“More grads choose industry over PhDs: Survey data reveal decade-long trend away from graduate school” is a story from MIT’s student newspaper.
I ran into a faculty member who is doing research for the federal government on where to fund PhDs. “We didn’t used to have postdocs in engineering,” he said. “But now MIT has more than one postdoc per faculty member. There are nowhere near enough assistant professorships for all of the PhDs that we are generating. So we’re exploiting them by paying them $50,000 per year.” (Paying a market-clearing wage is apparently now generally accepted as “exploitation.”)
Related:
A Ph.D. in Engineering could conceivably get a job outside academia, unlike a Ph.D. in English literature, so we are not talking about as egregious an abuse as English departments conning gullible students into grad school and a lifetime of debt and poverty to get cheap labor and defend their turf in intradepartmental warfare.
The Freakonomics guys wrote an essay entitled “Why Drug Dealers Live with their Mothers”. Drug dealing is overall a lucrative business but most of the money goes to those at the top of the pyramid. It’s like an illegal version of Amway. So those at the bottom of the pyramid make hardly anything and can’t afford their own apartments. So why do they do it, given the risks of getting sent to jail, getting shot, etc. vs. the meager rewards? Because they know that Mr. Big at the top of the pyramid got started exactly the way they did – by standing out on a street corner and selling retail. Each and every one of them thinks that HE will be Mr. Big someday . And it is in the interest of Mr. Big for his flunkies to believe this and to do all the hard work and provide him with cheap labor .
What goes on with postdocs is EXACTLY the same thing.
@Izzie L.: Same as law school.
I recognize that going to law school also carries a risk of going to jail or getting shot, but otherwise, it is nothing like drug dealing.
Seriously, I did the “big law” thing for a little while and it does also operate on the same pyramid basis. Same for banking, consulting, sales, etc. – if it wasn’t for false hope, most people wouldn’t have any hope at all.
@Izzie L.: Good analogy. Same goes for sports.
PhD programs are nothing but pyramid schemes. Professors and universities know it, but try to rationalize it by saying they are offering training/mentoring. Let’s not even mention the humanities, most of which are a waste a of time as a career and should only be pursued by the idle rich (e.g. women married to successful men with high income).
In the sciences, students are told what a great privilege it is to do science and get a stipend of $1500 a month. What they are not told is that it is a gamble where you on average will spend 6-7.5 years working in a lab 50-60 hours a week for a tenure-track professor who is also gambling for his shot at tenure.
Perhaps the only use I got out of it was that it was a passport for me to move to Europe where the job security (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_security) and benefits are far better. Would I have done it again? I don’t know… probably not considering the opportunity costs and the stress I had to go through to get to this point of achieving an indefinite full-time position at the age of 37 – something that my peers who went straight into Finance had already achieved by age 25. Interestingly though, several of them also when back to school for MBAs. But we all know that is less of a commitment and much easier to get through.