Fair enough. But as you noted, even so there are not enough slots for phds
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More men than women have earned PhDs in the last 20 years. However, if looking at just US citizens, more women than men have earned PhDs in the last 20 years. 36% of 2021 earned doctorates went to non-US citizens. (There is so much data on PhDs at NSF it is overwhelming. I expect one could pull out the details by gender to figure out if females are relatively underemployed. The data are clear that females do make less $ on average than males, which is no surprise to anyone.)
Basically a crisis. From AAUP: The 2022 report (full report requires subscription, summary here) shows that 53.5 percent of higher education institutions have replaced tenure-eligible positions with contingent faculty appointments, compared with only 17.2 percent of colleges in 2004.
In 2019, just 10.5 percent of faculty positions in the U.S. were tenure-track and 26.5 percent were tenured, according to the AAUP. Nearly 45 percent were contingent part-time, or adjunct, roles. One in five were full-time, non-tenure-track positions.
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Very interesting thread and thoughts for a foreigner who did PhD in R1, went back to native country and worked in various R&D labs before starting a business.
It is very curious that only a few want to think of education/research for the sake of learning and advancement of the knowledge. Commercial gains out of it if any should be secondary. It makes sense to do a Ph.D only if you subscribe to this thought. I believe PhD is not a commercially sound decision in any field whatsoever. Bachelors or at the most Masters is the sweet spot to maximize monetary gains over lifetime.
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This is not what I posted- and is not what I believe. So I apologize if my post was misleading.
My point was that one cannot assume that high PhD production (eventually) from “surprise” type colleges means that the environment at said “surprise” college is more intellectual/more engaged/“sake of learning” or type of the mind kind of place. This may or may not be true- but it is not what the data which has been posted shows.
I posited that perhaps the larger than expected number of PhD’s COULD be due to poor advising. The great minds on CC can likely come up with 10 other explanations, all equally plausible in the absence of more data.
And Andy- if you truly believe that every person- foreign or native born- who gets a PhD is doing it for the sake of learning and advancement of knowledge, I have a LOT of people for you to meet. In the US-- starting with the Viet Nam war and the draft, which led to educational deferments, there have been a host of reasons for getting a doctorate (for one, it makes getting the much coveted “O-1 Visa” much easier for non US Nationals).
I have a family member with a PhD in Educational Leadership (not an EdD, a PhD). She did it for the cash. It put her on a much higher compensation scale for doing pretty much the same work as she did with just a Master’s; her school system paid for it; why not?
It was most definitely the “commercially sound decision”. Whether society is served by yet another dissertation on “Alternative pedagogical techniques in a non-differentiated classroom setting” I leave to greater minds than my own.
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I am not current on the present salaries of adjuncts. However, back in the day when I was in grad school, adjuncts and/or lecturers earned more than the grad student stipends, but not by much (adjuncts, of course, having their salaries depending on the number of classes taught). Perhaps in-line with what the salary was for a beginning K-12 teacher in southern public schools, or lower. Except that those beginning teachers would eventually start increasing their pay with every additional year of experience (no matter how small the pay increases), but that the adjunct/lecturer rate would generally remain fairly flat, regardless of additional experience (much less the additional knowledge gained by the PhD).
It is not necessarily that people are looking for significant commercial gains and are money-hungry by forgoing a PhD. It’s just that who wants to sign up for a career for living on a salary that is more along the lines of grad school skimping…but for their entire career? And I strongly suspect that inequalities in pay between departments (i.e. STEM vs. humanities & social sciences) remain, which also is correspondingly impacted on their adjuncts.
For those not familiar with education and pay among the 50 U.S. states, southern public schools generally have among the lowest rates of teacher pay (among public schools) in the country.
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Okay, I’m going to try and bring us back to the topic of Surprises in Undergrad Schools Producing Doctorates (regardless of whether you think that’s a beneficial decision or not). And I’m considering surprises as schools that would have surprised me before I started looking at this data, or as schools that don’t get much mention on CC.
Total PhD
- #11 St. John’s (MD)
The Tri-College Consortium: Might be odd since they’re all “ranked” colleges, but two members of the trio get a lot less attention on CC than the third.
- #3 Swarthmore
- #9 Haverford
- #14 Bryn Mawr
Women’s colleges have five schools in the top 50 colleges which is maybe not surprising, but notable:
- #14 Bryn Mawr
- #21 Wellesley
- #27 Mount Holyoke
- #28 Smith
- #50 Scripps
Other Schools
- #23 Whitman - perhaps my ignorance of Pacific Northwest schools is showing here
- #25 Kenyon - gets mentioned here, but not nearly as often as other schools just above and below it)
- #26 New College
- #37 St. John’s (NM)
- #39 Wheaton (unknown if IL or MA)
- #40 Hendrix - usually only mentioned on CC when budget’s a serious consideration because they have a flagship match program
- #42 St. Olaf - this one’s been getting mentioned more on CC
- #46 Earlham
I’m just doing the Total PhD category for now…I’ll let others explore some of the subject-specific ones!
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Seems like that means that the number of students each faculty member at a PhD-granting research university supervises to graduation still exceeds the number needed to replace the faculty member plus additional faculty needed at other colleges and universities that do not grant PhD degrees.
Even if the ratio is only 1.5 to 1 instead of 10 to 1, that still means a large surplus of PhD graduates compared to college faculty jobs, so the job market will be horrible except in subjects where there is enough industrial or other non-college/university demand for PhD graduates to consume the excess.
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I’ve said the same thing many times over the years. This is especially true for the less selective schools that are not necessarily sending students to top PhD programs. A PhD in history from Princeton gives you at least a slim shot at a tenure-track job in academia, whereas your chances from Northern Illinois or U Memphis are practically nonexistent. Quite frankly, there are many PhD programs that should not exist.
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People who get PhDs in Education are often Educational researchers or college professors in the field of Education, as the PhD is a research degree. Most school principals get a Doctorate of Education (Ed.D). Two separate degrees exist and the list only includes the former.
There are all sorts of applied doctorates accross many fields. For example, my mother has a doctorate in Ministry (D.Min) and my older son has a doctorate in Pharmacy (PharmD) but neither of them are tracked here as these are only academia and/or research degrees.
Don’t we have way too many PhDs in education? Have they managed to improve US education (either K-12 or higher education)? Haven’t they arguably done the opposite? Perhaps we’d be better off with far fewer of them.
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How many do we have? How many should we have?
Is it really reasonable to blame the problems facing K-12 education on those with doctorates? Aren’t educational decisions often political in nature?
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Folks get the degree they get. I’d love to tell everyone I know with a PhD in Education that they got the wrong degree, but that’s not how the world operates. A school system which requires a doctorate for a Superintendent role does not tell its principals where to go. It states the requirement- a doctorate degree. The individual then figures out where to go-- and if the degree is a PhD whereas a Ed.D would have been the better choice? It is what it is.
And MANY Principal/Superintendents prefer the PhD if that’s what a local university is offering at the right price. They have a ready population at their disposal for research (student body, teachers, para’s), they have some notion already of “gee, wouldn’t it be great if there was a study that showed XYZ”, and frankly, they aren’t interested in a lot of extended coursework on the more applied side. They did that for their Master’s already.
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I’m also a faculty member and have experience in a variety of institution types. I just wanted to chime in and say that my experiences are somewhere between what has been posted. While the faculty members usually started off with a 2/2 teaching load at the R1 that I was at longest, over half of them were only teaching 1/1 due to having a grant buy out their teaching, or taking on administrative tasks such as undergraduate or graduate director, chair, program director, etc. My observation was that they all cared about their teaching. As this was a high-ranked public flagship, the undergraduate classes tended to be large and the graduate classes small. Many faculty members ended up teaching exclusively graduate classes some years.
Although I am happy to have earned a PhD and feel privileged to be a tenured faculty member, I am very cautious when advising my students. I try to make sure that students realize how bad the job market really is for faculty jobs, and that they are also interested in the types of industry work a PhD would result in.
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I’m not sure exactly which policy decisions or educational research you’re referring to, but most of the recent detrimental decisions in either K-12 or higher education that I can think of have been made by political leaders who definitely did not have (and were not listening to) a PhD in Education.
As I realize we are not supposed to go too far down the rabbit hole of politics here on CC, I will leave it at that.
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My UC Berkeley son had profs teaching all his courses, loved them all except one (but course was taught by 2 profs so not so bad). The discussion sessions were the only ones taught by grad students. It is strange that people would think profs don’t teach the courses at R1 schools. Maybe they don’t at some of them?
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Use of graduate students as primary instructors may be mostly for specific types of courses like frosh level English composition and beginning foreign language courses.
He had AP/IB credit so did not take either of those courses, so maybe they are taught by grad students. Come to think of it, the only grad student I remember teaching a course way back when I was in college at U Michigan was German.
Really not sure what to make of all these stats. Unless we think all “doctoral recipients” are the same, regardless of the field, the granting institution, and the eventual career outcome, what is the point in counting them in bulk?
Is underlying this counting an implicit assumption that a PhD equals a necessarily better undergraduate educational outcome?
There are students who had every intention of going to grad school entering college, and every opportunity to do so, that had other opportunities open to them by a superior undergraduate education that made them reevaluate their goals.
Are these stats accounting for these effects in any meaningful way?
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Perhaps because I pick out the “surprising” names there are some people who wonder whether any of these lists seem particularly valid. After all, I’m generally not mentioning the Big Names.
So, using the last data set I referred to above from Dataverse (Top Feeders to Ph.D. Programs), here are the top 50 undergrad producers of doctoral recipients adjusted by school size.
- Cal Tech
- Harvey Mudd
- Swarthmore
- MIT
- Carleton
- Reed
- Grinnell
- Williams
- Haverford
- Pomona
- St. John’s (MD)
- U. of Chicago
- Vassar
- Bryn Mawr
- Princeton
- Oberlin
- Yale
- Olin College of Engineering
- Wesleyan
- Amherst
- Wellesley
- Stanford
- Whitman
- Macalester
- Kenyon
- New College
- Mt. Holyoke
- Smith
- Dartmouth
- Brown
- Harvard
- Rice
- Bowdoin
- Cooper Union
- Duke
- Cornell
- St. John’s (NM)
- Johns Hopkins
- Wheaton
- Hendrix
- Middlebury
- St. Olaf
- Columbia
- Barnard (oops…missed another women’s college for post #66)
- Colby
- Earlham
- Davidson
- U. of Rochester
- Colorado College
- Scripps
The vast majority of the colleges on this list are among the Top X schools that frequently make the dream/reach lists for a lot of students who come on these boards asking for suggestions, chancing, etc. Are we saying that these institutions should be derided because they are among the higher producers of people with doctorates when adjusted for institutional size? If we’re not asking those questions about Cornell or Johns Hopkins (which sandwich St. John’s NM) or Pomona and U. of Chicago (which sandwich St. John’s MD campus) or Middlebury & Columbia (sandwiching St. Olaf), then why are we questioning the “surprising” names, i.e. the ones that we don’t hear about all the time?
If I said that I was surprised that MIT or Williams or Princeton made the list, people would think that I had lost my mind or knew virtually nothing about the composition of those student bodies. As those three schools have acceptance rates well below 10% and are reaches for all who apply, it’s nice to see names of schools that keep company with them where the acceptance rates are such that many more students would have a likely chance of attending. A student might not be able to get into Amherst, but they have significantly better odds of getting into Wheaton. Carleton would be a hard get, but there’s a good chance they could get into St. Olaf.
Frankly, I’m surprised at the amount of pushback a number of posters have about this particular data point and insinuating that these more accessible schools must be inadequate in some way as they must only be making this list because their alums are getting a PhD on how to breathe oxygen from a no-name university whose diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
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I don’t think we are saying that. I think some of us are saying that the list has so many weaknesses that it is not very helpful in proving intellectual curiosity among a student body.
As you note, this list is composed of many reach schools. You already know the degree of intellect at them. Is Grinnell really more of an intellectual place than Princeton? Unlikely. Theyall have some kids who enjoy life of the mind topics, some less so, and kids with different cateer options
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