Over in Twitter-land, Jeff Terry weighs in on a perennial topic of interest in academia:
(Also read the tweet he’s quoting and the replies, which include some good stuff. Yes, that requires two clicks, which I realize is a lot to ask on the Internet of 2021, but you can do it.)
I think of this kind of argument as “double negative recruiting,” because it really amounts to telling prospective students “This degree won’t stop you from being successful in something else.” This is sort of depressingly common in physics at the undergrad level: a lot of parents look at the range of undergraduate degrees on offer and immediately understand that an engineering degree leads to a job, and a bio/chem degree leads to med school, but physics doesn’t seem to slot neatly into a path to a comfortable living. One of my least favorite parts of touring prospective students around is when I have to have the double-negative conversation: explaining that majoring in physics doesn’t preclude joining one of the more obvious tracks to making money. It’s sometimes a pretty hard sell, because it doesn’t have the emotional resonance of an actual affirmative argument: “You should study this because it’s awesome, and will directly get you a job after graduation.”
These problems get more acute at the graduate level, as demonstrated by the Wall Street Journal article on predatory Master’s programs that generated a lot of buzz last week (and was a topic of conversation at our faculty/staff happy hour). The main take-away from that is that Columbia’s MFA programs are run by venal dickheads, but it points to a larger issue of people spending a lot of money to get degrees that don’t actually open any doors for them. This is even worse when the expensive degrees are post-baccalaureate, because the opportunity cost is higher. A not-immediately-useful undergraduate degree at least takes up the same amount of time at the same life stage as one with a more direct connection to a job. A not-useful graduate degree, on the other hand, is replacing years when you might’ve been getting paid an entry-level salary with years when you’re paying someone else. If you then get stuck in the same kind of entry-level job you could’ve gotten a few years earlier, that’s a major loss.
(For the record: At the undergraduate level, I don’t think your major makes an enormous difference— if you’re graduating with good grades in a school with a solid reputation, you are almost guaranteed to be employable. The only difference your major field will make is in how much you have to hustle to convince somebody to hire you as opposed to somebody else whose degree more closely matches the title of the position they’re filling. In general, I think you’re better off majoring in something you’re enthusiastic about, rather than trudging through a more obviously job-related program with mediocre performance, particularly if that enthusiasm helps motivate you to do the work to get good grades and references. It might take a little more work to convince the person offering a job that a physics major can be an “applications engineer” or whatever, but this is also a place where enthusiasm for your major subject can help you.)
If you’re looking at sinking several years into graduate school, even if you’re not being asked to pay ruinously expensive tuition for the privilege (seriously, don’t do that), then, the stakes are high. Before you do that, you should make sure that the degree you’re seeking will open doors— that it’s absolutely necessary to do the thing you want to do. (This is the big problem with the expensive degrees from that WSJ piece— it’s not clear that they have any real benefit when it comes to getting jobs in the industry the students are interested in, as demonstrated by this fantastic Twitter thread from a not-quite alumnus.) If you can’t get the job you eventually want without the graduate degree, then go ahead (with open eyes regarding the job market, etc.); if there’s another common path to the same sort of position, don’t go to grad school.
In the case of a Ph.D. degree in a STEM field (and perhaps a bit more broadly than that, even, but I can really only speak to STEM), there’s only one good reason to go: because you want to work in research and be the person who decides what problems you’re going to study and how. This isn’t specific to a faculty context, mind— the same sort of hierarchy holds outside of academia. If you want to be the person calling the shots for a research program in a national lab or a corporate research environment, a Ph.D. opens that door and almost nothing else does.
If you think research sounds interesting but aren’t sure you want to commit for the long term, get a job as a lab tech or the like; it’ll put you in a similar environment but pay better while you make up your mind. You can go to grad school later if you decide that’s the right path— if you’re at the right company and good at what you do, there may even be ways to get them to pay you for it, which is a huge win.
If you’re not sure what you want to do, but are just, you know, kind of on a roll with the school thing after all those years, so just want to run it back in a new location: don’t. Seriously, don’t. There are more pleasant ways to find yourself. If you just want to be in an academic setting, go after a teaching credential or something instead.
If you want to end up working as a management consultant or a hedge fund manager, just go get a job at a management consulting firm or hedge fund. Yeah, they pay more for people with Ph.D.’s, but not really enough to make up for spending a good chunk of your 20’s living on grad-student wages.
The Ph.D. is a credential that entitles you to— someday, well down the road, if you’re both lucky and good— be the person calling the shots for a research program. That might be a faculty lab at a college or university, or the PI of a group at a national lab, or the director of a program at a corporate research lab. That’s pretty much the entire list of jobs for which you need a Ph.D.— if you’re working as a researcher in one of those contexts with a lesser degree, you’ll always be working for somebody else. (You can end up in management with a lesser degree, and wield the power of the purse to order Ph.D.’s around, but you almost certainly won’t be allowed to turn knobs in the lab in that case.) For any other job— many of which are very good jobs, some of which pay vastly better than the research jobs— the degree is superfluous. It’s nice to have, and you will be able to bask in the satisfaction of knowing that you are the World’s Leading Expert in the topic of your dissertation (for a brief moment, at least), but you don’t need a Ph.D. for anything else.
If somebody is selling you on a Ph.D. program on the promise of some job other than someday being in charge of a research group, that’s double-negative recruiting. What they’re really saying is that getting a Ph.D. won’t stop you from doing that other thing. It will, however, involve several years of extremely hard work for very low pay, so if you like the job being offered in the double negative, find out what the other path to that job, and see if you can take that instead.
That’s a slightly harsher version of the speech I give to students in our senior seminar for physics majors about the pros and cons of going to grad school. If you’d like this sort of thing to show up in your email at irregular intervals, here’s a big button:
If you’d like to scare somebody else off pursuing a doctorate for bad reasons, here’s a different button:
If you’d like to yell at me for being Wrong on the Internet, comments are open.