University Affairs (CAN) article: The PhD conversion experience

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-phd-conversion-experience/#comments
The article starts by listing common issues with the grad school as a career path, but somehow ends with the most delusional statements:
"In order to honour the PhD grads' right to flourish, the university needs to undertake a large-scale transformation of itself.
...
Within this expansive working space, funded by the universities, governments, foundations, industry and public agencies of all kinds, PhD grads could do the work they have trained so hard to do, mobilize their knowledge and research skills across multiple sectors of work and action, contribute in manifold ways to the public good, and never have to leave the sanctified place where they feel they most belong because that place has pushed out its walls and become part of the larger world."

I.e. lets reorganise the world to provide every convert to the "Church of Knowledge" with a job enabling "life of ideas".
Interestingly, author even acknowledges "Academia is a Cult" opinion piece.

[marshwiggle]

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-phd-conversion-experience/#comments
The article starts by listing common issues with the grad school as a career path, but somehow ends with the most delusional statements:
"In order to honour the PhD grads' right to flourish, the university needs to undertake a large-scale transformation of itself.
...
Within this expansive working space, funded by the universities, governments, foundations, industry and public agencies of all kinds, PhD grads could do the work they have trained so hard to do, mobilize their knowledge and research skills across multiple sectors of work and action, contribute in manifold ways to the public good, and never have to leave the sanctified place where they feel they most belong because that place has pushed out its walls and become part of the larger world."

I.e. lets reorganise the world to provide every convert to the "Church of Knowledge" with a job enabling "life of ideas".
Interestingly, author even acknowledges "Academia is a Cult" opinion piece.

I haven't the slightest idea of what he means by that.

One very telling comment:

According to one argument, the reason the graduates want to stay is that their graduate education simply fails to teach them how they could take their learning, and their research and teaching skills, to secure employment in sectors beyond the walls of the university. In the face of this failure, universities have developed practically-minded professional skills training programs where PhD students can pick up valuable know-how about project management, public speaking or professional networking. The many skills-training programs across the university system are worthwhile even though they tend to misrepresent skills as if they were a kind of currency that grads could acquire and then trade for advantageous employment opportunities in the wider labour market.

How terrible to think of skills as things having actual monetary value outside academia! Blasphemy!!!!

[apl68]

I think the attraction of academia to those who seek PhDs is simpler than any sort of "conversion."  Ms. Mentor at CHE wrote a column where she spoke of The Person Who Is Very Good In School--people who thrive so much in educational environments that they go into PhD programs in hopes of being able to make a career of remaining in school as academics.  It more or less explains much of my own motivation in trying for the PhD.  I belonged to that cohort of grad students who were encouraged into academia by the Bowen Report's catastrophically misplaced optimism.

[polly_mer]

One very telling comment:

According to one argument, the reason the graduates want to stay is that their graduate education simply fails to teach them how they could take their learning, and their research and teaching skills, to secure employment in sectors beyond the walls of the university. In the face of this failure, universities have developed practically-minded professional skills training programs where PhD students can pick up valuable know-how about project management, public speaking or professional networking. The many skills-training programs across the university system are worthwhile even though they tend to misrepresent skills as if they were a kind of currency that grads could acquire and then trade for advantageous employment opportunities in the wider labour market.

How terrible to think of skills as things having actual monetary value outside academia! Blasphemy!!!!

Psst, the rest of us also have project management, public speaking skills, and professional networking as part of our excellent graduate education.  Those are not add-ons, but are part of the meat.  The PhD who doesn't have those skills won't be all that successful in academia, either.

L. Marin Wood's excellent essay "Odds are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" seems very relevant to the discussion.

[kaysixteen]

You may be right, Polly, probably are right.   But exactly how many PhD students, even in 2020, get substantial amounts of such training/ preparation in grad school?   Certainly no one in my program back in the 90s got any such, nor was any offered, either by the academic dept or the university's career counseling services (which PhD candidates in my dept were not even encouraged to use, though I myself did).

[pigou]

It's not clear why we should expect PhD programs to prepare students for something other than research careers. We don't expect medical school to prepare graduates to become accountants either. People underestimate the risk of going into a PhD and think it's a safe career choice... it isn't. But all things considered, very few PhD students work the hours that medical residents do. So it's also, for the most part, a pretty sweet gig.

[jerseyjay]

It's not clear why we should expect PhD programs to prepare students for something other than research careers. We don't expect medical school to prepare graduates to become accountants either. People underestimate the risk of going into a PhD and think it's a safe career choice... it isn't. But all things considered, very few PhD students work the hours that medical residents do. So it's also, for the most part, a pretty sweet gig.

I think that when people talk about "alternate academic" jobs, they tend to confound two things:
1. Whether somebody with a PhD can use the skills learnt in grad school/teaching/research in a non-academic job; and
2. Whether a PhD program is a good way of preparing yourself for a non-academic job.

I think that many people who go into academia later find that they cannot or do not want to make academia their life-long home. There are things that are learnt in academia that are also useful in other fields.

But it would seem wasteful and silly to train to be an academic with some other goal in mind.

Ii read an interview in the JAMA at my doctor's office recently with somebody who had been an auto mechanic and then, at 40-something years old decided to go to medical school and was now working in the ER at a local hospital. (He was also black and from a working-class background so the article was rather inspiring.) He said that many of the same skills he learnt as an auto mechanic were useful in being an ER doctor. From his description I believe him--and I think it is great that an auto mechanic can become a doctor or a doctor can become an auto mechanic, if he is so inclined and willing to do the hard work. But on a large scale, it would seem to be a wrong to think of being an auto mechanic as being good training to be a doctor, or vice versa.

I tell my undergrads that history is a good major and you can do any number of jobs with it. I do not tell students who are thinking of history grad school the same thing, because if they want to do something else, they should do it. It is good to have other options, but in general they should be the exception not the rule. If a few historians decide to do something else, that's great. If a large number of PhDs in history decide to go into other fields, that is a sign that either the historical profession or history grad programs are defective--which is probably the case.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

It's not clear why we should expect PhD programs to prepare students for something other than research careers. We don't expect medical school to prepare graduates to become accountants either.

This makes sense. However, the logical next step to deal with oversupply of highly-specialised workforce (at very high personal cost to many people in the said workforce) is to reduce admissions. Or, at least to ensure that students are properly informed about their prospects.
Instead the author of the article demands a "Reformation" in order to provide good jobs for all.

[dismalist]

It's not clear why we should expect PhD programs to prepare students for something other than research careers. We don't expect medical school to prepare graduates to become accountants either.

This makes sense. However, the logical next step to deal with oversupply of highly-specialised workforce (at very high personal cost to many people in the said workforce) is to reduce admissions. Or, at least to ensure that students are properly informed about their prospects.
Instead the author of the article demands a "Reformation" in order to provide good jobs for all.

I don't think that prospects are secret. After all, the word go out in Athens.

Thus, we are left with the diabolical supply and demand. All this is voluntary!

It is easy to think that complainers want more, and they do, but ideologically there is also much more closely felt emotion, which comes out in the article:

A place for everyone, and everyone in his place.

Recipe for the middle ages.

[polly_mer]

You may be right, Polly, probably are right.   But exactly how many PhD students, even in 2020, get substantial amounts of such training/ preparation in grad school?   Certainly no one in my program back in the 90s got any such, nor was any offered, either by the academic dept or the university's career counseling services (which PhD candidates in my dept were not even encouraged to use, though I myself did).

Almost no engineers with graduate education go into academia. The number that sticks in my mind is 10%. Less than half of people in fields related to mine (e.g., chemistry, physics, branches of math, branches of computer science) even plan to be academics while in grad school.  The problem discussed at length in these fields is how to get enough professors for the students who want to study these topics.

My non-academic employer is applying increasing pressure for everyone with a graduate degree to partner with a university to be a professional fellow to teach a course a term and to mentor student research so we have a pipeline of new employees.

This problem of grad school only preparing people to be academics is mostly a humanities thing.  We're all researchers where I live with real skills (how do you do real research without project management skills?), but it's sad to watch the humanities folks keep saying they teach all these transferable skills, but clearly they don't.

[marshwiggle]

It's not clear why we should expect PhD programs to prepare students for something other than research careers. We don't expect medical school to prepare graduates to become accountants either.

This makes sense. However, the logical next step to deal with oversupply of highly-specialised workforce (at very high personal cost to many people in the said workforce) is to reduce admissions. Or, at least to ensure that students are properly informed about their prospects.
Instead the author of the article demands a "Reformation" in order to provide good jobs for all.

One quote from a report referenced in the article:

According to Statistics Canada research (Desjardins, 2012), the decline in the availability of tenured or
tenure-stream positions across Canada was even more pronounced for professors under the age of 35. In
1980-1981, one-third of professors under age 35 (35 per cent) held a full-time tenured or tenure-track
position; 25 years later, this was true for only 12 per cent of professors in that age category. The predicted
career opportunities – especially for those aspiring to be hired as university professors – have clearly not
transpired in reality. As one current doctoral student puts it, "You come in here with the dreams of doing
something but you have to face the reality of the job market outside" (Sekuler, Crow, Annan, Mitacs Inc., &
Academica Research Group Inc., 2013, p. 13).

So forty years ago only one-third had tenured or tenure-track positions. The oversupply has lasted for the entire career of most current academics, yet the conning of potential grad students continues. The idealistic "golden age" never existed.

[apl68]

I think that when people talk about "alternate academic" jobs, they tend to confound two things:
1. Whether somebody with a PhD can use the skills learnt in grad school/teaching/research in a non-academic job; and
2. Whether a PhD program is a good way of preparing yourself for a non-academic job.

I think that many people who go into academia later find that they cannot or do not want to make academia their life-long home. There are things that are learnt in academia that are also useful in other fields.

But it would seem wasteful and silly to train to be an academic with some other goal in mind.

Ii read an interview in the JAMA at my doctor's office recently with somebody who had been an auto mechanic and then, at 40-something years old decided to go to medical school and was now working in the ER at a local hospital. (He was also black and from a working-class background so the article was rather inspiring.) He said that many of the same skills he learnt as an auto mechanic were useful in being an ER doctor. From his description I believe him--and I think it is great that an auto mechanic can become a doctor or a doctor can become an auto mechanic, if he is so inclined and willing to do the hard work. But on a large scale, it would seem to be a wrong to think of being an auto mechanic as being good training to be a doctor, or vice versa.

I tell my undergrads that history is a good major and you can do any number of jobs with it. I do not tell students who are thinking of history grad school the same thing, because if they want to do something else, they should do it. It is good to have other options, but in general they should be the exception not the rule. If a few historians decide to do something else, that's great. If a large number of PhDs in history decide to go into other fields, that is a sign that either the historical profession or history grad programs are defective--which is probably the case.

Yes to all of the above!

That's why I mentioned the Bowen Report.  My undergrad advisors didn't give me the warning about going to grad school in history because they believed--in good faith, but very, very mistakenly--that it was a viable career field to go into.  Three decades on, it would be little less than a crime not to give potential grad students the sort of advice that you give.

[jerseyjay]

Polly is of course correct about there being extensive non-academic employment for PhDs in some fields. That is certainly not the case for History, and I doubt for English, Philosophy, or some of the "pure" sciences. As a PhD in history, I worked for several years in a non-academic field in which a PhD (or at least a mater's degree) was necessary. But there aren't enough of these jobs to go around.

In a rational world, the oversupply of history PhDs would be resolved through either (a) increasing the demand by massive hiring or (b) decreasing the supply by closing many programs or at least reducing the number of students entering programs. I try to do my part by advising any student who asks me about grad school to do something else, not because they don't have the skills to be a historian, but because the jobs don't exist.

I think that it is good that some schools and some advisors and some grad students are now open to their PhDs working in non-academic jobs. But this is like a sponge cleaning up a leak: until the leak is stopped, no sponge will be able to absorb all the extra liquid.

None of this is new, even if it has become worse in the last decade. I got my PhD in 2003 and the situation was not much better then.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

So forty years ago only one-third had tenured or tenure-track positions. The oversupply has lasted for the entire career of most current academics, yet the conning of potential grad students continues. The idealistic "golden age" never existed.

I suspect that back then this statistic represented the divide between PhD from mid- to high-ranked institutions holding tenure-track jobs in universities and Masters/low-rank PhDs on term contracts in colleges and other lesser institutions. So, the "Golden Age" may have existed for the academic nobility (as per Dismalist's remark on the middle ages) happily oblivious to the problems of the lesser academic classes. The divide appears to be within this class now.

I don't think that prospects are secret. After all, the word go out in Athens.

I know an undergraduate petroleum geology program that lost 90% of its enrollment in the last 4 years purely due to decrease in demand after job prospects deteriorated. I haven't heard about anything like happening in the PhD programs.

[polly_mer]

None of this is new, even if it has become worse in the last decade. I got my PhD in 2003 and the situation was not much better then.

The situation in the humanities has never been good in my lifetime.  That's why it's bizarre that people keep acting as though this 'temporary' state that's lasted more than forty years is somehow easily solved but people just aren't taking action or was somehow unknowable for the people who recently graduated with a doctorate.

Kaysixteen's reference to the '90s is sighworthy.  It's been 20+ years and nothing has changed nor have individuals seem to have stepped up to learn something different in all the years that have passed that would get them another career. 

I remain annoyed that humanities are somehow the poster child for graduate study when they are one medium category instead of the vast majority of graduate degrees awarded.  There are as many materials engineering PhDs awarded in a given year as English PhDs.