The PhD glut
Gary North writes a beautiful article on the over-production of PhDs by universities in America.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north427.html
I have a personal interest in the subject, because I had the misfortune of wasting 4 precious years of my youth getting a PhD. Alas, I figured out only towards the end that I was wasting my time [and other people’s money]. It didn’t help in any subsequent job - note that I have been involved in fairly advanced technology. I would go as far as to say that for 99% of even advanced engineering jobs in the industry, a PhD is a waste of time. The point is not that I learnt absolutey nothing in 4 years, the point is it wasn’t worth 4 years, and it wasn’t worth the price the “system” paid to get me through that PhD.
Advanced engineering jobs do require specialized knowledge, but that is not is what is imparted in a typical engineering PhD. Instead, most of your time is spent churning out research papers, most of whom are of dubious value to anyone outside of a closed academic network (and even for those in the network, the primary value being their own career advancement), just to show that you can perform independent research. You can learn to perform independent research perfectly well in high technology industry, while doing more relevant work, and not requiring any kind of taxpayer subsidy.
Some quotes from North’s article:
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Academic departments grow in terms of the number of students enrolled. We know from Parkinson’s Law that growth is an institutional imperative. Administrators advance their careers by expanding the number of subordinates in their department. So, every academic department wants more students – students of a special kind. Students are not of equal value to a department. The lower-division student (freshman or sophomore) does not rate highly in the currency of academic resource allocation: the full-time enrollment, or FTE. The FTE figure is what justifies the hiring of a full-time faculty member. The lower the ratio, the better. It may take 15 lower-division students to generate one FTE. It may take only eight Ph.D.-level graduate students to generate an FTE. The more Ph.D. students a department can attract, the faster the growth of that department. This is the iron law of academia. All other economic laws are sacrificed for it, as the economist says, other things being equal. This fact of academic economic life creates an incentive for departments to enroll lots of graduate students. It also rewards those departments that persuade M.A. students to go into the Ph.D. program. Also, the brightest graduate students may be asked to do unpaid or grant-paid research for senior professors. The professors then publish the results of this research under their own names, thereby advancing their careers. It’s the division of labor at work. … Graduate students do not learn about supply and demand, and it does not pay senior professors to teach them. Here is evidence. In response to the ever-growing glut of Ph.D.’s, the American university system turned out about 30,000 Ph.D. graduates per year, 1969 to about 1975. Since then, it has increased the output. In 1980, it was 33,615. In 1990, it was 38,371. In 2000, it was 44,808. In 2003, it was 46,024. (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2006, Table 290.) Despite this, we read on a website devoted to selling “how to get higher learning degrees” materials, … Most degree-granting universities are funded by taxpayers. A university used to be an institution of higher learning that was authorized by a college-accrediting agency to grant the Ph.D. Employees of all but the most prestigious four-year colleges want to be called a university. So, title inflation has matched degree inflation and grade inflation over the last 35 years. The supply of college graduates with ever-lower academic abilities is funded by money coerced from taxpayers. The American higher education system is structured by the professorate to reward those professors who teach small classes of graduate students. So, year after year, decade after decade, the supply of Ph.D.-holding students increases, despite an academic market that does not hire most of them, and hires a minority at wages that do not compensate them for the money and time invested in earning their degrees. |