Reform the PhD System or Close It Down 487
jamie points out an opinion piece by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in Nature News decrying the state of PhD education in the US, calling it "broken and unsustainable." Quoting:
"The necessary changes are both curricular and institutional. One reason that many doctoral programmes do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia. Expertise, of course, is essential to the advancement of knowledge and to society. But in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields. Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible. If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come from faculty members, who all too often remain committed to traditional approaches."
"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:2, Insightful)
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
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No, it is similar in the US for many Chemistry majors. They often end up running a QC bench without a PhD.
A PhD these days is more often a certification, can you work on a large nebulous problem? Can you work continuously for four or five years on a problem? Can you work with limited direct supervision?
Students do work in their sub-field or sub-subfield. Sometimes they get a truly relevant job, sometimes they get a job in that general area, sometimes they go completely afield. It just depends.
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Right. My wife is a PhD chemist, and she has worked in multiple non-related industries, all totally non-related to her fairly obscure PhD thesis topic.
They expect her to figure stuff out on her own and find a solution. A PhD does not guarantee that you have those skills, but it is an indicator that you may have acquired them at some point.
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I agree with all of this. I bitched and moaned in the other thread last night that complained about worthless PhDs and a foreign takeover of the scientific community, or some such conspiracy.
Unrated to this reply, but back OT, while I love The Journal Nature, I really do not think the chair of the religion department at Columbia is exactly qualified to tell a fresh post-doc that their degree is worthless because their thesis was on the mitosis of toilet bacteria and their first job is investigating HIV in
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Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:5, Funny)
If I go to school that long, the last thing I want awarded to me is Dr. Phil.
Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is similar in the US for many Chemistry majors. They often end up running a QC bench without a PhD.
A PhD these days is more often a certification, can you work on a large nebulous problem? Can you work continuously for four or five years on a problem? Can you work with limited direct supervision?
Students do work in their sub-field or sub-subfield. Sometimes they get a truly relevant job, sometimes they get a job in that general area, sometimes they go completely afield. It just depends.
from the link in my sig:
"The undergraduate sits back waiting to be filled with learning. The Professor speaks, the undergraduate absorbs. Regurgitate the data on a few tests correctly enough and you are home. The Ph.D., on the other hand, means that you have done some original research. Sounds simple, but what it really means is that you have to be constantly defending yourself, explaining what you did and why. It leads to questioning all of the work of everyone else. Why did they do it this way? Were their conclusions correct, their evidence airtight, their reasoning sound? You need to be a skeptic. A doubter, a demander of proof. A B.S. given an SOP might think it comes down from on high, cast in stone. He or she will handle it with care. A Ph.D. will immediately get out a hammer and beat on it to see if any rotten pieces fly off."
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Preach on, brother!
As a former PhD candidate I've hired many a former hard sciences student to do completely unrelated work in the area of business. They have all done extremely well. In my experience there are only 2 qualifications for a job. Intelligence and motivation. If you are bright and motivated, you'll do fine. Lacking intelligence, I'll take motivation. Without motivation.... well, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
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Not necessarily - I'm doing a PhD and have no plans to stay in academia. I do not expect to receive any direct benefits from the degree after I graduate, it's just something I like to do. The PhD studies are free in my country so why not take the opportunity.
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I had culture shock when I went to university. In high school I felt a lot of people were just goofing off and slacking; druggies and delinquents. I felt that when I got to college I'd be surrounded by more serious people or at least the top of their class. Boy was I wrong. (not that I was a serious person myself) Then when I went to the corporate world, I felt that at least I'd be surrounded by mature people, and I was wrong there too. Then when I went back to grad school I felt that I'd finally be s
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Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
Even in that case, the PhD system has a serious problem: 1 professor can, and is usually expected to, shepherd more than one student through the PhD process(plus, many research labs would basically fold without the available supply of cheap but highly skilled grunt labor). Thus, the supply of PhDed candidates who want academic jobs increases substantially faster than established professors can die or new professorships can be created.
It is certainly true that, for many PhD students, an academic job is th
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They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems.
So... what are engineers?
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There continues to be confusion between PhD meaning "crazy high level of applicable education", and PhD meaning "specialization and expertise in a narrow field". Commercial and social interests want the first definition of PhD, some certification that means "this person is a top tier and well rounded member of his field who knows everything we want him to know", and the academic need of someone who is an expert in a narrow field of sufficiently believable level that he can advance the art.
These are two real
Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:5, Insightful)
"The 'great minds' earning PhDs in life sciences, probably would never be useful in the world of 'real' science anyway,"
Yes, that is snobbish, and certainly blinkered much like what the article was complaining about. Next time you come down with a life threatening disease, I want you to refuse any treatment that was not done using 'real' science.
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'In Physics at least, specialisation can lead to some very useful and broadly applicable findings. Granted, sometimes completely unexpectedly. I can imagine the same is not true for a highly specialist life sciences PhD.'
http://xkcd.com/793/ [xkcd.com]
Driving license (Score:5, Interesting)
In Physics at least, specialisation can lead to some very useful and broadly applicable findings. Granted, sometimes completely unexpectedly.
Indeed. In the Sciences and in Engineering, a PhD is the equivalent of a "driving license" for doing research. It does not guarantee you'll be good at it, but the odds are much better than for someone lacking the qualification. It signifies that you can plan and execute long and intellectually difficult tasks in a particular field, which may include discovery of new knowledge (experiments) as well as detailed physical and mathematical analysis. It shows that you're qualified for certain types of demanding job, which are not in particularly short supply. A PhD in physics or engineering was a prerequisite for my job and for several of my colleagues, and we're in industry, not in academia.
TFA failed to delineate the subject matter, lumping all PhDs together as if physical sciences, bioscience, and engineering suffered from the same lack of utility as the humanities or social sciences. It appears that TFA really just dealt with the humanities which tend to have limited economic applicability (PhD in Religion, or in History of art, or in Etruscan statuary). In some cases they amount to little more than an expensive hobby.
Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:5, Interesting)
Well if you are avocation changing the system you need to lump them together. If the PhD are more often then not are becoming too specialized to be useful then the PhD system needs to change. Sure they are exceptions where some PhD offer enough generalization to show people to know that in order to meet any particular goal that you will need help in different areas. But those are the exception.
I would actually go further stating there is a larger problem with the education system in the whole.
At child at the age of 4 enters school and remains there until they graduate from high school at 17 year. (That is 13 years) Then they will directly go to college for 4 more years at 21 years old (17 years) Now in that process they weill decide what they want to do for a living. Well during that period education is the only system they know, so They choose to stay in education, So they will get 2/4 years of masters (If they want to stay as a k-12 teacher) and 8 years if they want to be a professor. So now we have Teachers and Professors who's life has been centered around education. Then they teach the next generation that repeats the process. What happens is there is a schism between skills and knowledge that people need professionally and what they need to advance in Education, and it will keep on getting worse if you leave the system unchanged.
Many Teachers and Professors (you can tell if you talk to them personally) despise commercial industry, but yet really know what is going on in it. They will focus on the areas where it has gone wrong but not where it has gone well. So they think we spend all our days in a real Dilbertesk like life. Education needs a infusion (A large one enough to change the schools culture) of professionals who are good at what they do to teach information that will be more practical for real life situation and really open up a dialog on how things really work.
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Education needs a infusion (A large one enough to change the schools culture) of professionals who are good at what they do to teach information that will be more practical for real life situation and really open up a dialog on how things really work.
Our licensing laws are a problem with this too. Knowing a lot about your field and how to teach someone what you know is often legally not enough - sometimes you need to be a education major (or close to it) to pass the requirements, but have little requirement
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More mandatory
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also, a lot of the "degree inflation" you are talking about has nothing to do with the number of degrees out there. It has to do with things like more and more jobs are technical, for every engineering job out there created requires an
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Further your consideration of mandatory education is more blind acceptance than factual. I have already said that diplomas a
Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score:5, Funny)
As in can in other fields.
Math, for example, has become so specialized that two people with PhD's in Math might study such diverse areas that they couldn't explain their work to each other.
Personally, I pride myself on having what may be the most useless PhD ever devised by man. My area is Literary Theory. I deal in texts. I am qualified for absolutely nothing, not even to bathe myself in the mornings. However, it gives me god-like powers in the comments sections of blogs.
I was able to make a decent living in academia, until I retired (the work was just too strenuous for me). Now I spend most of my time bathing myself in morning, commenting on Slashdot and playing Portal 2. Fortunately, my wife is still a working mathematician so the refrigerator continues to be refilled, somehow, with food and drink. Oh, I walk the dog, too. I am qualified to walk the dog.
No, I don't think there's anything wrong with the PhD system. I think it is a fine system. It has allowed me, someone who in other societies would have been a shaman or dead, with a way to keep occupied without hurting anyone but inattentive undergraduates.
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Yup - when I was working on my PhD I frequently found reading any kind of academic journal highly frustrating. I was at the top of my class in a top-10 university and yet outside of my very specific field the literature was just about incomprehensible, and I have a pretty wide variety of knowledge (in my opinion). Even within my field I found that papers often used needlessly obscure jargon - and not just because of the need for precision. I could understand them but could see how others who haven't read
Oh Come on (Score:5, Insightful)
"Increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia"
The language of number theory seemed to be an exercise in the technical until hundreds of years later we end up with encryption systems based on their very principles. How you can claim prior knowledge of what will be useful in future, I do not know.
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Yes yes, but this about context. What is meant is , there is some research that is increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia , and likely to remain so for a duration of time in which a graduate student's career choices will be made.
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Which ...
Electricity was considered a novelty at best, until practical uses were found for it ...
Group theory was considered esoteric and purely academic since it was invented in 1832 by Évariste Galois, until it was used in the Standard model of Particle physics ...
Most of current Mathematics is like this, and large swathes of of other science cannot get funding because no-one can see the current relevancy of it ...
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You missed it again *sigh* - in the duration where a graduate student as to make career choices. A hundred years, the time taken research you mention to be put to practical use, is actually slightly more than the average lifetime of a grad-student, no?
Research like "The migratory route of the Norther Wheateater" is unlikely to get you a job anywhere else apart from an ornithology department, and only those specializing in bird migration.
No one said it isn't useful to society. It doesn't help graduate stude
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It depends what you think a PhD is for ...
PhD's need to do proper research, but do not yet have a job and so either they do something in order to get a job, or they do something purely academic
If you reject a PhD because the subject of their PhD thesis is not relevant then you have missed the point, you do not employ a PhD because their thesis is useful to you, but because *they* are useful to you, they have shown themselves capable of doing the research and wo
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"Increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia"
A PhD is very often only relevant for academia. It might help also a carreer outside of academia, but in essence the work of a PhD should advance the research in the field of study - therefore advancing "academia".
Re:Oh Come on (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the opposite might be true in fields like computer science.
The PhD program is too focused on solving problems that Google or Microsoft kinds might also be tackling; like text data mining, network protocols characteristics, software engineering. Mostly conferences are heavily sponsored by industry and results that are of immediate use to the industry are present and the quality of a PhD is determined by the number of publications in such industry sponsored conferences.
Too many bodies, too few incentives. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets have a system where the professor is rewarded for doing their own research, rather than their ability to write grants and farm out the work to their subjugated minions.
Re:Too many bodies, too few incentives. (Score:5, Insightful)
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But, too many Ph.D.? Provided the challenges humanity is facing, I don't think so. However, I can accept the idea we have not yet found a way to take advantage of all of them.
If by "take advantage of all of them" you mean something like "pay them a living wage" then you are correct, we can not do that. There are simply too many.
Re:Too many bodies, too few incentives. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are not too many PhD's, there are too few grants (money) that are provided by our tax moneys. There's more job openings and research funded in the industrial military complex than in all the scientific research areas combined.
Re:Too many bodies, too few incentives. (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's ok if we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military?
I believe the GP's point is, if we're going to spend that kind of money, how about spending it on better ways of living that blowing shit up?
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Knee-jerk reaction of the Tea Party Troll. The Fed Gov'ment should PROTECT us, not make people ATTACK us because we wronged them. Keeping our guys safe would be easier if you kept them at home, not killing and raping civilians. It's war, people die on both sides, otherwise it would be genocide so protecting them is not really of importance, they're just cannon-fodder for the most part.
Maybe studying cow-farts will allow us to survive a few years longer on this planet instead of blowing us all to a nuclear c
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No, take advantage of them as in have them working on things which can be of use. From the article:
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...and Academia doing Industry research kills both (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many Ph.D.s? You bet. In the name of "solving practical problems", we've moved industry research into the universities, and killed off fundamental research.
Re:...and Academia doing Industry research kills b (Score:4, Interesting)
I never figured out why things went wrong
NIH started as a means to support fundamental biomedical research. It expanded from $4M in 1947 to 100M in 1957 and $1B in 1974 and $30B today. It became the way that biomedical research is funded, and dwarfs the NSF budget of $7B. Everybody wanted a piece of that pie, but it turns out to be tied up with political strings. Universities came to depend on research money that often exceed student tuition and state grants. But it's hard to justify basic science to congress - that's the whole reason NSF's budget is so much smaller than NIH - so NIH has been progressively steered towards clinical, applied, "translational" research. Other branches of science have been pushed in that direction, too, as they struggle to justify their existence next to curing heart disease and making the lame walk.
The argument for Government funded basic science used to be that we couldn't know what would come out of it, but that the simple process of discovery would result in unforeseen benefits. Society couldn't trust commercial enterprises to take such altruistic risks (although some of them did consider support of long-term, fundamental research part of good corporate citizenship or part of their own 20 year success program). Government now, at least in the US, has little foresight or capacity for long term planning. If the corporate attention span is one fiscal quarter, then the government attention span is one election cycle. So, we've sacrificed our long-term prospects for short term reward.
Don't eat the marshmallow yet.
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That may just mean that there are too few positions available.
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Did you mean to say, "let's have a system where no research is actually done"?
Important research cannot be done alone. And doing research with several people working on your projects requires receiving grants to be able to pay them. Doing all the paperwork to get those grants (which is not something we can get rid of) means that's the re
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Re:Too many bodies, too few incentives. (Score:4, Interesting)
Tenure, like "academic freedom", was instituted for the protection of university management. More specifically, the university management would get various donations-on-a-string from various political, business, or civic leaders, which would be deadly to accept, and impossible to turn down.
"Here's ten million dollars for research for the university; I've already notified the press. Its only condition is that you must teach Lefthanded String Theory."
Too many of those, and a dean's going to be fired no matter what. If nothing else, the conflict between the Lefthanded String theory which is demanded by the last donation, and Righthanded String theory which is demanded by the next donation... would cause conflicts.
By giving the teachers academic freedom, the school can say "I'm sorry, the contracts with the teachers prohibit me from telling them what they should teach." In the end, they're likely to get the donations anyhow, but without the hook, line, and sinker. Tenure does the same thing, but acts against politically charged rival assassination.
He gerneralizes (Score:5, Insightful)
He generalizes the situation in some subjects (e.g. philosophical sciences). The situation in natural sciences is different. Having a PhD in physics (and not being an idiot who does not look left or right) enables you to talk to a lot of people and understand a lot of people. And you usually get you degree in 3-5 years (after the master) and not 12. And yes, i agree with him, weed out the subjects in the PhD courses where people waste, badly supervised, their valuable lifetime and replace the PhD courses by more appropriate new topics and fields. My feeling however is that this is more a problem for the philosophical faculties than for the science faculties.
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This is why it is incredibly important to look at the various PhD programs in your field, and consider the average rate of PhDs earned vs attempted, as well as the average number of years before completion.
At least in American universities in Physics, there have been some PhD programs where a person might get a PhD in only 4-5 years. Seven is typical. But there are other programs where the average PhD takes 15-20 years.
That sounds seriously broken. In some cases, it is seriously broken. I think my fathe
Mark Taylor (Score:2, Insightful)
Mark C. Taylor's PhD is in religion [columbia.edu]. What was that about providing clean water to a growing population?
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LOL. Great point. The dude has two choices: (1) Get his guy to perform a miracle so that there is more clean water, or (2) Get his _other_ guy to stop banning birth control.
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Should men who "lie together" be killed? How about unfaithful women? It's in your bible... just saying... (okay, it would be fair to mod me -1 troll for this but I just can't resist the taunting...)
Eliminate the BS Ph.S. programs (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on. Seriously. I talk to these types several times a week a bar near the Arizona State University campus and it is amazing how obscure their research topics are. Indeed, I get the feeling that there are extra points awarded (in some sense) for the more bizarre and irrelevant your topic is. And you can just feel the inner sneer as they watch you try to process the title of their dissertation.
Some of these people understand that they are shouting in an echo chamber of one, and in their circle of nominal peers, that's freaking cool.
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Eliminate the bullshit Ph.D's in... philosophy.
Thank you for that. I haven't done a coffee spit-take on slashdot in a long time...
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Glad you noticed. ;-) Sorry to hear about your computer.
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Two things.
1. People need a specific subject for their PhD thesis. Normally, they are supposed to have a wide grasp of the field well beyond th
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"... might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on..."
You sure about that? Because Prof. Taylor himself has a doctorate in Philosophy (Copenhagen 1981), and he now heads Columbia's Department of Religion.
I read this more as a thinly-veiled attack on basic scientific research, actually.
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"political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on."
That shows how much you understand about research being a web of ideas. Maybe you think those ideas in the sciences grow on trees? Read Descartes sometime, he only invented algebra.
And it is clear you have never done science. Great ideas come from great analogies, those are frequently not from science.
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Hey, without the lit and philosophy majors, who are you going to talk to in the bars? Who's going to correct your grammar or point out the pun in the title "Eliminate the BS"?
The difficulty in a PhD in these fields is the requirement to do unique work. This is hard to do in the context of an artist like Shakespeare or Milton
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You might be surprised to know that works and suspected works by those authors are still being discovered, as well as writings of contemporaries. To say PhD's in anything but science, engineering and mathematics are worthwhile is indicative of an incredibly ignorant and narrow-minded world view. Just as one example, to understand relationships of people and groups of people is becoming ever more important as we invent new communication
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One of my old history professors did his thesis on how African American Teenagers Danced to Jazz (?) in the 1930s in Philadelphia.
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One of my old history professors did his thesis on how African American Teenagers Danced to Jazz (?) in the 1930s in Philadelphia.
And there are people that are glad that research was done. Seriously. And how teenage African americans danced to music in the 20s and 30s is what led to how a generation danced to music. I love science, engineering and technology but there is a lot more to life. I think people (not saying you) that look at higher education's goal as essentially a trade school are, well, narrow minded.
Entry barriers are set to low (Score:3)
I believe that the current inflation of PhD degrees is a direct consequence of the "everyone in university" attitude. I think that there is absolutely no point in giving a BA degree to pretty much anyone who enters university, because this produces an enormous mass of mediocre MS students, which then turn into way too many PhD candidates of dubious value. I include myself in this group, as I know full well that 20 years ago I would have not been admitted in a PhD program, let alone receive a degree. A PhD nowadays is an award to persistence, not excellence.
The inflation in titles is then carried on to the job market: more and more jobs are offered to candidates who hold a PhD, where a good MS would be more than enough. However, as a poster above noted, a PhD is basically taken as a certificate of being able to work independently (which, in may cases, is hardly true).
Treating PhD students as cheap labor is not doing a favor to anyone. I would find it much more honest intellectually to offer long-term internships for BA and MS students, instead of enrolling them to receive a higher degree which on the long run is devoided of all meaning.
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This attitude is most blatant for jobs requiring any sort of asso
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A PhD nowadays is an award to persistence, not excellence.
To strengthen your point, I don't know of anyone who failed his or her PhD. Some people abandon but if you stay there and get some results, you will get your PhD. In most labs I know, when a PhD student doesn't get anything because the project is badly designed (happen often) or because he or she is not up to the task, he or she gets shifted to someone else's subproject and gets a quick low impact first author paper. A PhD student failing is bad PR for the lab since it suggests to the university authorities
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This is the Age of the Internet (Score:3)
The goal should be to research something relevant (Score:2)
The goal should be to research something relevant, not to publish as many papers in as short a time as possible.
That's the core of the problem.
Very often, a reseach is actually broad enough to have some relevance... but in the race to maximize the publications, the research is cut up into tiny fragments which are then published.
Darwin wrote a single book that was relevant. Nowadays, that research would be distributed over at least 500 papers... making it nearly impossible to read. And you have to wait for s
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Re:The goal should be to research something releva (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be hard to argue that group theory was relevant when it was developed. Or early number theory. Maybe you'd have liked Einstein to have given several applications for his theory of relativity (hint: it was before space flight and GPS). Or how about quantum mechanics. How about modal logic, that was merely an academic curiosity before Tony Hoare and a host of others came along and made it relevant, relevant enough for Intel to care about mathematically proving facts about their chips.
Science is a web of ideas, start pruning before you even know whether something is useful is stupid and short-sighted. Here's a thought, science can chew gum and walk at the same time. It produces relevant stuff and stuff that you will not think will ever become relevant...until it does.
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Universities are graded, ranked and funded by the amount of papers they publish and the amount of students that graduate. Neither of those promote good research.
Ok, let's break the PhD system. (Score:2)
That would just mean stopping science. Performing actual research is the best way to learn a scientific subject. It's the only way, in a sense.
Professor of RELIGION (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that "Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor", pontificating on how research has become too specialized and non-understandable to the public at large, and "must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population" is himself a Professor of Religion. FTA:
"Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York and the author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). e-mail:mct22@columbia.edu"
Sort of easy to predict that, in fact. Because you know what? A person doing real, cutting-edge research, developing insights that no one else ever has before in history, is almost by definition going to be non-understandable by other people -- at least until such time as their research becomes diffused and more accepted by the mainstream. The call to "nourish cross-disciplinary investigation... focus on solving practical problems" is a thinly-disguised attack on basic scientific research. It's classic short-term thinking; if you demand profit/practical solutions right now, then the basic research that develops heretofore unimaginable solutions tomorrow will not be done.
Now, there's a lot of problems with PHD employment prospects, etc. But this is pretty damned skewed by how exceptionally non-useful this guys' graduates in philosophy and religious studies are. (I say this as someone with degrees in both philosophy and STEM.) I might suggest actual solutions would include: (a) Mandatory clear information provided to prospects about career and employment prospects, so they can make their own decisions on priorities. (b) Rollback the corporate-minded administrative takeover of higher education from faculty. (c) Return most teaching positions to being full-time tenured, instead of part-time contingent faculty as we have today, etc. The "make education practical/profitable" effort has been going on for 30 years, what we have now is the result of it, and it's time to stop digging the damn hole any deeper.
Re:Professor of RELIGION (Score:2)
Professor of Woo? (Score:2, Informative)
Before going to the article, I quick checked Wikipedia for "Mark C. Taylor".
First sentence:
I didn't read the article.
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If I wanted the thoughts and discussion of a proponent of a Demon Haunted World, I would go to BioLogos, not where I go for 'News for Nerds'. Really, Templeton Prize winners' wacky notions of reality are available all over the web, if you bother to explore a bit. I'm reading Slashdot for a reason, and Woo isn't what I'm looking for.
Glad this wasn't about MLK! (Score:2)
Not sure if many people here know, but one day I was searching for Martin Luther King's history and found a lot more than I wanted to know. Among these were that his name wasn't officially changed to Martin Luther and neither was his father's. Next I found that many people in the PhD programs discovered that King's PhD paper was largely plagiarized and would likely have been revoked if he weren't already dead. (Some still think it should be... I'm on the fence about it... what good would it do? None for
Bachelor's programs (Score:2)
Only a small percentage of students want careers in academia, but that is the field
Not US-specific (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not US-specific, it's like that in all western countries.
And it's actually meant to be that way. The academic world is the only place where fundamental research can be done, since the private sector has no interest in research that do not have direct applications.
If you want to do practical research, work as a R&D engineer in the private sector.
100% in agreement (Score:2)
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Return of Dark Ages? Monk Leads Crusade (Score:4, Interesting)
Taylor is really just advocating a return to the Dark Ages, where monks could sit around at ponder philosophies at little expense to their feudal masters. While that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin, this is not true for science. In science, mathematics, engineering and medicine, such specialized technical training is absolutely essential to even begin to understand the issues at the frontiers of science and knowledge. There is simply no way anyone can predetermine what odd fact or phenomenon will be at the heart of the next breakthrough nor learn enough fast enough not to specialize. Who would have thought that the properties of dielectric materials would spawn entire industries and revolutionize the way people communicate when they were first discovered in the 1840's? If you read the comment section of the article, Igor Litvinyuk's response was right on target.
What Taylor calls for is really a dismantling of funding for science under the ruse that it is hurtful to students. It is not at all surprising that Taylor points to the collapse of the research economy in the 1970's. Since this was precisely when the philosophy of Ronald Regan came into being, where "government is viewed as the problem" and the solution is for all power and wealth to be ever more concentrated into the hands of a few ultra-wealthy so that it can "trickle down" to the more deserving. Taylor's piece is little more than a call to return to the Dark Ages, where more and more money that otherwise might be spent on education and expanding the frontiers of knowledge that can be used to solve humanity's many pressing problems go instead toward yet another tax break for the wealth and an other special handout to the already well to do. They want to "reform" the PhD system because there are not enough jobs, by dismantling it. Same old sham, just repeated once again. One would think eventually people would be smart enough to recognize the consequences of such a disastrous philosophy being applied once again to yet another segment of our society.
They want reform because they fear the consequences of a lot of smart people sitting around thinking there has to be a better way. It is a threat that focuses attention on the real cause of the failure in the lack of jobs. Namely, that the ultra-wealthy, in whom we after nearly 40 years of the philosophy of Reaganism have consolidated virtually all the wealth and power, don't want to spend their money on advancing the frontiers of knowledge that might contribute to the solution of the myriad of problems plaguing society, they would rather spend it on themselves and upon maintaining their special, most fortunate status. Unfortunately, it is this system that is truly unsustainable, since the planet groans at the weight of billions all trying to achieve the same status. On such a planet, humanity will only survive if every job soon requires the skills inherent in a PhD. We need more PhD's not less. We need more education not less. To accomplish this we need less concentration of wealth to make it happen. We need more PhD's and fewer crusading monks who only seek a return to feudalism and a return to the Dark Ages. If you really want to solve the PhD job problem, not to mention most other societal, political and environmental problems work to end the consolidation of wealth in hands of a few not educated enough to recognize or just too comfortable not to want to recognize the danger inherent to humanity in the philosophy of Reaganism.
I question Dr. Taylor's credentials... (Score:2)
Not to say that our system is perfect - it most certainly is not - I'm just not sure he's the right guy to evaluate it.
Huh? (Score:2)
I haven't read the article. (After all, I'm on /..) I do have one question, though?
What drivel is this? The enhancement of knowledge is what doctorate level education is all about. If you don't want to pursue knowledge, jump out after your BS/BA or masters.
Flameworthy (Score:2)
whatever (Score:2)
But I miss Lingua Franca magazine. It served the purpose of cross-discipline communication informally.
Why cross-disciplinary? (Score:2)
Are you a virtual scientist if you work on a computer?
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I always wanted to be a PhD (Score:2)
Until I actually worked side-by-side with a few. Never in my life have I worked with anyone that (at least on paper) was a world authority in a very minuscule field of study, while at the same time showing close to no knowledge in pretty much everything else around them. It was depressing because I always assumed a PhD would be a really smart person that was an expert in that one particular thing, when in reality it felt like dealing with an idiot savant. Worse, all of this additional education resulted in
does the PhD matter? (Score:2)
Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible.
I understand this, and I've seen it myself. My fiance's cousin has a PhD in biochem. She had trouble explaining her thesis to just about everyone except her adviser. She couldnt explain her work as a lab assistant to anyone who didnt already know what she was doing. This seems like a problem that no amount of higher ed. learning can fix. Of course, i might be over generalizing. However, it's a problem that doesnt just plague the PhD educated under a broken system. Millions of people cannot communicate with
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However it's disgusting that you are so dismissive and even
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Re:The Whole Premise is Flawed (Score:5, Informative)
No one's delaying their release into the workplace to get a PhD so that they can make a better contribution to "the world," period. People pursue a PhD so that they can stay in academia, where they are comfortable and proficient, and make as much money in academia as an academic can.
I am working full time while obtaining my PhD. I am getting the PhD because it is teaching me to do the things that are required, and that I cannot learn elsewhere. While I have not delayed my entry into the workforce (I like money), one of the reasons that I am getting it is because I want to make a contribution to the world. Everyone has goals in life, and while some people have goals like "own box seats to the Packers", "pay for my grandchildren's college", and "backpack through Europe" others have goals like "make a difference in the world". These are what you want out of life, and I find your derision of "help the world" to be insulting.
Since academic institutions profit directly from the milling of PhD degrees
The idea that academic institutions make any money on PhD students is downright false. The fact of the matter (and I've spoken with numerous professors/advisors about this) is that "suckers pay for their PhD". This is a direct quote from Dr. Kapoor (http://www.nanovk.com/), who has had 40+ MS/PhD students. Nearly everyone obtains funding from a number of sources (I've only met one person who didn't, and they just didn't try), including:
1 - work on a grant project (if you do your dissertation on an aspect of the project)
2 - RA work (live in the dorms for free, get tuition comp'ed, and get little-$ for it)
3 - TA work
4 - the school itself
5 - their work (full time work/part time school)
6 - Work program (work pays you go go an get skills they are interested in, owe time afterwards)
7 - governmental aid program (non-loan)
8 - grant program/award (NSF or the like)
9 - outside agency help (NAACP or whatever)
10 - outside governmental involvement (foreign government sends people to America to be educated, brings them back afterwards)
Keep in mind that many of these program stack. You can sign up for RA work (free place to live and money) to have your tuition paid for (easy), get a NSF grant (not easy), work on funded projects for your major advisor (very easy), and get a bit of outside agency help (moderate). Of course you have to produce through this time.
Also, getting someone through their PhD is incredibly time-consuming on behalf of the professor and organization. Although the school is compensated for the classes, they have to compensate the student for project work. Then, they get to foot the uncountable-but-still-very-real cost of advising PhD students (~2 hours/week at ~$100/hour = ~$10K/year for 4-5 years) with professor time.
Re:The Whole Premise is Flawed (Score:4, Informative)
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"That traditional approach being stuffing whatever corporate-sponsored stuff into the heads of their students."
Never been in a PhD program have you. And by the way, this is somewhat the opposite of what the article was complaining about. If new PhD students were being stuffed with Business School Product ideas, then they'd be doing relevant research, wouldn't they.
Sometimes it helps to actually think before you...well...in your case...think.
Re:short-sighted (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, when Einstein published his theory of general relativity, nobody expected this to ever become relevant for anything beyond pure curiosity. Well, that's because nobody thought of GPS back than.
And when he was arguing against completeness of quantum mechanics, there's no way he could have imagined that his thoughts would one day lead to quantum cryptography.
When Kepler thought about the movement of celestial bodies, he would never have guessed that his insights would one day help with weather forecast.
When Heisenberg and Schrödinger formulated the equations of quantum mechanics, they didn't think of TV sets, computers, or the internet.
The inventors of the particle accelerator thought about studying particles, not about cancer therapy.
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When Heisenberg and Schrödinger formulated the equations of quantum mechanics, they didn't think of TV sets, computers, or the internet.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that quantum mechanics isn't required for TV sets, computers, or the internet. Sure, electronics, such as diodes and transistors is based on quantum effects, but no understanding of quantum mechanics is necessary to stick such components together.
You don't have to understand the fundamentals to make use of the peculiar, but repeatable observations.
That is not to say developing the theory was useless. Certainly, electronics were and are improved based on the fundamenta
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You don't have to understand the fundamentals to make use of the peculiar, but repeatable observations.
That "limb" you are going out on is called "ignorance". The components engineers "stick together" were invented by physicists based on discoveries arising from a deep understanding of quantum theory. Without quantum theory we would never have thought most of solid state electronics possible, much less been able to hit upon just the right combination of materials and dopants to create working transistor junctions.
Columbus discovered America by a combination of chance and ignorance (he had the diameter of t
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and some community colleges tend to be focused on getting a person a degree and trained for an actual JOB.