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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."
"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.
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
As in can in other fields.
Math, for example, has become so specialized that two people with PhD's in Math might study such diverse areas that they couldn't explain their work to each other.
Personally, I pride myself on having what may be the most useless PhD ever devised by man. My area is Literary Theory. I deal in texts. I am qualified for absolutely nothing, not even to bathe myself in the mornings. However, it gives me god-like powers in the comments sections of blogs.
I was able to make a decent living in academia, until I retired (the work was just too strenuous for me). Now I spend most of my time bathing myself in morning, commenting on Slashdot and playing Portal 2. Fortunately, my wife is still a working mathematician so the refrigerator continues to be refilled, somehow, with food and drink. Oh, I walk the dog, too. I am qualified to walk the dog.
No, I don't think there's anything wrong with the PhD system. I think it is a fine system. It has allowed me, someone who in other societies would have been a shaman or dead, with a way to keep occupied without hurting anyone but inattentive undergraduates.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If I go to school that long, the last thing I want awarded to me is Dr. Phil.