PhDs and time-wasting.

The Economist posted an article the other day about why PhDs are often a waste of time:

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

To that I’d like to add that as someone who spent 5 years in a business PhD program and then left to do something I found more interesting (research and writing for a broader, non-specialist audience, not to mention gardening and renovating), I think the problem exists for “professional doctorates” too.

If you’re at a top research school, the “practical value” that your degree has isn’t so practical. At my school, for example, people were socialized away from being interested in something like human resources, mostly through criticism and public humiliation, and socialized toward theory that never seemed to have much practical utility at all.

Let me say too that theory CAN be incredibly practical - theory drives practice in many ways. But some theoretical conversations, even in business, are extreme examples of navel-gazing - of interest to a handful of specialists who cite each other’s work and keep each other’s careers buoyant, and of not much interest or use to anyone else.

I started the Phd program because I was incredibly interested in following a particular idea to its natural end. I thought academia was the place to do that, the place to pursue ideas, and research and writing. I was mostly wrong.

The changes that have been ongoing in academia since the 1970s - changes that have to do with the rise of the economic story in higher education - mean universities aren’t what they used to be.

Ideas don’t get the same play that they once did. There’s an academic underclass forming, fewer jobs all the time, and yet my old school still posts on its webpage that their students who graduate go on to great positions and six-figure salaries. When classmates a couple of years ahead of me had a hard time getting jobs, eventually getting hired on different continents that they never wanted to go to, for not as much money as they had hope for, faculty seemed genuinely puzzled. I still don’t know if they were just willfully ignorant about the changes in the system or believed, as many of them do, that if you’re having problems, it must be your own fault somehow - not the system’s.

In my experience, PhD-land ended up being more about careerism and doing work that would get you graduated and then get you tenure at a school that would push your alma mater up in the rankings, regardless of what your true interests were.

When I finally figured that out, I decided to follow my own interests anyway. In my case, the research and writing that I did ended up in the book MONOCULTURE instead of in a PhD dissertation.

And I’m OK with that. The learning that I did at school was absolutely not a waste of time, but it was almost 100% self-directed and I had to fight for it, though because I had external funding (from national science councils instead of from my department), I had much more latitude to pursue my own interests while I was there.

But I found that where I was, the degree process itself, sad to say, was no longer about the learning. And that truly makes a PhD a colossal waste of time.

Comments

[Heather]

Wow - great post F - so excited to see Monoculture out there and to see you happy and writing and renovating and gardening....a much better use of your time I agree! :) h.

[FS Michaels]

thx Heather - I'm excited too -

[Elaine]

Yes, I agree with Heather. The academic community's loss is the publishing world's gain.

[FS Michaels]

Thx Elaine! Sweet of you -