 加好友  发短信
mathcqu
等级：超级版主
帖子：667
积分：2194
威望：12
精华：0
注册：2003/3/4 11:55:27
|
[转帖] Is doing a PhD a waste of time (economist veiw point)  Post By：2011/8/8 8:54:20 [只看该作者]
Is doing a PhD a waste of time (economist veiw point)
The
following is just cut-and-paste selected parts of an
article entitled: Why doing a PhD is often a waste
of time, The Economist
16th Dec 2010. Although,
I'm not happy with all of its arguments, it is of value
to be considered! Please
note
that it is a purely economical ponit of veiw, which is of course not a
well respected (or even is out respected) viewpoint in academia.
-enjoy-
 "... 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 ..."
"Rich pickings:
But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly
motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do
more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A
graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of
teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in
2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates. Indeed, the
production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers
..."
"... In
Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the
average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has
created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas
five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure
full-time job. These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs
boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet
that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go
to waste when fashions change ..."
 " ... Dr Freeman estimates
that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were
awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion
had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working
conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also
keeps wages down ..."
"A short course in supply
and demand: ... In America only 57% of doctoral students
will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment ... A
PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master’s degree. It can even
reduce earnings
... Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all
that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers
offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors
tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia ...
About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their
degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly
occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21% ..."
"A very slim premium:
... Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the
course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses.
Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some
physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to
become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses
offer the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one
course on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr
Schwartz ... Many students say they are pursuing their subject
out of love, and
that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where
the qualification might lead.  In
one study of British PhD graduates,
about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to
go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of
engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get
stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are
penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university ... The interests of
universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD
students ...
Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’
publication records ..." for full article visit this
link
An
interesting votation has been performed on the
topic of this article, i.e., Is doing a PhD a waste of time?, on
Economist web. It was lunched on 28th Dec 2010 and closed on 4th Jan
2011. This plot shows the statistics within
3137 votes.
|
|
