There is no good reason to get a Ph.D. ?

Graduate School
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<p>I found this comment on a blog: The</a> Ph.D. : Lawyers, Guns & Money</p>

<p>Because I don’t think just writing a great dissertation and having letters from big-name professors and a big fellowship is enough anymore. I think you need to have real teaching experience, be able to teach online,</p>

<p>I’m trying to be charitable and find a way to gloss this as something other than “Go **** Yourself.” Maybe, “Congratulations, go **** yourself.” I can just imagine this letter: “As a prominent gray eminence, I can attest to the fact that Dr. So-and-So’s dissertation was remarkable, a real intervention in the field, and s/he is also able to teach online.”</p>

<p>I’ll share some hard-earned wisdom here. There is no good reason to get a Ph.D. Most people do it because they were good at college. They sign up for grad school bent on repressing all knowledge of job markets. They are assisted by grad programs and grad directors in doing just that, through admissions coddling and lies. Early grad students go through coursework playing the same game they’ve always played, but more arrogantly. The motive force here is essentially to be patted on the head for being so smart by some imaginary person for whom one’s adviser is a stand-in, except that one’s adviser does not pat one on the head, but instead does not ****ing care. Why would they? You are just a graduate student.</p>

<p>Either then one graduates, in which case one continues to chase the approval of persons both imaginary (“You’re so smart!”) and real (“Maybe you’ll get tenure!”) These so-called Assistant Professors are insufferable, and spend lots of time blogging about how much work they have to do/have gotten done/how great it is to be an academic even in <strong><em>sville, Alabama because We Serve the Truth or some *</em></strong>. (If they are male, this will not be a public blog, it will be more like a stream-of-consciousness for an audience of one.) Most of these people get tenure and spend the rest of their lives as discontented ***<strong><em>s, fighting with department chairs for release time, begging an indifferent administration for a few dollars, and thinking of the most collegial-yet-subtly-cutting retorts with which to jab other academic pricks who really just want to be patted on the head at conferences. Every now and again you will publish a middling-to-stupid article in Who Gives A *</em></strong> Quarterly which will be read by ten people, all hoping to nit-pick it and score points in the reckoning, again, of someone who does not exist.</p>

<p>Or else you get out of grad school and do something nice with your life. Or, better yet, you never go. Choose wisely!</p>

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<p>“Academic work is not a “hobby” you just happen to get paid for. It is not a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. It is not Nerd Heaven. As far as I can tell, these seem to be the chief, if implicit, good reasons people can give for getting a PhD. They’re not good reasons to get a PhD! They’re just happy delusions!” - Dave the commenter.</p>

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<p>I commented about this on another thread, but it really depends on the major and what you wish to accomplish. If you are a Psych, or sociology major, just plan on going to grad or professional school after undergrad. If you are an engineer, then you really don’t need a PhD to get a job. But for those of us in many of the physical sciencs (Chemistry, Biology, Micorbiology,etc) it is a given that you have to go to graduate school, or professional school after undergraduate.</p>

<p>In my company, the PhD new hires are the highest paid (~$90K starting). I entered with a B.S. in chemistry making $42K, but I was lucky because the company just started to hire B.S. chemist after about 10 years of not doing so. </p>

<p>If you want a job, you just need a B.S. But if you want to control your destiny, and really do something w/ yourself, and don’t want to work for someone the rest of your life, then I would suggest getting a graduate degree. Too many times we tell young people to go to school, get in debt to attend the school, so that they can get a “good” job to pay off the debt they acquired trying to get the good job. This is the worst message to send to kids. We are teaching them how to become good slaves, and not masters of their own destiny. Everybody is not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, so the vast majority of people need educational instruction in certain fields to be succesful. But even then, everybody I entered my company (including me) see that we don’t want to sit in cubicles for the rest of our lives; therefore, many of the new hires, espically form my university and about three others have left the company I am with. We worked too hard for too little.</p>

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<p>Because I don’t think just writing a great dissertation and having letters from big-name professors and a big fellowship is enough anymore. I think you need to have real teaching experience, be able to teach online,</p>

<p>This comment is pretty much indicative that this commenter knows very little, if anything, about the academic job market. Search committees don’t care about your teaching experience, and they certainly don’t care if you can teach online. Not the ones at brick-and-mortar, research institutions anyway. They don’t even care whether your dissertation is great because they are not going to read it (although it helps if the topic is “hot” in your field at the time).</p>

<p>What they care about is your research, point-blank. Big name fellowships help, but that’s because they demonstrate that you can win research funding at an early point in yoru career. They care about your publications, and they care whether it looks like you will be able to set up and maintain a research lab with the appropriate personnel and funding for your field.</p>

<p>I’m not saying that PhD programs are all peaches and roses and that the job market is a walk in the park, but saying that the job market is difficult and that there are few jobs is not the same as saying there’s NO reason to get a PhD. It depends on what you are getting the PhD IN. In my field, there’s lots of work outside of the traditional tenure-track job. Aside from the fact that schools of public health and MPH programs are popping up everywhere now, there are think tanks and government and military agencies that want people with PhDs in public health. You can parlay it into a policy career; you can work in a department of health for a city or county; there are several things you can do with a PhD in this field. People with PhDs in the biomedical sciences and biotechnology fields can find lucrative careers doing research and development for industry, and there are far more jobs in academia for them. People with PhDs in statistics/biostatstics/mathematics can have lucrative careers in insurance and financial management. People who get PhDs in management and accounting have their pick of the field because there are more tenure track positions than PhDs in those fields to fill them.</p>

<p>It depends on the FIELD, not the PhD itself. Sure, if you are the millionth person to get a PhD specializing in 19th century American history or literature, then it’s unlikely you’ll get a tenure track job at Brown or even Podunk State. But a person with a PhD in accounting has a reasonably good chance at getting a tenure-track job, and a person with a PhD in chemistry has options outside of academia should they choose not to get a tenure track job. There are a lot of careers outside academia that require or recommend a PhD.</p>

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<p>Well, to be clear, there are plenty of less research-intensive schools (i.e. the LAC’s) that place a far greater emphasis upon your teaching. Research still carries some weight, but far less intensely than at the major research universities.</p>

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<p>What do you guys think of this comment?

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<p>I’m interested in why these reasons for getting PhD are called delusions. He doesn’t really give reason for it.</p>

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<p>What he’s getting at, I think, is that there’s a common misconception that as an academic you can study whatever you want. That’s not true. As an academic your career is tied to publishing, and publishing is tied to a small subset of “hot” topics within your field. If you veer off the field’s current focus in order to pursue something that interests you, you’ll probably not be able to publish in top journals and you’ll probably be unemployed before tenure.</p>

<p>On the other hand, once you hit tenure you can do whatever you want (though that’s something like 5-7 years of PhD studies, 2 years of a post-doc, and 6 years tenure-track down the road… and it assumes that you don’t care about post-tenure promotions such as full professorship, chaired positions, administrative positions, etc). Of course, it’s not guaranteed you’ll find an academic positions or that you’ll hit tenure even if you’re publishing in a “hot” area.</p>

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<p>Yes, but you can often get this while pursuing a Ph.D. I got my teaching experience (several years) as a TA during grad school, mostly as an instructor not assistant, and this was important in landing my first job.</p>

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<p>@snarlatron: What’s your field?</p>

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<p>@XaviFM: Language & Literature - All positions I applied for required teaching experience.</p>

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<p>Lawyers Guns and Money, the source quoted by the OP, is an academic blog. The writers and most of the commenters there absolutely do know what they are talking about. However, it is a legal/history/poli sci/IR blog, so it does not, and is not intended to, apply to all fields.</p>

<p>The quoted post was directed towards History PhD students attending top-tier but non-elite programs.</p>

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<p>the reason for getting a phd is that you really are fascinated by a subject, not that you are good at being in school. all the kids that are good at being in school generally do not make it through grad school because you are not patted on the head and told that you are smart- quite the opposite. you realize just how little you know.
i don’t know about humanities but in terms of biology research i can’t imagine anything i would rather do. when i see people living for the weekends i know that i made the right choice even if only 5 people in the world know what i am talking about. additionally, you learn how to think, analyze and overcome problems. there is not end to the amount of growth that one undergoes not only during their phd but also afterwards with the toolkit they have developed.</p>