not considered sound by your peer researchers. Successful publishing in reputable venues validates your research, and is the most effective way to disseminate new insights. I agree that the publishing system is broken. You have to work around that by choosing the right venues. This is another academic skill you need to learn.<p>If you really want to improve society and feel insufficient if you 'only' improve your research field, then don't pursue a research career. Better go work for some non-profit organization, or found one.
What are the politicians there for then?<p>I'm not being facetious here. Politics is one of the primary avenues of bringing about social change. Ditto civil service.<p>A PhD should be about novel contributions that increase the sum total of human knowledge.
A PhD should also be about being honest in ones arguments in the popular press. PhD's in Education may take 13 years (is that the median?) because most students are part time. In good graduate programs that provide guaranteed funding for students, 4-6 years is customary (and funding sometimes runs out at year 5). It's hard for me, as an academic, to trust an author who twists statistics to make his case.<p>And what does it mean to improve society? Basic biomedical science rarely promises improvements, but has given us revolutionary technologies (the structure of DNA, the genetic code, cloning, transgenic animals, etc, etc). The essence of basic science is that you do not know what you are going to learn, or whether it will be useful. You cannot plan unimagined discoveries.<p>Should graduate students start doing "research" sooner? That is certainly the standard in biomedical research, where very few courses are required. But the consequence is that students know a lot about what they have done, and very little about other disciplines. How does a graduate student in biology become a computational biologist without learning programming and algorithms?<p>The comments about having research experience are spot-on. And many of the frustrations people describe could be reduced by learning more about one's advisor before joining the group.
I agree that the PhD system needs some rethinking but I don't think focusing research on more 'practical' problems is necessarily a good idea. I have seen 'practical' research going on in industry labs and I think it often falls into a no man's land of neither being practical nor advancing the state of knowledge in any meaningful way. Citation counts are problematic in some ways, but they do approximately measure what the research community thinks of as important work. I agree they seem to suffer from overly promoting "what's in fashion." OTOH, there is benefit to having a community of researchers all focusing on one topic at a time so that ideas can be exchanged and build on one another. Just like with startups, for some good ideas, it may just be that they are being proposed at the wrong time or haven't found the exact right form yet.
> Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses...<p>The university where I am currently doing my PhD has a very heavy focus on the outputs of a PhD contributing something worthwhile not only to academia but also to industry or the world. It isn't a massively high ranking university but it does force academics to think practically as well as theoretically. We are required to have an industry (non-academic) advisor on our supervisory panel who helps guide the research so it can be useful and not just gather dust once finished.
I totally agree with the problems of academia chasing citations, but the solution sounds odd to me. There are plenty of applied master programs aimed exactly at what is proposed: engaging with the professional community and fixing simple stuff.<p>But I still think some people should be isolated from the daily torment of humanity to push us forward. Maybe we just need less PHD.
One thought I had about this was related to a book I was reading recently about the Math Olympiad. It was discussing how in the US the way math is taught never allows the students to struggle with any hard problems. That experience of going up against something potentially intractable is totally foreign to most students, even at the undergrad level I suspect. When you throw someone into a totally new environment where their life revolves around doing something they have never done before, it is kind of a shock. I think part of the solution here would be to introduce harder problem solving earlier into the standard curriculum. For this reason, I would be curious if PhDs in Russia or Eastern Europe, where the school systems are known for being more mathematically difficult from an early age, suffer from the same level of problems that exist in the US system.
Basically every human endeavor "should" be about putting the general good over the individual good. After all, it's in one's own selfish interests for that to be the state of affairs; there are far more people not-you doing things than people who are you doing things, so you stand to benefit more if all those not-you people are doing work that indirectly improves your quality-of-life. ;)<p>The (sometimes literally) million-dollar question is: how do you align incentives to bring about that desired end-state? Ph.D's are not unique in struggling with this age-old conundrum; if the government is willing to pay for robotics research for drone warfare but nobody is putting up the cash to pay for nursing-care robot research, then we can make some pretty firm predictions what kind of robots we'll see mature and reliable in twenty years.
The only real rot I see in the PhD track is the dangerous imbalance of degrees to jobs in certain areas (not STEM usually, although STEM is pretty uncompromising for tenure track). IMHO in the humanities the PhD is some kind of sick ponzi scheme, where advanced degrees serve to subsidize tenured faculty's careers with little to no hope of going on to anything of their own. (I know STEM isn't <i>much</i> better, but it's a <i>little</i> better, especially with industry being willing to assume some risk.) But I've got friends $100K in debt for an art history PhD, and that's craaaaaaaaaazy given what awaits on the other side.
I don't understand this system at all. Only 1 in 200 Phd student ends up becoming a professor, yet in college we have classes of 200-250 students per professor. And some of the older professors have been teaching the same class for many many years, without attempting to change the material.
They are just repeating the stuff the already know, over and over again. It seems for me a waste of human resources, for me, to put some of the smartest people in to such repetitive task. Instead, I think the hiring bar for academia positions should be lower, the classes should be smaller, and the student should receive more customize experience.
The reason I completely hated my phd program:<p>- it was incredibly political, much, much more than companies I worked at.<p>- most students were just trying to tweak some equations and get the hell out of that place.<p>Overall it was a very unhealthy environment and wasnt worth It.
Academic kudos should be realigned better with scientific achievement.<p>Academic kudos translates directly to money (tenure, research funding) and power (gatekeeper positions) and that makes it microeconomics problem. Highly competitive person with high scientific achievement may not be the best person to judge and distribute kudos of others.<p>We should find a way to quantify kudos distribution to create good incentives. Researchers should get impact factor for mentoring, accepting papers to journals or giving voting for tenure to others who produce high impact studies after they get the tenure.
This could literally be said about any other human endeavor. I mean, Comcast should be about improving society, but I don't see articles in the Guardian shaming <i>them</i>.
Academia has always been, and always will be, about new knowledge. The article laments the pursuit of citations but fails to note that it is today's primary quantitative measure of new knowledge - though imperfect.<p>"Improving society" as academia's objective will have its own set of misaligned incentives, potentially much worse than the pursuit of "academic kudos". How would this be measured?
You all are kind of scaring me a bit...<p>I just finished my Bachelor's and am starting my Master's this month. I have no formal research experience, but I planned to dive in during my Master's. For anyone who has done/is doing there PhD, if there is any advice you all could give me in order to get the most out of this next year before I apply for PhD programs, that would be great.
Great, I can play too! Corporations should be about improving the public good, as they used to be [0], not chasing monetary value. Your turn!<p>[0] Not just "in my day"-ism. According to "We the corporations", demonstrating this was originally part of the legal requirement for many governments' approval of articles of incorporation.
"They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real world."<p>By that metric, most fundamental discoveries in the last 200 years would not have been enough to finish a PhD.<p>Even Hamming's error correcting codes took 10+ years for Bell Labs to implement it. And even then it was because they had no other alternatives and were in a bind.
The two aren’t mutex. And <i>publish or perish.</i> The suggestion is that academia should be utilitarian and short-term focused. This will never happen. It’s tantamount to saying “we should get rid of archeologists because they aren’t a profit-center department.”
From the comments, one of the "Guardian picks":<p><i>I strongly, strongly disagree. A PhD should be about science. Not about utility for society. I am pretty sure that Max Planck did not think about the utility of computers when he proposed this completely absurd, little mathematical trick of discretising energy. Still, without quantum theory: no computer, no laser, no magnetic resonance imaging...and I could go on forever.<p>Progress in science is necessarily chaotic - if you disallow incoherence, absurdity, non-applicability, you will kill science. The author is conceptualizing "science" (maybe he talks about engineering and not science?) only as a tool of problem solving for the society - that is actual the role of science in Orwell's "1984" and that was the role of science to a certain extent in socialism. By making science teleological, one makes science ready for totalitarian abuse. Thank you very much!<p>By the way, comparing PhD systems from different countries is absolutely rubbish. In Germany, it is already rubbish to compare PhDs from different faculties from the same university....</i>
Bizarre. This is coming from someone presumably embedded in the grant-writing machine that is modern academia. How do grant proposals justify their cost, exactly? Academia would be healthier if some back slaps at the next conference was all it took I think
No. PhD should be about truth, research and advancing knowledge. Knowledge/science shouldn't be politicized.<p>It's such an absurd assertion when you consider that different people have different ideas on how to improve society.