<p>
</p>
<p>The question is not whether you can obtain some industry research position coming out of a top PhD program, just like the question is not whether you could obtain some academic position coming out of the same top PhD program. The question is whether you can obtain a desirable such position. I don’t doubt that if you’re willing to take any industry research position, regardless of pay or location, you could surely find one, just like I’m sure that if you’re willing to become a gypsy adjunct lecturer, you would surely find employment. But are you willing to do that?</p>
<p>The above issue becomes especially salient if you’re married or in a serious relationship, as many newly minted Phd’s are wont to have. You then can only realistically choose positions in locations that your partner will realistically will want to live in, yet many industry research and academic positions are not exactly in the most dynamic of locations. </p>
<p>Take Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. For decades, their largest R&D arm was located in Southeastern Connecticut, yet the fact is, outside of a career in R&D, military/defense-contracting, and (recently) Native American casino gaming, there are not many careers available for your spouse to pursue in SE Connecticut, unless he/she’s willing to simply be a housewife/husband. It is for that reason that many new bio/chem PhD’s can’t seriously consider a research career at Pfizer, for fear of a divorce. Venture capital and (especially) consulting, in stark contrast, tend to have office locations where there are a variety of other careers to pursue, hence satisfying the professional aspirations of an ambitious spouse. </p>
<p>Furthermore, even if your industry’s research positions are located in a desirable location, that’s not to say that that industry will be hiring when you graduate. Each industry undergoes cycles of hiring and firing that are not always highly correlated with other industries. Right now, the pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a clear hiring slump with tens of thousands of layoffs, and many newly minted PhD’s in biology and chemistry are not obtaining research jobs that they would have obtained just a few years ago. In contrast, newly minted PhD’s in geology, chemical engineering, and petroleum engineering are enjoying a raucous hiring boom. Yet how quickly we forget - it was less than 15 years ago when the price of oil scraped $10 a barrel, oil companies couldn’t lay people off fast enough, and Houston was in a state of economic depression, while at that very same time, the pharmaceutical industry was undergoing the largest hiring boom in its history. The upshot is that you may well happen to finish your PhD at a time when your corresponding industry is undergoing a downcycle and not hiring.</p>
<p>Attending a well-branded school therefore provides you with greater career choice and hence allows you to diversify your risk across both space (geographic location) and time (industry business cycle). For example, I can think of a number of people who graduated with computer science PhD’s in 2002-2003 at the trough of the dotcom bust when hundreds of thousands of software/CS workers were being laid off, and who corresponding decided that they would rather become consultants or financiers instead. Why hack and slash your way to try to obtain a research job offer at a tech company where layoffs were rampant, employee morale was low, and the very existence of the company itself as a going concern was questionable, when you could instead obtain a lucrative position in consulting?</p>