The PhD Reckoning

This has been a really tough year for the Academia in the US. The new presidential administration has unleashed a flurry of attacks on it, singling out some institutions more than others. A recent tweet by a researcher at Harvard bemoaned the fact that she was unable to get any of her grants renewed, and as a consequence one of her postdocs will become jobless. This is indeed a very difficult and regrettable situation, especially since their research seems to be in the field with direct relevance for public health. And my heart goes out to the poor postdoc, who will now have to make some extremely stressful and difficult life decisions.

But the big picture is that the vast majority of PhDs will not be able to even get a postdoctoral position. I could have only dreamed about getting one of those. After a few term positions teaching at small liberal arts colleges, many years ago I finally decided to ditch the academic career altogether, and focus on something that is far more valuable - building a family. I moved to a remote small town in Midwest where my wife had a tenure-track position. The town was far away from any professional centers, and I had to figure out how to build another career, with no resources, no professional or personal network, no access to any close technical job markets, and no nearby educational institutions where I could upskill or reskill. All while navigating the unforgiving Scylla and Charybdis of the US immigration. Those were tough, depressing times.

Unfortunately the US Academia produces a glut of PhDs, with absolutely no regard for the professional or career prospects of those PhDs. The latest figures put the number of newly minted PhDs in the US at 58,000. Arguably the only jobs where PhD level skills are directly relevant are those in Academia itself, but those jobs have been becoming increasingly hard to get. The latest estimate is that there are only about 10,000 - 12,000 tenure track job openings in the US each year. Some fraction of the surplus is captured by the postdoc market, but not enough to make the whole system sustainable.

PhD education is primarily subsidized from two sources of funding - grants from the government and the paltry teaching stipends that most PhDs have to resort to. There are ethical problems with both of them. The government funding is, obviously, downstream from taxes. So we are asking the public to pay for (costly) skill acquisition that in most cases have absolutely no practical value. The response to this argument is that the value of (PhD) research is that it expands human knowledge. OK, maybe. But the fact is that 80-98% of all PhD theses are never cited. IMHO, the problem is even worse than that. There is a very powerful publishing-citation cartel in place that operates through you-cite-my-student-I-cite-yours mechanisms. So in other words, it is highly unlikely that the PhD system we have right now in place is even close to being the optimal system for creating new insights and knowledge.

Another challenge to the skeptical view of the value of PhD is that those programs help create objective, rigorous thinkers, something that is valuable across the board in our society. This is a variation on the “transfer learning” theory of the value of education, which, I am sorry to say, has not been verified through any kind of actual empirical study. A few attempts to validate it have been, at best, inconclusive. And anyone who has sat through a single faculty meeting would find the notion that these people are “objective, rigorous thinkers” laughable.

From my own experience I can tell you that outside of research roles, there are no positions anywhere in the professional world where the kind of deep, scholarly work that you are taught to engage in academia is valued. In fact, you will have to retrain yourself not to think along those lines. You will have to learn how to quickly come up with solutions to problems, and in vast majority of cases that entails knowing to apply a preexisting template in a specific and particular way.

Finally, there is the question of the value of deep dive into a topic as means of personal growth and development. This argument resonates the most with me. I’ve been doing something like that my entire life. However, this is, to put it in economic terms, a luxury good. It is something that’s nice to have, once I have a roof over my head, and my family is not starving. I certainly don’t expect anyone else to foot the bill for those pursuits, and I have no expectation that they will in any direct way help my professional career.

We have to come to grips with the fact that the modern academia has painted itself into a corner in terms of its societal benefits. Whether they want to admit it or not, the existence of a PhD program is a signal about a viability of a particular professional path. And those signals have been over subsidized for many generations. The vast majority of people who obtained a PhD would have been much better off starting their professional journey outside of the academic-research matrix far, far earlier in their lives. We finally need to come to grips with that fact and reshape our institutions to better reflect it.

You may or may not have noticed that none of my arguments above have made any mention of the 8,000,000 lbs gorilla in the room: AI. All of the above arguments have been relevant a decade ago, two decades ago, or even much earlier. And through it all the system chugged along, with no urgency to change or reform. However, the advent of very powerful AI that can generate a PhD level research report within a few minutes, may finally usher in the much-needed restructuring. The change, unfortunately, like any change that is imposed by forces outside of one’s control, will be very painful and disorienting.