The missing piece to changing the university culture

Ok, so I don't have a Phd, originally I was thinking about getting one but I started working and that just sort of fell by the wayside. But I never wanted to teach. I've always been interested in things and going deeply into a subject is (for me) its own reward. And that was my impression of the Phd folks I met, not that they were wanted to teach but that they really wanted to understand something completely. Was I completely wrong about the motivation there?

As a grad student at Wash U, there&#x27;s certainly feels like a lot of interaction and connection with the start-up scene here in St Louis, although I&#x27;ve not got involved myself. Just yesterday, there was an elevator pitch competition organized by a <i>different</i> entrepreneurship organization.<p>These are the kinds of things which aren&#x27;t measured when graduate programs are evaluated, but are super important for people who don&#x27;t plan to plough into academia, and maybe even more so for those who do!<p>There&#x27;s a definitely a lot of opportunity to get non academic career path advice and experience here. A grad student in my lab did a couple of internships at Google during his PhD, which clearly is not something every program&#x2F;supervisor would be cool with.

I haven&#x27;t finished my Phs (and am unlikely to, due to a terribly narrow and unsupportive culture at my faculty) but I&#x27;m a much damn better epistemologist for having done all that work. I&#x27;m looking for ways to provide the in-depth analytical skills which are mostly only available at doctoral level in a cheaper and more affordable format. This will benefit all.

Pardon my crass cynicism, but exactly how is moving PhDs from one bubble (academic) to another (startups) going to help? We are going to have the same PhDs who, by the admission of the paper might be &quot;unequipped for a nonacademic career&quot; moving into companies. If they&#x27;re unequipped for some reason or another that is about cultural knowledge of the academic vs. industrial process and folkways, then that might be fine. But what if they&#x27;re unequipped because the PhD process has merely used them as interchangeable labor and not fundamentally instilled in them critical reasoning or thinking skills? How are these startups, then, going to have any chance of succeeding? Shouldn&#x27;t we be worried, then that the unequipped PhDs will flood the market and drag down the people who are trying to do startups which have a shot of succeeding?