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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."
In Physics at least, specialisation can lead to some very useful and broadly applicable findings. Granted, sometimes completely unexpectedly.
Indeed. In the Sciences and in Engineering, a PhD is the equivalent of a "driving license" for doing research. It does not guarantee you'll be good at it, but the odds are much better than for someone lacking the qualification. It signifies that you can plan and execute long and intellectually difficult tasks in a particular field, which may include discovery of new knowledge (experiments) as well as detailed physical and mathematical analysis. It shows that you're qualified for certain types of demanding job, which are not in particularly short supply. A PhD in physics or engineering was a prerequisite for my job and for several of my colleagues, and we're in industry, not in academia.
TFA failed to delineate the subject matter, lumping all PhDs together as if physical sciences, bioscience, and engineering suffered from the same lack of utility as the humanities or social sciences. It appears that TFA really just dealt with the humanities which tend to have limited economic applicability (PhD in Religion, or in History of art, or in Etruscan statuary). In some cases they amount to little more than an expensive hobby.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well if you are avocation changing the system you need to lump them together. If the PhD are more often then not are becoming too specialized to be useful then the PhD system needs to change. Sure they are exceptions where some PhD offer enough generalization to show people to know that in order to meet any particular goal that you will need help in different areas. But those are the exception.
I would actually go further stating there is a larger problem with the education system in the whole.
At child at the age of 4 enters school and remains there until they graduate from high school at 17 year. (That is 13 years) Then they will directly go to college for 4 more years at 21 years old (17 years) Now in that process they weill decide what they want to do for a living. Well during that period education is the only system they know, so They choose to stay in education, So they will get 2/4 years of masters (If they want to stay as a k-12 teacher) and 8 years if they want to be a professor. So now we have Teachers and Professors who's life has been centered around education. Then they teach the next generation that repeats the process. What happens is there is a schism between skills and knowledge that people need professionally and what they need to advance in Education, and it will keep on getting worse if you leave the system unchanged.
Many Teachers and Professors (you can tell if you talk to them personally) despise commercial industry, but yet really know what is going on in it. They will focus on the areas where it has gone wrong but not where it has gone well. So they think we spend all our days in a real Dilbertesk like life. Education needs a infusion (A large one enough to change the schools culture) of professionals who are good at what they do to teach information that will be more practical for real life situation and really open up a dialog on how things really work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think the opposite might be true in fields like computer science.
The PhD program is too focused on solving problems that Google or Microsoft kinds might also be tackling; like text data mining, network protocols characteristics, software engineering. Mostly conferences are heavily sponsored by industry and results that are of immediate use to the industry are present and the quality of a PhD is determined by the number of publications in such industry sponsored conferences.
I never figured out why things went wrong
NIH started as a means to support fundamental biomedical research. It expanded from $4M in 1947 to 100M in 1957 and $1B in 1974 and $30B today. It became the way that biomedical research is funded, and dwarfs the NSF budget of $7B. Everybody wanted a piece of that pie, but it turns out to be tied up with political strings. Universities came to depend on research money that often exceed student tuition and state grants. But it's hard to justify basic science to congress - that's the whole reason NSF's budget is so much smaller than NIH - so NIH has been progressively steered towards clinical, applied, "translational" research. Other branches of science have been pushed in that direction, too, as they struggle to justify their existence next to curing heart disease and making the lame walk.
The argument for Government funded basic science used to be that we couldn't know what would come out of it, but that the simple process of discovery would result in unforeseen benefits. Society couldn't trust commercial enterprises to take such altruistic risks (although some of them did consider support of long-term, fundamental research part of good corporate citizenship or part of their own 20 year success program). Government now, at least in the US, has little foresight or capacity for long term planning. If the corporate attention span is one fiscal quarter, then the government attention span is one election cycle. So, we've sacrificed our long-term prospects for short term reward.
Don't eat the marshmallow yet.
But it's ok if we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military?
I believe the GP's point is, if we're going to spend that kind of money, how about spending it on better ways of living that blowing shit up?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure