Reform the PhD System or Close It Down

jamie points out an opinion piece by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in Nature News decrying the state of PhD education in the US, calling it "broken and unsustainable." Quoting: "The necessary changes are both curricular and institutional. One reason that many doctoral programmes do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia. Expertise, of course, is essential to the advancement of knowledge and to society. But in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields. Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible. If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come from faculty members, who all too often remain committed to traditional approaches."

Comments

Oh Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

"Increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia"

The language of number theory seemed to be an exercise in the technical until hundreds of years later we end up with encryption systems based on their very principles. How you can claim prior knowledge of what will be useful in future, I do not know.

Too many bodies, too few incentives.

[pnotequalsnp]

The competition for tenure track positions is currently insane, since the professors from previous generations have trained too many PhDs. The funding agencies reward large labs under a single PI with large grants, with the labs mostly running on graduate students and post-docs who themselves see no way out. Now we are seeing career post-doctoral positions, especially in the biomedical sciences; see the recent suggestions about making a post-doctoral position more permanent. Not everyone can be a manager (PI), so we are stuck being graduate students or post-docs. I know industry is also a home for PhDs as I am one of those happy campers, but the fact is there are too many PhDs being trained relative to the number of positions available.

Lets have a system where the professor is rewarded for doing their own research, rather than their ability to write grants and farm out the work to their subjugated minions.

Re:short-sighted

[maxwell demon]

Also, when Einstein published his theory of general relativity, nobody expected this to ever become relevant for anything beyond pure curiosity. Well, that's because nobody thought of GPS back than.

And when he was arguing against completeness of quantum mechanics, there's no way he could have imagined that his thoughts would one day lead to quantum cryptography.

When Kepler thought about the movement of celestial bodies, he would never have guessed that his insights would one day help with weather forecast.

When Heisenberg and Schrödinger formulated the equations of quantum mechanics, they didn't think of TV sets, computers, or the internet.

The inventors of the particle accelerator thought about studying particles, not about cancer therapy.

Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia"

[paiute]

No, it is similar in the US for many Chemistry majors. They often end up running a QC bench without a PhD.

A PhD these days is more often a certification, can you work on a large nebulous problem? Can you work continuously for four or five years on a problem? Can you work with limited direct supervision?

Students do work in their sub-field or sub-subfield. Sometimes they get a truly relevant job, sometimes they get a job in that general area, sometimes they go completely afield. It just depends.

from the link in my sig:

"The undergraduate sits back waiting to be filled with learning. The Professor speaks, the undergraduate absorbs. Regurgitate the data on a few tests correctly enough and you are home. The Ph.D., on the other hand, means that you have done some original research. Sounds simple, but what it really means is that you have to be constantly defending yourself, explaining what you did and why. It leads to questioning all of the work of everyone else. Why did they do it this way? Were their conclusions correct, their evidence airtight, their reasoning sound? You need to be a skeptic. A doubter, a demander of proof. A B.S. given an SOP might think it comes down from on high, cast in stone. He or she will handle it with care. A Ph.D. will immediately get out a hammer and beat on it to see if any rotten pieces fly off."