" … In his new book, “The Graduate School Mess: What caused It and How We Can Fix It,” he proposes a plan to solve the problems that have cropped up in grad schools in recent years. He explains why the system isn’t working here:" …
The average time to degree is too long, and it’s definitely inflated by the competition. Back in the day, new PhD graduates weren’t expected to have a publication or a book in order to get a tenure-track job. Nowadays, science PhDs are expected to have several publications before getting a job, and humanities PhDs often have to have a book under contract and another viable project underway. Science PhDs also have shorter times to degree, but often have to do 1-3 postdocs after graduate school to be competitive for university jobs. With grants being more difficult to get, science and social science PhDs are also increasingly expected to come in with grant-writing experience and ideally a grant in hand.
It’s ridiculous. The expectations are too high. Search committees are expecting to plop a fully formed professor in the slot rather than do some career develop and individual mentoring.
But…he didn’t actually suggest any ways to fix it in the article. Instead, the article was an advertising piece for his book. I also expected him to outline a few more problems with the system. Times to degree and the attrition rate aren’t problems with the system - they are symptoms of problems with the system.
If you’ve been reading the Chronicle of Higher Education anytime between now and the 1980s, or living as an academic during that time, this is nothing new. The important thing is to make college freshies and sophomores understand before they get emotionally attached.
YES. I wish more professors would be honest about the job market with their students when they express an interest in getting a PhD and becoming a professor. I’m not an academic anymore, but when students ask me for advice on getting a PhD I feel an obligation to tell them how awful the job market is.
I started this thread several months ago in response to PhD comics. It is relevant to this discussion.
The are things that Leonard Cassuto says that are not true. Some of these counter arguments I made in this previous thread, but I will make them again.
- Leonard Cassuto says...
This is wrong…The time it takes to get a PhD decreased significantly from 1988 to 2013
By over a 1 year across all fields-> http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/data/tab31.pdf
- Leonard Cassuto says...
Where is this figure coming from? Again, it is wrong. In 2008 the national attrition rate was 57%.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/01/graduate
This number has been improving, and it is as high as 70% to 80% at some universities.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/changes-rackham-help-boost-doctoral-degree-completion-rate
- Leonard Cassuto says...
Exaggerated for scientists and engineers → http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/data/tab31.pdf
Life Science - 6.9 years
Physical Science - 6.5 years
Engineering - 6.6 years
I know that, in physics, it’s typical of graduates from top-30 schools to publish 3+ articles to even have the ability to defend their dissertation…
Indeed. I’m surprised the WaPo would publish such a thing.
Do we know that they are not? OTOH, shouldn’t a 20-something also be responsible?
Son’s best friend from high school was encouraged by his UCLA profs to apply to their PhD program. He did and was accepted. Hated it, but took the MA and is now making bank. (Comp Sci/Eng type.)
Well, I know that they are typically not. Professors all do different things, and some of them may be more upfront about the job market than others - but in my experience, and in the experiences of the vast majority of doctoral students and postdocs I talk to, their advisors (from college through the postdoc) were not honest with them about the market. Comments ranged from simply omitting important information to willfull self-delusion.
And I mean, they suffer from survivor’s bias, too. The ones teaching us - especially on the graduate and postdoctoral level - are largely the ones who made it, and the ones who typically had a smooth ride of it. My graduate advisor went straight from undergrad (also an HBCU, like me) to grad school to a prestigious 2-year Ivy League postdoc to an Ivy League professor position. In fact, his trajectory is one of the reasons I selected him as an advisor. My secondary advisor had a similar trajectory - undergrad, grad school, a postdoc - that he hated but that was nonetheless at a top university - a stint at an R2 in a desirable city followed by successively moving up to a prestigious R1 in an even more desirable city and then an even more prestigious R1, all of which were able to solve his two-body problem with his wife in the same field. None of the other professors in my department had struggled with employment - or at least, they didn’t discuss it.
And they rarely discussed job market stuff, either. Occasionally one of my departments would have a seminar on the nuts and bolts of it. The other department ignored it altogether, aside from the DGS sending around some job ads. But there was no talk of how hard the market was or what a competitive applicant looked like. The assumption was simply - you went to Columbia, you’ll find a job.
I think the prevailing attitude is that college students are adults and they’re supposed to do adult things. But although they are legally adults, they are brand new adults - they’re still adolescents in terms of developmental stage. It’s like expecting a baby who just learned to walk to run a 5K with you. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should be responsible for the course of their own lives, but I’d argue turning to an experienced mentor is the responsible thing to do. You expect those experienced mentors to be straight with you about your career prospects.
Besides, when you’re 21 you have no idea. I was 21 when I graduated from college and headed to a PhD program, and I knew how to Google. I read all of the reports online about how the academic market was shrinking and it was difficult to find a job, and how the competition was increasing. I had decided that I didn’t want to chase academia at the time, for a variety of reasons. But it wasn’t because I thought I couldn’t do it. People who are 21 and headed to PhD programs are used to being the cream of the crop - even the cream of the cream. They’re the ones at the tops of their classes at Harvard or Amherst or Wisconsin or Ohio State; they have never significantly failed, by and large, and are used to being the best and the brightest. It’s easy to reason “Sure it might be hard for NORMAL people to get a job; it won’t be hard for ME to get a job, because I am special and uniquely competitive. I’m going to rock and roll in graduate school and be a superstar and roll into an academic job straight away.” In fact, I said if I was going to be an academic, I’d just skip the postdoc altogether. Ha!
You don’t realize concretely at 21 that when you go to graduate school you will be one of MANY who are also the best and brightest; you don’t know what that means in practice. And you don’t realize how small the ratio of worthwhile positions to applicants truly is. So yeah, I think 21-year-olds maybe have the responsibility, but professors have an even greater responsibility to inform their students, because they are mentoring from the position of experience and wisdom. If I saw a dude about to jump into shark-infested waters for a leisurely swim, I’d at least warn him about the sharks so he could decide for himself whether he wanted to take the risk.
I agree that professors have a responsibility to tell their advisees the “facts of academic life” and some of us do that. Nevertheless, as a parent, I know that young adults often know better than those who are giving advice and for better or worse university professors often become role models for bright students who have ambitious plans. How easy it is to tell a promising scholar that it is a bad idea to become highly educated? I know that both my brother and I never were in doubt about the fact that we wanted a Ph.D. and to be university professors. No one could have convinced us otherwise at the age of 21.
So what can professors do? Well, we can let our undergraduate advisees know that there are many rewarding careers which do not require a Ph.D. and we can tell our Ph.D. students that there are many ways to use that education outside of an academic setting and that it is still valuable to have done it. Finally, we can post on places like this forum letting questioners know that a Ph.D. should be pursued only if one would regret not doing it afterward and that the earnings lost during the 5 or more years of graduate school will not be recovered simply by having that Ph.D.
Responsible faculty do this and also endeavor to have their students complete their Ph.D.s in a reasonable time (I always try for 5 years from the B.S. in physics).
My major concern (aside from some of the facts being wrong) about the articles like this specific one in the washingtonpost is this…It is a across the board criticism of the academia.
There is a major difference between the value of a PhD in applied physics, engineering, or many life science areas versus humanities. Across the board criticisms confuse and unnecessarily discourage potential students. In 2013, humanities and social science PhDs represented only ~27% of all PhDs earned. This is down from ~31% in 1983…and probably down from more than that is you go back 40 years into the 1970s.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/data/tab12.pdf
Why do people insist on giving a horror story about a humanities PhD career in an effort to represent the life of all grad students and all professionals in academia?
I would go one step further. If Leonard Cassuto is a fair representative of the quality of Harvard AMs/PhDs (in English?), then maybe they should close down the graduate programs (in English?) at Harvard. No critical analysis skills whatsoever, and over-simplification/over-generalization/over-sensationalization to the extreme.
It appears more people are getting the idea!
I halfway agree: it depends on how we’re discussing getting a PhD. If we’re talking about a transition to academic jobs in and of itself, things are better but not great in the sciences. The job market is still tight in those fields, and the slog to a tenure-track job is still long: 5-6 years of PhD work followed by 2-4 years of postdoctoral work, or even more. Many science PhDs are doing 2 or even 3 postdocs to be competitive for professor positions, and grad school + 2 postdocs means 3 different moves. It also means 7-10 years of low-paid labor - even if you are a bright-eyed 22-year-old when you begin, you’ll be 32 years old (at least) when you’re just starting on the tenure-track with a workable middle-class salary for a family.
Now, if we tell students these truths upfront and they use their time in the PhD program to prepare equally for academic jobs and non-academic possibilities…well, that’s fine. And many PhDs in the STEM fields - and even several social science fields; my field (psychology) is pretty widely useful outside of academia - have lucrative and ample possibilities open to them besides academia, if they do some research and find out about them.
How bad is the market for PhDs in Economics (Industrial Organization / Microeconomics etc) from top departments? Can they get into consulting and economic forecasting jobs at Fortune 500 type companies and in government etc if they fail to get into academia?
Are the prospects better for PhDs in Economics or Business / Finance?
I guess what I am asking is, are the prospects for PhDs in Economics similar to those in STEM or Humanities? Thanks
I was going to ask something similar, about how all of these points stand in relation to business schools? I rarely see a business PhD on these forums, but I assume much of this is true for the"softer" areas like management, organizational behavior, etc?
…so I like looking up data 
Originally I posted NSF data from (1988 to 2013)
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/data/tab31.pdf
It showed time-to-degree since bachelors as going from 10.6 to 9 years. This motivated me to look further back.
I found one NSF report going back to 1978 (page 3)
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/nsf06312.pdf
In 1978 the time to degree was 9 years…just like it is today. Interestingly there was a sharp increase from 1978 to late 1990s to up to 10.8 years. This was followed by a sharp decrease in the 2000’s and 2010’s back to 9 years.
Going back even further I found a document that went back to 1920 (page 48 in adobe reader or page 36 in the document itself.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/pdf/nsf06319.pdf
In 1975 (40 years ago) the time to degree was ~9 years…just like today. In fact the time to degree varied from 8 to 9 years between 1942 and 1975 (e.g. it was also ~9 years in 1945). You would literally need to go back to 1940, before the US entered WWII, to see a PhD take less than 8 years across all fields.
As for this comment by Leonard Cassuto
It’s nonsense, and it should not have been published in the Washingtonpost.
I like the since starting graduate school statistic better than since bachelors. Of course any people don’t start graduate school right away but the key is how long it takes once one starts.
That’s why I hate these artificially drawn “divisions” between groups of fields. Content-wise, you get weirdness going on - anthropology has very humanistic aspects to it and in some ways has more in common with humanities; history has very social science aspects to it; and a particular given anthropologist might function/do scholarship more like a humanist than a social scientist. Psychology sort of straddles the social and natural sciences, particularly in some subfields; biology, especially some subfields, can have a lot of social sciency aspects to it.
But the other thing is career-wise splitting them up this way implies the STEM PhDs always have an easier time getting non-academic positions than non-STEM PhDs in the social sciences and humanities. It’s really more dependent upon your field, and drilling deeper than that, it depends on the kind of research that you do within your field. For example, quantitative psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the development of statistical methodologies for psychological research; a quantitative psychology PhD (or a heavily quantitative political scientist, for example) probably has better non-academic job prospects in the world of data science and quantitative finance than a biologist or a chemist who doesn’t use statistics - or even a physicist who does not (I recently met a physicist who does not use any statistics in her work, and she admits to not knowing much about it).
The other question is “for what?” Most marketing jobs, for example, ask for social science majors. I think a PhD in anthropology or sociology has a better shot at those kinds of jobs than a PhD in mathematics or engineering. I say this to mean that I don’t think that STEM PhDs have more applications in the non-academic world; rather, I think STEM PhDs have more applications in the non-academic world that don’t require a complete re-imagining of the work that they do and the value that they offer. It doesn’t take much imagination for a PhD in electrical engineering to go from doing research in academia to doing research for AT&T or Apple, or to go work as a professional engineer; it doesn’t require struggle for a PhD in math to imagine doing quantitative finance or other mathematical modeling positions outside of academia.
It’s harder for anthropologists and historians and English literature scholars to imagine counterparts in the non-academic world - even though I very much do know of people who are not academics who are paid to essentially be anthropologists, historians, and literature scholars in the private or public non-academic sector, as well as people who use the skills from those PhDs to do different things.
With that said, economics PhD holders have good prospects for two reasons. One, their quantitative expertise and knowledge of something that is very remunerative in the non-academic world (economics) does make them in demand, both at private companies (banks, insurance firms, investment/hedge funds, etc.) and public sector type jobs (World Bank, IMF, UNESCO, whatever). Two, the very fact that their skills are so in-demand outside of academia - and that they are so well-paid there - means that the competition for actual academic jobs is lower than it is in other social science fields. So it’s also a bit easier for them to get jobs within academia.
The same is true of business PhDs on a much larger scale. There’s actually a shortage of business PhDs to teach at U.S. business schools, particularly in the fields of accounting and finance. So a PhD in accounting, if they wanted to be an academic and had a decent/average publication/research record, could probably find a great academic job. But yes, there’s tremendous value for business PhDs outside of academia - although of course that’s going to vary based on subfield (the PhDs in finance will very likely come out way better compensated than the marketing PhDs, and both may have an easier time finding employment than management PhDs). It’s also going to depend a lot on their experience.
Going back to the earlier discussion, how do business PhDs fair in terms of the competition for academic jobs, number of publications needed, grant writing experience, and years of post doc experience before gaining a tenure track position? I’ve chosen the route of management/organizational behavior to do social psychological research because of the perceived health of the job market for this field, and the opportunity to potentially teach as a business professor (better compensated) or a psychology professor (social or organizational focus). Being that my research interests touch on these 3 areas, does the interdisciplinary aspect of my chosen field suggest slightly better or increased number of opportunities, assuming reasonable success in the PhD program?
My edited comment didn’t save, but I wanted to add that I realize social psychology PhD students also get jobs in business schools. I have been told OB programs are typically (somewhat) less competitive for admission (especially with my interests in emotions and intergroup relations, which are common interests in social psychology and less common for business applicants, considering my strong research fit for faculty in both fields) and that many programs collaborate heavily with the psychology departments. After working for 5 years as an HR manager the interdisciplinary focus is important to me, regardless of whether job prospects are any better in the business world - but it’s always good to know what I am getting myself into.