Daily Archives: December 22, 2010

Perhaps Someone Should Base a Thesis on This

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The disposable academic. (Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time)

I think the article suffers from several flaws — the premise is based on the contention that the only legitimate reason to obtain a PhD is to get an academic position and/or to earn a lot of money.

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 notion that a doctorate is training for academia is contradicted by the various stories I hear about how graduate school never trains you how to teach. In science, at least, the main thrust of graduate school is to teach you how to do research.

Also, the author contradicts his own idea, because if the only reason for a PhD is to get a position in academia, why should the wants and desires of the business world matter? I suspect that the skills the business world wants is as a lab technician, with the capabilities of someone who can do research but without the financial burden of paying someone who has a doctorate. Someone with the capabilities of a PhD but without the ambition to get the degree..

In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

What this fails to note is that there is some work that you will only be able to do is you have a PhD. While you might not get paid more, there’s the chance that it will be more interesting and/or fulfilling. There are people who do what they do because they like doing it.

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.

Here the author fails to note that the graduation rate of undergraduate degrees is about the same — in 2008, 57.2% of college students had completed their degree within six years of enrolling. If completion is the metric for worthiness, then a bachelor’s degree is just as worthless.

The decision to get a PhD should be made based on knowing the facts. If you want to go on to be a professor and do research at a major university, you should know that the odds are against you, and shame on anyone who tries and misrepresent those job prospects. You should know whether you stand to make more money with the degree. But it’s just irresponsible to pretend that there are no other reasons to choose such a career path.

Guaranteed to Be Pauly Shore Free

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Life Under the Bubble

Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a miniature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1”—Earth—and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in DISCOVER called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 80 percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier.

Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment seized upon the ways in which the project had failed.

I suspect the way the project was treated was because the basic operation was presented as a given — the inhabitants will be sealed inside and the system will be self-sustaining. In that sense it was not a great experiment, but it was a grand experiment: it was large-scale, and we did learn things we did not previously know. When physicists build a bigger and better accelerator, the operation of it is pretty much a given, because we have a long history of building bigger and better accelerators. Even the LHC, with the well-publicized superconductor quenching and baguette bombing, the setbacks in operation were relatively minor and fixable — it’s not like the problems would prevent searching for the Higgs, they just delayed it a little.

But nobody had attempted an isolated man-made biosphere before. So I think they got a raw deal on the collective raspberry that the media blew when it didn’t work out as hoped. It’s nice to see it has served as a scientific platform, even if it is in a more limited way.