One thing that most people don't realize (or willingly try not to think about) is that every "higher education" level, all the way from the BSc to the last day of your PhD, is actually, first and foremost, a selection process. I have felt this ever since I got my first foot in my first BSc lecture, and the feeling has never left me. And I'm doing the exact same thing right now as an Associate Professor, both as a lecturer and as a supervisor. Most the talk and ideas we hear all the time about pedagogical skills, teaching methods, better techniques for supervision, etc. will fall to earth when push comes to shove: the truth is that the vast majority of higher education staff has no idea what they are doing when it comes to actually educating students. We do our best, we present our knowledge in the best way we can think of, and we are genuinely interested in students learning them, but the truth is that the knowledge of exactly what kind of education techniques work better or worse, is non-existent (for all practical matters). So, what happens is that, some students learn, others don't. Would they still have learned if we were using completely different teaching methods? Probably. Would they have learned even if we were not there? Maybe, but probably not. Because our real task (we as in, the staff), when you really get down to the basic core of what is happening in higher education, is to be there and give them a goal: if you want to have this certificate, if you want to be like me, and reach this milestone, you have to endure this, and pass these tests. I'll show you some things here and there in an arrangement that is probably as close to random as it is to not random, and well, you deal with it and find a way to pass the test. It doesn't really matter how you do it, how you find your motivation to keep on keeping on, what matters is that you survive this process and reach the end. And so is the selection process implemented.
Well said. And most professors do not have, nor or required to get, training in teaching at all! Random is the right word and there is a large stdev at that. I remember one semester I had both, by far, the best and worst professors of my long schooling career; both in the same faculty too. Going from one class to the next was disjointing on how vastly different the experience was. The worst prof was so bad that that the students of the class banded together and complained to the dean that we were learning nothing and that this was a required class for our degrees. The best prof was so good that he was able to fill in some of what the other was missing on top of his regular curriculum and it felt effortless.
I understand, but it's also unfortunately unrealistic to expect that someone who is already an expert in something will also become an expert in teaching. When you are an academic, besides your teaching you need to be constantly updating your knowledge of the state of the art and pushing the boundaries to get published and stay relevant in your field. It's hard to also focus on learning teaching skills which are, sometimes, very unorthodox and not straightforward. Also, factor in that those who teach teaching are also sometimes not good teachers, and are also researchers, and will also need to stay updated with research, and will also try to push unorthodox, unvalidated teaching methods to their students... it's complicated.
Yes, I do agree its complicated. But... while it may be unrealistic to expect them to be an expert in teaching, I think it is absolutely realistic to expect them to be competent in teaching, seeing as that is a fundamental component (along with research) of being a professor.
Maybe in a few american Ivy-league it's a selection process. For most of the world it's "who has the patience and perseverance to go through that ancient hierarcy". In the past 15-20 years academic success has become increasingly based on social standing , and there are many ways to hack that one
That is still a selection process… it’s just that the success profile is different. Even in Ivy league you can’t really say the ”smartest” ones are the most successful. Selection selects ”something”, and I don’t really know what to be honest.
> but the truth is that the knowledge of exactly what kind of education techniques work better or worse, is non-existent (for all practical matters). So
Uhh what? Is this some kinda myth teachers and professors want to perpetuate in order to be lazy about teaching?
Theres definetely research on what makes good education techniques "good". I agree that higher education serves as a filter, but you admitting that you and your colleagues have basicially no idea what they're doing while teaching says more about your ignorance than your teaching skills really.
I expressed myself incorrectly; I meant that it doesn’t exist among us (not in general). At any rate, my experience with pedagogical training is horrible at best. Those who teach the teaching are just as bad as me; why should I listen to them?
> One thing that most people don't realize (or willingly try not to think about) is that every "higher education" level, all the way from the BSc to the last day of your PhD, is actually, first and foremost, a selection process.
I also have no interest in funding a selection process with my taxes (EU resident), I have an interest in funding a process which prepares people to be productive members of society, which means prepares them to contribute in a commercial for-profit setting as without this the state has no revenue with which to fund anything.
I also don't think what it selects for is of particular value to industry.
Well, that is why we all work under the guise of "formal education"; we cannot really admit and accept that what we are doing is something else, because then people will react like this. Actually, in many ways it is education, just not in the ways we think about it. In my opinion, most of what passes for "pedagogy" or "education skills" is quite frankly bullshit. You learn things everyday, whether you're a student or not, and you teach things everyday, whether you are a teacher or not. If you really want to learn something in the Bsc/Msc/PhD trust me, you will learn, and we will teach you. The problem is that most people want education to be some kind of straightforward, almost passive process, like "hey I'm attending university, if I'm not learning it's your fault". The transfer of responsibility from student to teacher as it is done today is absurd. Learning is an active, exhilarating, and sometimes even brutal process. And, well, sorry, but it should be: knowledge is power, and to learn things is to thrive and improve yourself. How can that be such a passive process as "go to lecture, see some slides, learn"? Learning is also competitive; if you know how to do something that few people know, you are more valuable to society. By definition, that cannot be a passive, watered down process as people want it to be; if it was, then the knowledge you obtained would be borderline worthless (because everyone else would have it).
These experts in education unfortunately take one thing for granted, that PhDs need to be trained. I really don't think that's true and that there is any need for PhD training. At least, there shouldn't be any need.
Here is the thing: The purpose of a PhD is to demonstrate the ability to conduct scientific research independently. When a student enters a PhD program, they should have all the prerequisites to do that. If not, the university has failed and the study program needs to be reformed. A PhD student needs to have the ability to conduct research and write a thesis, and they get more time for that than they will ever have again as a postdoc.
In my opinion it's really that simple: Do the research and write your PhD thesis, and finish it in time. This "training" idea comes from the US, and the only effect of this in Europe I've seen so far is that unnecessary and off-topic PhD courses with point systems have been invented. At least in my area, these are completely useless and merely delay work on the PhD thesis.
What they should do, however, is to stop the grade inflation and stop handing out a PhD to everyone, no matter how bad the thesis. That's the real problem, I've seen plenty of lazy, extremely low-effort theses, and every time the lazy PhD student passes the defense and gets the PhD. That devalues the PhD and the work of those who take it seriously. Please start to let at least the worst PhD students fail.
Many PhD programs in the US take ~5 years or more, and often hand out "boilerplate" Master's degrees in the process. Source: saw it happen a bunch at big state schools in California, and heard of similar things in VA, and NY schools.
What? You can do a 2 years master degree in Norway? I studied in Germany and 2 years could only get you a B.A., 4 years was the absolute minimum for an M.A. or equivalent degree. But perhaps this has changed.
> Here is the thing: The purpose of a PhD is to demonstrate the ability to conduct scientific research independently.
This is field-dependent. In some fields, undergrads can already be independent researchers. In other fields, even postdocs are not independent, as doing research requires funding, materials, and labor. The latter is the real problem, as professors in those fields need a steady supply of PhD candidates to do their research.
You finish your college, you're officially an (eg.) engineer now, you can build a bridge, millions of people will use every year, and it's ok... but if you want to try out new compositions and additives of/to cement in a lab environment and measure their properties, you need a mentor, and six different unrelated courses... and preferably a well-known name to co-author your article, to get it published at all.
First of all a freshly graduated engineer will never be signing off on a bridge used by millions of people a years.
More importantly designing a bridge using a century old design, well understood materials, and sticking to all the well known, well documented and legally mandated best practices we have accumulated over the years is an entirely different skill than trying to come up with a novel and better way of designing or building a bridge and then conclusively proving that it is still at least as safe as the old way of building a bridge.
> You finish your college, you're officially an (eg.) engineer now, you can build a bridge, millions of people will use every year, and it's ok
As an engineer just out of the school, you wont be the one responsible for building a bridge millions of people will use every year. It takes more years to get there.
Most people in PhD programs misunderstand the actual objectives (I sure did). They assume that the academic environment is just like the undergraduate one they have come out of. That is false.
To better understand the new rules that they are operating under, I suggest looking to 'literature'. The two best examples that I have found to illustrate the real 'rules' are:
1) The Horatio Hornblower series. It follows the career of a noble, poor, yet educated British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. It follows Horatio from midshipman to Admiral.
2) The Sharpe series. Also set during the Napoleonic Wars, this series follows the Army instead of the Navy. You read of the career of an orphaned son of a whore commoner who is elevated to officer rank. Much conflict with the inherited nobility and chafing occurs with the commoner protagonist.
It is quickly discovered by the protagonists of both series that to survive at officer rank, the lives and interests of the enlisted must be second to the demands of career. Much deeper discussions about this occur in both series.
The key for a PhD student is to observe the fighting and jockeying of the officers between each other over career. These dynamics, even through fictional books, are identical to the fights of academics even today. How the protagonists deal with these challenges should be a lesson to any PhD student in their own careers.
The question is, do we really need a PhD reform? Or should we restructure the academic process to enable more people to pariticipate without going through the ardous process of writing a thesis? I have a PhD and work in an industrial research environment, with 50/50 PhD and non-PhD colleagues. There is no difference in quality of work and output. So maybe universities should be less discriminatory against non-PhD research fellows.
> I have a PhD and work in an industrial research environment, with 50/50 PhD and non-PhD colleagues. There is no difference in quality of work and output. So maybe universities should be less discriminatory against non-PhD research fellows.
I don't disagree. But if we consider that researchers need to publish papers, requiring a PhD isn't not much different than requiring a bunch of publications (when you have 3-4 publications, basically you have a PhD thesis, just need to introduce context and glue everything together).
To be fair, this is really field dependent. In the sciences this is (mostly) true, but in the humanities your output for your PhD is sometimes just your thesis. The problem is fundamentally that the PhD traject is geared towards an academic career, but there are not enough academic positions for all those PhD students, so they end up in industry. And there their skills don't really translate that well, as OP also says.
>The problem is fundamentally that the PhD traject is geared towards an academic career, but there are not enough academic positions for all those PhD students, so they end up in industry. And there their skills don't really translate that well, as OP also says.
This is a gigantic problem and thank you for highlighting it. Imagine you're in the United States and you have a PhD but you're not a citizen here and you just invested a ton of time and effort but you have to go back home all because there's not a position in your field. It's absolutely nonsensical to think about how the United States justs pisses away talent.
yet it is used to gatekeep positions. Contributions to science can be made without bundling them in a thesis, while being delivered to the whims of your supervisor.
Then one should make a good case for changing that gatekeeping, if you think it’s unhelpful. That’s not what this article advocates: this article is about changing the PhD process inside the academic system.
To be honest, we probably see an alternative to academia grow and disrupt it before we see academia reform itself – the academic institution is so old and has so much legacy at this point, that it is close to impossible.
I am curious on how these new structures would look.
hot take from someone in Europe: I have no degree and work as a software engineer. New masters graduates I have worked with still need a lot of guidance to do basic things: making pull requests, writing unit tests, structuring code, setting up CI and CD pipelines, network communication, IaC, cloud, microservices, parallelism and state management.
Most of what they do know is of limited value. They don't seem to really grasp the fundamentals of computers very well, they maybe grasp some math, but nothing more than what they could have learnt in maybe 3 months or less, and the math is pretty useless if they don't have a feeling for how to apply it to something like a stateless microservice.
I think in our industry having these people go directly to work internships would be much more valuable for them and society than what is currently happening. While I do think free education is good in principle, I am not very happy that my tax money is propping up this broken system.
On the other side, I've seen plenty of people embark on something that amounts to "given a solution to the generalized halting problem, I could build a system to do X, therefore I have a path to do X" and then proceed to do years of hack after hack to bandage over one corner case at a time, building the computer equivalent of a spaghetti bridge.
I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
> I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
I agree, but I don't think a PhD in computer science reliably instills this in anyone, or at least not on scales that you operate on in industry.
I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. There are a number of educational tasks academia also carries out, furthermore, there is the entire reasearch area.
On the contrary, My masters in computer science from Denmark has really helped me professionally. But I had exposure to engineering aside my studies throughout all the years.
> I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation.
I agree, but to me that is somewhat the main problem. The most important thing that my tax money should be funding is industry preparation, but if you conflate that with other functions, everything gets muddled. Most of our education resources (>95%) should be exlusively for industry preparation. If we do it well, then remaining 5% will become higher.
In my opinion, tax money should mostly go towards building a prosperous society, whatever that means. But some things I see as being highly important:
1. Education in active participation in a democracy
2. Education to be able to take care of their physical and mental health
3. Education to be able to be empathetic towards their peers.
4. Education to create jobs rather than inhabit them
I don't see it as a error per se, that a lot of people in Denmark (My country of origin) do a masters degree in-order to take a normal subsistence job afterwards.
My own hopes for the future is that education does not take 5-6 years and is something that is only done in ones 20s but is something that is a lifelong companion and helps a person accelerate their careers, also later in life.
> 1. Education in active participation in a democracy 2. Education to be able to take care of their physical and mental health 3. Education to be able to be empathetic towards their peers. 4. Education to create jobs rather than inhabit them
Some of these things, or some aspects of these things, are quite heavily prescriptive, i.e. values that you think people ought to have as opposed to descriptive, i.e. facts people ought to know. And I don't think education ought to, or can meaningfully, instill values in people that is different from the society they inhabit.
And to the extent that these things are not prescriptive, but descriptive (i.e. how to take care of your own physical health), it really should be done before university, and way before post graduate education.
> I don't see it as a error per se, that a lot of people in Denmark (My country of origin) do a masters degree in-order to take a normal subsistence job afterwards.
If a masters degree implies 5-6 years, which I think it does for engineering, then I do see a problem with it, because it is not free.
Also from what I understand people do past the 1st year of higher education it really has little relation to any of the things you list. So even if it was the purpose of having people spend 5-6 years at university, I don't see it working out.
Having taken a masters myself has helped med tremendously on all of the aspects:
1. I know a thing or two about computing etc. and how we should apply that on a societal level from my masters in computer science. I use that to engage in the discussion. Someone else has studies science of religion and can chip in with insights there.
2. Having an advanced degree has taught me a thing or too about reading and understanding research and critical thinking, which has helped me understand the extremely scattered market for health advice.
3. Having lived large parts of my adult life on a sub subsistence level has helped me be empathetic towards poverty etc.
4. Having an advanced degree helps you assess new projects and ventures that might be worth pursuing entrepreneurially.
> 3. Having lived large parts of my adult life on a sub subsistence level has helped me be empathetic towards poverty etc.
It is unclear how having enough enough resources so that you could not produce anything for 6 years makes it easier for you to understand poverty than people who never had such privilege. I'm sure any person actually in poverty would much rather do nothing productive for 6 years while still having a roof over their heads, a dry place to sleep and food to eat.
I think if being empathetic towards poverty is something that is important to it may be better obtained by just sending people to an impoverished place with no resources, social support structures or accommodation for a week.
Lambda School and other JavaScript web developer bootcamps have been very successfully disrupting the "traditional CS degree" as the only route to software engineering.
Perhaps the thing to disrupt stale academia will be a wave of bootcamp PhD's coming out of Lambda University. In the short term, there may be a side effect of deflating the FAANG-style compensation, job stability, and perks of "tenured faculty." It seems obvious that there is an enormous benefit of a more mobile, agile, and adaptable academic workforce of folks who only contract to teach for a semester or two before dipping back into industry careers or trying out another institution (or maybe even working at multiple institutions at once to broaden their teaching and research skills!).
The "traditional CS degree" was never the only route to software engineering. That claim is just not true, a self learning developers, the ones who went to entirely different field or the ones who dropped out were and are ridiculously common. By "different field" I mean both people who studied physics/math similar fields and psychology/sociology further away fields.
And even now, people who came from bootcamps are rare compared to the above.
Similar to how the churches became less relevant over time, wothout disappearing. Of course, many still have religious sentiment, but it's not comparable to the complete dominance religion used to have in all aspects of life.
Is there really an army of suckers who are rushing to waste years of their lives on doctoral degrees and the associated lengthy, underpaid indentures? The statistics would seem to say so. Or perhaps this is the natural progression of the research (especially academic research) pyramid scheme?
Are we going to up the degree requirements for everything? High school to college diploma, bachelor's to master's, master's to doctorate, doctorate to ???
I'm one of those suckers and I'm glad I wasted years of my life being paid to study things I found interesting, on my own terms, without pointless meetings, impossible deadlines and unreasonable bosses, dropping projects and colleagues I did not like. Would do it again.
A PhD degree in a relevant subject area (think STEM) can be a door-opener in industry, not just academia. Many interesting jobs are reserved for PhD holders, or at least, are more readily available for them.
Beware, though, because in other fields - particularly in STEM - a PHD may actually lower your job prospects. "You're overqualified" gets old really fast if no one offers jobs that align with your proficiency level.
Do you see this happening in CS? I've seen positions where they don't care if you have formal training or not, then why would being a PhD holder hinder your chances?
Channelling my inner HR drone here, but I've heard that all at different times from them when looking for talent:
Because why would you linger around in university if you can have a serious income ten years earlier? Obviously something must be "wrong" with you, something that would make you a complicated employee that just asks for creating trouble. Better hire a CS bachelor for a third of what you would ask (risking you'd run as soon as you get some offer more to your liking), not like we're doing any revolutionary bleeding-edge stuff anyways.
I used to work for large civil engineering consultancy. They had lots of highly paid people with PhDs, hired because of their PhDs, doing work directly related to the thing they did their PhD in. So it obviously seems to work fine in some fields.
My BiL is doing a PhD in CS in in a minor uni in UK (scholarship from the uni + TA/RA -ship or whatever it's called).
He gets to be an indentured servant, but in the end hopefully he will have a piece of Paper from a 1st world country that will certify his already substantial CS skills. (also possibly, a Foreign nationality down the line, providing yet another piece of paper, a passport with respect)
In addition, my sister and nieces get to live in a good country, and I have been very impressed by their education, even a state school in UK is miles ahead of any private school we could afford here.
It's a trade he made, despite knowing he was being made a sucker, because the Upshot was going to be worth it in a decade's time. He was going to spend those years in academia (at a uni in my 3rd world country) anyways, why not get something for it?
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I think that's how the assembly line will work in developed countries. As local citizens (like you and other commenters here) realize the two letters (Dr) are not worth the effort, uni will turn to academics from other countries, instead of actually reforming the system.
> Are we going to up the degree requirements for everything? High school to college diploma, bachelor's to master's, master's to doctorate, doctorate to ???
I suspect this has already happened.
In 1940, 25% of the population were high school graduates and 4% had college degrees.
Today, 30% of the population have college degrees, and ~4% of the population have PhD, MD, JD etc.
So a college degree doesn't indicate what it once did.
In plenty of non-USA countries, a PhD is basically a prerequisite to enter the higher echelons of government and the corporate world.
Not saying it should be like that, nor that it is completely impossible to advance in those countries without. It's more that there's a glass ceiling through which you'll have to break if you don't have a PhD. And I have talked with PhD students with such backgrounds who were quite clear on that. For a (to me) surprising number of them, an academic career was not the main goal at all (not necessarily completely ruled out, but not the original main goal).
Amen. I always tell people that want to do a PhD that, if they want to torture themselves, I can recommend some really great clubs in Berlin for that. It's probably more healthy as well, psychologically speaking.
Twenty years ago I left a miserable software development job for a PhD program where I got to think about interesting problems all day. Nothing in my life has ever been as much fun, even despite the lousy pay. Wish I could do it all over again.
The PhD is never going to be "updated" because it has never been updated throughout its history. It will be obsoleted
Education is changing before our eyes. The world increasingly has all the material and resources to learn, customized and tailored to the ability of each student. There will soon be a tipping point where traditional school-based education becomes irrelevant, all-at-once
> where traditional school-based education becomes irrelevant, all-at-once
This is actually studied subject.
Everyone needs general knowledge base before they even realise why they study at all. The whole point of university is to shape your thinking model.
Even your movie experience will be downgraded. If you don't know Western fairytales, you will find Shrek movie unfunny.
I would rather have one anarchistic Leonardo da Vinci who doesn't give a fuck about Shrek than hordes of standarized, cookie-cutter groupthink people that find some capitalistic product funny.
> it has never been updated throughout its history
As Wikipedia points out, "The doctorates in the higher faculties were quite different from the current PhD degree in that they were awarded for advanced scholarship, not original research. No dissertation or original work was required, only lengthy residency requirements and examinations." and "The doctorate of philosophy developed in Germany as the terminal teacher's credential."
The modern system, with its focus on research training, is derived from Prussian educational reforms in the early 1800s, which then spread around the world.
The problem is that universities, at least in my experience here in the UK, are just getting more bureaucratised and less committed to pure (non-corporate/"enterprise") research. I don't trust them to reform anything and actually improve it.
That can also happen in two-year long programs as well, especially in those that allow you for less than a semester from proposal to defense. I can certainly perceive a scaling issue in academia. Will MOOC-style initiatives be able to solve this problem in the future?
> That can also happen in two-year long programs as well, especially in those that allow you for less than a semester from proposal to defense.
I can imagine that. My own programme had two terms with exams in January and May/June, then the dissertation from June till September and it was a nightmare!
> I can certainly perceive a scaling issue in academia. Will MOOC-style initiatives be able to solve this problem in the future?
If I were running a university, I'd definitely move the large early undergrad courses to MOOCs to free up lecturers time for more advanced/specialised courses and direct supervision of students. It seems crazy to me that there are thousands of basic algorithms, calculus, etc courses being taught across the world by people who could use their time a lot more productively teaching the more specialised knowledge they have acquired through their research.
> If I were running a university, I'd definitely move the large early undergrad courses to MOOCs to free up lecturers time for more advanced/specialised courses and direct supervision of students. It seems crazy to me that there are thousands of basic algorithms, calculus, etc courses being taught across the world by people who could use their time a lot more productively teaching the more specialised knowledge they have acquired through their research.
Universities are in a position where they have to balance teaching quality with research output, and there's a tremendous amount of pressure for (I would say!) the majority of universities around student experience that I think is underplayed in this thinking. In my experience MOOCs are not a substitute for in-person teaching, and the move to this kind of content delivery during COVID was met with pretty universal student dissatisfaction, both from students and lecturers.
I think a more appropriate approach is for there to be more clearly defined system for teaching/researching - i.e. post-doctoral staff who have mainly teaching responsibilities and others who are mainly research based. This win-win is already the case in a number of institutions and departments I know, however I know a lot of staff on both sides who would like total separation if desired. It's not a positive student experience to have lecturers who openly do not want to be there!
> If I were running a university, I'd definitely move the large early undergrad courses to MOOCs to free up lecturers time for more advanced/specialised courses and direct supervision of students. It seems crazy to me that there are thousands of basic algorithms, calculus, etc courses being taught across the world by people who could use their time a lot more productively teaching the more specialised knowledge they have acquired through their research.
That's a very good idea. That could even free resources for allowing research opportunities for more students.
That's a strange question because academia is totally overrun with people looking for postdoc positions. I've served in committees and issued calls. There are dozens to hundreds of candidates for every postdoc position, and at least half of them (usually most of them) are so qualified that they could even count as overqualified. It's painful to write the rejection letters, sometimes I even had to include a personal remark to emphasize that it was an extremely close call and that their application and CV were flawless.
Perhaps you are from a top institution, so, naturally, you'll get a lot of high-quality applications; which in turn influences your perspective. But in the grand scheme of things, the total number of PhD students must be very limited. There's certainly more demand than supply for such training.
If there's an over supply of overqualified postdocs, maybe they could help train new PhDs?
There are dozens to hundreds of candidates for every postdoc position
Are you at a University people will recognise the name of (perhaps even internationally)? I have a friend at a small department at a smaller university and his department sometimes struggles to even get 2 or 3 actually qualified candidates to their postdoc applications.
I don't think I can see an actual argument in this.
Could it be summarized as approximately 'The current PhD system has good points but it's several decades old, you learn from someone who actually knows the stuff in practice, and politicians don't want to spend enough for it despite lionizing the economic value of the outcomes'?
I fail to see the problems beyond the obvious, and while there are obvious problems, people with agendas published under titles like "Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education" seem uniquely qualified to aggravate them.
If anyone is to muck around with one of the core arrangements for real scientific research (on a global scale, no less) they had better be very clear about the distinctions between "changed" and "actually improved".
Excellent points have been raised in both the article and the comments (especially the reliance on a single advisor; that's trouble).
But one thing that no one is addressing, is the fact that a much of the reproducibility crisis is caused by bad methodologies. Why are PhDs still misapplying statistical tools meant for normal distributions, by using them for power law distributions? That's endemic in the social sciences (see: economics, psychology). Why aren't universities giving all PhD students a proper background in stats & probability?
There's a description for spending years in a tertiary degree: not needing a full time income, or having it come from somewhere else
While I completely understand the sentiment and would also personally like that, the fact remains that to live for years untrammeled by the need for an economic relationship is something that is paid for by somebody.
Should society be saddled with excessive taxes for academic welfare?
Society pays for a lot of waste, so maybe it's unfair to single out academia. But it's a symptom of some kind of imbalance.
The article feels more like a rant than a well-thought-out argument. It hardly says concretely what the problems with current PhD training are (it mentions a few problems in different places, but misses important ones like the ongoing mental health crisis in academia [0]), and it makes very few suggestions about what concretely should change to address them. The authors don't even say what they mean by 'PhD training', ignoring the vast heterogeneity in the structure and duration of doctoral education programs between countries, institutions and even between different programs in the same institution.
In the US, PhD training typically consists of a coursework phase and a research phase, with a target duration of about 5 years. In the EU, a PhD has a target duration of 3 years, according to the European Qualifications Framework [1]. While some coursework will typically be demanded in EU PhDs, it would usually be more lightweight than the coursework in a 5-year US PhD. Some EU institutions will offer doctoral schools that mimic the US model, some institutions will actually offer multiple styles of doctorates in parallel programs (even for the same subject). The UK has 'Centres for Doctoral Training' (CDT) and 'Doctoral Training Partnerships' (DTPs) which look like a compromise between the US and EU models (with typically one year of coursework preceding the research phase). CDTs can be joint programs between multiple universities, with students commuting to other institutions to take classes. CDTs and DTPs are are offered alongside regular PhD programs in the UK (the latter will look more like the EU model in most cases and more like the US model in some). Other countries and regions will often have a similar mix of US- and EU-style training programs. Add to this various lesser known types of doctoral programs like part-time PhDs, professional doctorates, DBAs (Business Doctorates in the US), 'PhD by Publication' in the UK, PhDs that are primarily based at non-university research labs like CERN, Max-Planck-Institutes,... and you will see that the term 'PhD' or 'Doctorate' can refer to vastly different types of academic programs, lasting anywhere from 2 to 8 years, being based at one or multiple or no university, with coursework being anything from absent to equivalent to a 2-year Master's program, funding being provided by a professor, a university, a foundation, a government, a corporation or not at all, having one or multiple supervisors, administering letter, numeric or no grades at all, requiring substantial teaching to none at all,... There is really no point in talking about 'PhD training' or its shortcomings without clarifying which of those countless different types of programs you mean.
The premise of the article seems to be that there exists a uniform model of PhD training that emerged in the 19th century and hasn't been reformed since, which simply doesn't stand up to closer inspection.
