Is it possible to be a professor without a PhD? I would like to teach at a college level but the PhD path seems so risky to me to take a pay cut for years and you might not get the degree, and not a get a job.
I have a non-phd friend who did this. About a year ago he was caught up in the layoff wave and decided teaching would be a good way to earn money, stay productive, and pad his resume while interviewing. A great idea in theory, but his experience was less than ideal. Here were the highlights from his short tenure:
- The university sets a schedule and you are assigned to classes that are otherwise short staffed - there's little consideration for your interests. Basically you get bottom of the barrel courses and inconvenient hours.
- The students can barely program and do not care. I know it's a cliche, but it can't be understated. These "masters" students could not handle the equivalent of leetcode easy problems. Get ready for a lot of late submissions, half-assed homework, and begging for extra credit. Oh, and the final is open-book and you're not allowed to fail anyone.
- The student body is largely H1B visa holders. Anyone that's been paying attention to the H1B story knows that part of the visa scheme is funneling students into masters programs to improve their chances in the lottery. Nothing against visa holders, but this is obviously a cash cow for universities.
- Academic personalities and elitism. You are an outsider and will be looked down on. In my friends case, the Dean started getting very bossy and started dumping responsibilities on him that he really had no business being apart of. Ex. Being a judge for someone's thesis defense. My friend got a lot of satisfaction out of submitting his resignation after just 2 semesters.
I personally have a fondness towards teaching as well and tend to romanticize it, but my friends story really turned me off to any interest in that line of work. Of course this is just my friends anecdata, YMMV.
The only exception would be community colleges, which still require at least a masters.
At my university, my favorite professor’s title was “senior lecturer” because he only had a bachelors. This was despite being a Times bestselling author. (He taught literature and writing.)
In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered by major universities are taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty without doctorates.
Your job title probably won't be 'professor', but you'll be doing basically the same work as one.
Graduate students teach classes at their own universities as part of their departmental funding. This is only a temporary situation and exists only while they're enrolled. It's not a career path.
As a former graduate student myself, I'm actually not aware of any non-PhDs who are adjuct faculty or community college instructors. I'm not claiming that they don't exist anywhere, but given the number of PhDs and the number of available academic jobs, the competition is fierce, and non-PhD candidates are likely to lose out to PhD candidates.
Fwiw my dad had a masters in biology and a PhD in botany, but was an instructor for biology in the local community college (“Mount San Jacinto Community College”). I guess technically he had a PhD, but not in the way most people would think
Just make a youtube channel and start lecturing or substack. Obviously not the same thing, but the barriers to entry to content creation have been eroded, and if if you have the chops not having a doctorate won't be an impediment.
