In Defense Of The PhD

I'll defend the PhD for different reasons.<p>It educates you further. You acquire knowledge you don't get elsewhere. You get a range of skills and learning opportunities you don't get elsewhere - some of which are very useful when trying to discover new human knowledge. Research labs in universities do - and have traditionally - discovered much new human knowledge; they are good at it.<p>Using earnings as the sole measure of the worth of a PhD - while maybe what you'd expect The Economist to do - is a little simplistic.<p>If getting an undergrad CS degree didn't lead to higher lifetime earnings than, say, doing data entry, would you do data entry?<p>I wouldn't. I put a premium on acquiring knowledge, and doing work I consider interesting.<p>Research is very interesting work. Having a research degree can lead to more interesting jobs. Like maybe working on the algorithm design team, as opposed to the web development team. A lot of corporations do have labs doing research activities, where people with PhDs work. This should be factored in to any analysis.<p>Of course, if you view a PhD purely as training for academic positions, then clearly something is broken, because there are very few academic positions.<p>But if you see the PhD as an educational experience which broadens knowledge, and teaches the skills necessary to break new ground in hard technical problems, that's a different story.

As it happens, I'm defending my dissertation tomorrow (neuroscience, U.S.) and this post pretty well sums up my sentiment.<p>I particularly agree with the ending:<p><pre><code> Oh you’re saying I’m a dreamer, and that simply never happens? Well what about those thousands of internet start-up companies? They waste their time as well, trying to become another Facebook or another Google. Yet they still do it, because it’s their dream to pursue. And so is academic career ours. </code></pre> I think there are two modes one can do research in: one is a conservative, do-what-you're-told kind of incrementalism; another is higher risk, swing-for-the-fences, and entrepreneurial. I think there is a similarity between doing research in the latter mode and a technology startup, which is why I got sucked into Hacker News when it was still called Startup News. Nearly everybody on it was a <i>maker</i>, swinging for the fences. I felt a lot of affinity for the attitude if not the methods.<p>Anyway, enough HN procrastination, I need to practice my talk!

I'm happy I'm currently in the middle of my PhD, but this article makes a bunch of errors. It generally strikes me as the naive impression that undergrad have of grad school until they spend some time talking to post-doc and professors. I'll just identify a couple of obvious ones.<p>1. "We all read the PhD Comics and we all hear about how many hours of coursework or admin-duties a typical US grad student has. I don’t know how does it look like in other countries, but in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium this is definitely not the case. "<p>The Economist article doesn't say anything about there being too much non-research work. It says there are <i>very</i> long hours, and part of it is non-research. The OP has simply misinterpreted the Economist article. I don't know any grad students in the US who spend more than 25% time on teaching, and the OP lists this maximum as some sort of great aspect of the Nordic system.<p>2. "Apart from all that, a little bit of teaching looks good in your CV, especially if you want to apply for post-doc or other academic positions after finishing a PhD."<p>For most grad students, than this is just plain wrong. No one cares how good of a teacher you are (<i>especially</i> not for post-doc positions) unless your end goal is a teaching position at a small liberal arts college. But most most grad student's end goals are either research positions or industry.

Oh please, guy says linked articles are crap because they are only about US and UK and there is still rest of the world where the situation looks different. But he himself says only about Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands which are at the very top of the richest countries in the world list (he mentions also Slovakia which apparently has good PhD programs funding) and excludes poorer European countries such as Poland and Ukraine because they are too poor. I am sorry, but what kind of argumentation is this? Article is bad because it is only about US and UK but his blog entry is OK even though he compares only three richest countries in the world?

I am also doing a PhD in Norway, but in the humanities (ABD now). I agree with a lot of what is said here: PhD students in Europe, and especially in places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, have it unbelievably good (not that you'd believe it if you followed the debate here, with "PhD oversupply" and "temporary contract abuse" a prominent topic; to be fair, most graduates from my program have found academic jobs both in Norway and elsewhere, though there is a tendency for people who have spent over ten years in temporary positions to call it quits). However, places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, even if they punch above their weight in many fields, are not too big in the grand scheme of things. Again, I don't know that the situation is like in the hard sciences or in CS, but certainly in my field the fact that Europe has well-funded PhD programs and jobs does not help the pretty dire (as far as I can see) situation in the US. There are relatively few people who go on to positions in Europe after US grad school, and even fewer the other way around.

The comparison between startups and PhDs is not esp. appropriate. The entrepreneur often is willing to assume greater risk for greater pecuniary reward, whereas the PhD often is not assuming any greater risk but willing to accept likely lesser pay to do what he loves.<p>Which isn't to say that there is a class of entrepreneurs that start companies simply because they love starting companies, but that this isn't unique to entrepreneurs (e.g. there are lawyers who love doing lawyerly things).

I believe that most of the articles that been posted to HN that are negative in regards to doing a PhD are referring more to the liberal arts types of degrees, and the author here points out some reasons that these people are going on to do PhDs in the first place.<p>Sure, getting a tenure track professorship in English or the Humanities would be great for a lot of these people, but isn't doing a PhD better than the alternates that most of them have available? I would rather pursue a PhD than go do phone marketing, myself.

While I think this article makes some decent points, I have to say that in all the recent discussion around the value of a phd and whether or not the system is broken the only really strong defenders of the way things are have been those who are currently pursuing a PhD.<p>As someone who has been able to swing a faculty position without one (wanting to remain anonymous I'm not going to say what exactly is the case, but I will say it's definitely not because I'm particularly clever). It saddens me to see friends who were brilliant PhD students at very good schools, doing post doc work at mediocre schools that don't even do research in their area of interest (and these are some people in the math and sciences). Almost none of the people I know with PhD work in the humanities are doing anything even close to what they studied.<p>I don't think the people who are pursuing PhDs are necessarily the ones who are broken, but there is definitely a problem with the system, and I don't think most phd student will realize it until they've graduated.

I completely agree with this. I've just gotten my PhD, and could have gotten some commercial job with a higher paying salary. Yet I've chosen to stay in academia, doing something I love, travelling all over the world and having fun doing it.<p>I should also note that, at least in the Netherlands, young researchers will be on a temporary contract for quite some time. Circumstances (laws, funds, budget cuts, etc.) are against us and unfortunately create a very bad situation for us.

<p><pre><code> Normal people don’t study philosophy, and if they’re into computer science, they don’t care whether P!=NP — they just learn Java, Objective-C, Python or whatever else they find useful for becoming a successful software engineer. </code></pre> I resent that. Most programmers I've met find theoretical CS interesting, and learn things simply for the intellectual value of it. They just want to build things people use.

To add to the discussion, the ability that the PhD gave me was the confidence to "roll my sleeves up" and delve into the muck to try and figure out how to get something working, or figure out why something is not working.

&#62; Normal people don’t study philosophy<p>Well, I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but they really do know how to pick their words, don't they? Following the same logic only Plato would qualify as a true philosopher (he's the evil mind behind all this "academia" concept anyway), while Democritus, one of the few philosophers who actually knew what he was saying, would just be seen as an amateur.

After weeks of PhD bashing here is one article which successfully defends it against a lot of arguments against a PhD.<p>I especially like the comparison of an academic career with the startup track.