Are PhDs losing lustre? Why fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
63 comments
·February 13, 2025romesmoke
daft_pink
Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.
_hark
Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious.
Very few true eccentrics left.
rhines
I can't speak for other fields, but this does seem true of computer science. I worked in a university lab for a couple years and knew many PhD students, and most of them were most interested in leveraging the PhD to make more money in industry.
I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.
glial
> industry setting unrealistic requirements for education
This sounds like a market dynamic to me. If it were difficult to find qualified candidates, requirements would be lowered.
Just leaving this here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
tomrod
Fantastic thought. Though I think economic signaling theory shows the bottoms-up motivator.
Certainly in the US, the GI Bill lead to a decreased value for high school diplomas for the median graduate. This doesn't mean it wasn't the right idea for the time, just that it's caused a lot of crowding out. I feel like the Elite Overproduction is a good post hoc descriptive theory but missing the why.
armchairhacker
Academia is about whatever the academics want it to be.
Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.
In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).
Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).
I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.
Almondsetat
Oh please, when has Academia not been about prestige?
soared
Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.
tomrod
> Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.
I feel this idea is tired--like a 1978 Ford Pinto banged up and running on worn out re-treads. Will it go somewhere? Maybe, but not too far, not comfortably, and unlikely to end up where you want it.
Academia started as medicine, math, theology, and philosophy, if memory serves, and has given us so much of the basic research that leads to the applied technologies we have today.
The incentive structures get weird, certainly, like resources on the Serengeti.
ashton314
You’re wrong. It is for a good chunk of the academics I know, and they are the most delightful people to hang out with.
morelandjs
The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
dakiol
I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years
dgacmu
Prior to the new administration I would have pointed out that US CS and engineering Ph.D.s are generally paid with a stipend that's "just enough to live on".
There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/
I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.
You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.
seanwilson
There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison.
Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.
comrade1234
Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.
Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
vvpan
Renaissance Technologies is a very successful hedge fund that almost exclusively hires PhD's to do the coding, no matter what field.
mp05
> Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.
> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part
leecarraher
From my experience, there has been a noticeable decline in PhD positions available within academia, likely due to tenure and career longevity, and reduced retirement benefits. As a result, many PhDs are forced into the private sector. However, many organizations have removed middle management layers, making merit based advancement less likely, and instead time becomes the dominating factor.
So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.
jlarocco
As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it.
It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.
On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
jccalhoun
As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.
blululu
The article cites a trend without providing any real facts or information for understanding the topic. I.E. which field are seeing growth and which are seeing contraction. It's a bunch of vague guesses at the cause like 'cost of living' without ever to find and present any facts that could validate whether such hypotheses are actually true. Consider the most common phd is in education, we could easily see a decline in doctors of education and not realize that chemistry phds rose 4%. The effect of the change are very different in this scenario than 4% reduction in fundamental research.
null
axus
The article mentions Australia, Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Were there any counter-examples where the cost of living was supported and PhDs were doing well? I did not register to continue the article.
There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.