I find these articles to be missing the point. It's probably not rational to enter a PhD program if you're primarily motivated by making money. It's usually only a worthwile if you enjoy the subject enough that you don't mind spending 5+ years being underpaid (relative to what other salaries your skill set could command) to think really hard about it and try to leave an imprint. Then, even if you don't get to stay in the field afterwards, the PhD on its own will have been a good experience.
(full disclosure: currently slogging away on my dissertation).
Yes, I agree with you that the reality of current academia makes it more rational to enter a phd program with no expectations of a stable/decently-paid career.
But that's kinda ridiculous. That to do research science, we are expected to choose between, as you say "leaving an imprint", over personal/financial stability. We are not monks of science. And science is not something to be put on a pedestal like religion.
I feel like current academia likes to (for a lack of better term) brainwash prospective students into thinking the life of a research scientist is supposed to be hard. And if you don't have a hard life, you are not really a good scientist. As if personal/financial sacrifice is a virtue when doing research science.
Having this expectation when considering doing research science shouldn't be okay. But we are made to think it is.
I agree that it would be nice if it were easier to be a research scientist, and I certainly support more funding for basic science research, but mostly because I think it's important, not necessarily because scientists are especially exploited.
If you are really good, connected, or lucky, and are willing to make the requisite "sacrifices," then you can end up in a permanent research scientist role. I put "sacrifices" in quotes because these are many careers that people choose to go into (social work, community organizing, arguably teaching) that require much greater sacrifices and would be equally irrational if one were not passionate about the work. The correct response is probably that all these groups should be compensated better, and I (perhaps selfishly) agree, but right now. a research scientist is a much cushier, more prestigious, job than a social worker, and arguably marginally less important to society. (more disclosure: my wife is a social worker)
If, like most, you aren't able to get a permanent research job, or aren't willing to make the "sacrifices", you can go into industry, where (usually) you will make much more money but not get to work on things as interesting. If you hadn't gone into a PhD program, this is likely where you would have ended up in the first place. There is some opportunity cost of reduced total earnings (even if you get a higher salary with a PhD, it's likely you would have made up for that by not being a low-paid graduate student or postdoc for so long), but if you are passionate about science, then at least you will have spent 5-10 years doing it before getting a "real job."
I, like most of my peers, do want to end up being a researcher, but I harbor no illusion that this is the most likely eventual outcome. If I can't find a comfortable arrangement, I'll leave the field, do something else and be no worse off for it. I do realize that I am fortunate to be in a field (experimental high energy physics) where the impedance mismatch to industry is relatively good. Other fields may require different ratios of passion to "sacrifice" to be a good choice.
I think the importance or practical impact of a profession is a whole another issue I'd rather not get into. I take your point that there is a hint of entitlement to anyone complaining about a job that, comparatively, is better off than many other jobs.
I am all for people who are willing to tough it out for something they are passionate in. However, I hope these people are passionate because of some kind of internal motivation and not due to external pressure or culture to accept the status quo.
Why shouldn't it be hard? Most things that are worth doing in life are hard - particularly anything that affords you an opportunity for freedom or creativity.
You get a range of skills while working on a science PhD that will benefit you in industry no matter where you end up. If you choose to study an area that actually has industry applications then its even better.
If, on the other hand, you get a science PhD and spend all of your time working with some insanely complex device that only has 1 application studying an esoteric process that has no industry applications... then yeah you're going to have a hard time finding work. This is the story I have seen over and over again among my friends and colleagues that get PhDs.
If you're a graduate student be smart about it and make sure you get the experience necessary to help you find work after graduation! No one else is going to help you with that, it is up to you to build your resume.
Professors that take advantage of cheap labor and don't help their students transition after graduation are a problem that Universities should take up. It is to the University's benefit to get their students into nice industry positions.
I would say it like this: You either make yourself employable or you don't, in spite of working on a PhD.
What I observed during grad school was that students who wanted to be employable in industry pretty much had to direct their own efforts in that regard. They had to get into the right professor's research group in order to have the leeway to steer their goals. The soft skills needed to function in the business world were those that they were born with, or somehow learned outside the academe. Luck played a role too.
Overproduction of PhDs serves the interests of academia, which wants cheap and easily replaceable adjunct labor. Nobody is particularly motivated to change this, not even the adjuncts themselves, because they have convinced themselves that they have a shot at a tenure-track position, which is a remote possibility for most of them.
I have found this to depend on the school and program you came out of. Some bachelor's programs are rigorous, others not so much.
In general, engineering and science graduates with bachelor's degrees from large state schools and universities are fairly competent. Core skills and knowledge vary widely with graduates from smaller local schools.
It concerns me that, for this reason, my degree might be worth 'less' a few years/decades down the line than it is now. In the UK, a lot of job positions ask for a 2.i minimum. I have a 2.i from a a very good university, and I'm personally proud of it, but in a few years time I fully expect to see jobs asking for a 1st minimum become the norm, in which case my CV will be filtered out by default at the HR level, which is frustrating.
A similar problem for people who didn't go to university is the new A* grade added to the A-level system. When I did my A-levels, the top grade was A. In a few years time, people will probably forget this, and will then see normal A grades as somewhat 'lesser'.
I can only see grade/credential inflation getting worse in future.
However, I believe that by the time your 2.i degree is considered 'below the minimum', your accrued job experience will have far surpassed your academic achievements. I would also expect HR to not take your university experience into account (or at the very most only minimally) at that point.
I think college is a fun place to be until you figure out something productive to do. A lot of people feel that this is a "wrong" reason to do a PhD, but I actually agree with this view.
Perhaps there is not an abundance of PhDs, rather a shortage of jobs for PhDs. Something close to 1 of 75 PhDs will become a professor (from the PhD Grind), so almost every PhD should be preparing to work not as a Professor.
They did not include Australia. In my opinion it suffers from the same problems as China. These days, many students get a PhD in just three years. The control mechanism are so soft that a large amount of PhD projects would not pass as master (by research) dissertation in other countries.
My own experience with PhDs was an aborted one around '97 in Melbourne. I fully own the end of it - I just was not interested in the topic I had (BIG mistake), plus the more I saw of academia, the less I wanted to deal with it's politics.
But what was startling was how the PhD students were treated like cattle by our department. Shoved into the shittiest room in the building, where the airconditioning ducts were in backwards so it was freezing all the time, I watched number-crunching computers destined for PhDs get redirected to admin temps, amongst other general shake-your-head day-to-day stories.
The kicker story for me was that the dean had managed to poach some prestigious astrophysicist ("Astrophysicist? But this is Biophysical Sciences...") from another university, and in the afternoon of the last faculty day of the year, three days before christmas, one of the supervisors came and said we might want to talk to the dean as there were rumblings. Our office was receiving the astrophysicist and his staff on the next day the faculty was open and naturally they wouldn't be expecting a room full of people. The dean didn't even bother to proactively inform us that we had to move out! Did we have another office tagged for us to go to? Not really, no. So the dying hours of that afternoon were spent shuffling our stuff out and into some storage/office somewhere.
My supervisor hated the way we were treated. Basically we were a head count. Dean gets funding, then fuck 'em after that. My supervisor said that when he did his PhD back in the early 70s, a doctoral student was handled like gold. They were effectively considered another member of faculty. In only two decades we'd become 'room meat'...
Having said that though, it should be noted that a PhD is preceded by an (often independent) MSc degree, so comparing a 5 year (?) US grad school program after just a BSc to a 3-4 yr European PhD isn't quite comparing apples with apples.
As others have said, a PhD may be worth it if and only if you don't expect a job in academia at the end. But that's a long time not spent on one's career, and boy, that love for the subject has to be really strong.
For the vast majority of people I don't think it worthwhile. I said in another thread like this one that I don't think most people in academia want to be rich and famous, but they should expect a reasonable material existence. Academia currently doesn't deliver that. As Louis Menand points out in The Marketplace of Ideas, median times to a PhD degree is now hitting seven years in the sciences and ten in the humanities.
One of the compounding factors is that academic positions disproportionately go only to graduates of top-rated institutions. For CS faculty, 50% of tenure-track positions graduated from the top 18 schools, while 80% came from the top 25. If you want a PhD for academia, then it almost certainly isn't worth it if you don't go to an elite institution.
Some people have brought up the idea that people should not enter into a PhD program if they are interested in money. I agree, but the problem goes beyond that. For those of us who are fortunate to find permanent positions doing research, it's actually an amazing life. We're not rich, but we are comfortable and we have jobs that we love.
But, there are relatively few of us who end up with permanent research positions in the sciences. So, let's take my field of physics and consider the situation in the US. Let's imagine two tracks for a student. She's skilled in math, computer science, and physics. She could go into computer science and start working in her field immediately after college. Depending on where she goes, she could make $100K/yr shortly after graduation (ok, a lot of that may go towards rent, but let's just use this as a round number).
Now, let's suppose that she decides to go the physics route. She will likely spend 6 years as a PhD student. Back in my day, I remember making a stipend of $13K/yr. Checking online, these have now gone up to ~30K/yr at a number of institutions. So, at the end of 6 years, that's already a huge opportunity cost. She hasn't bought a house, she probably has few if any retirement savings. Now, let's suppose that she continues for a postdoc for 3 years. Let's say that she makes $50K/yr (it's probably more likely that she'll make $40-$45K/yr, but let's again take a round number). So, at the end of this, she's lost $570K of potential earnings. This is ignoring taxes, but to be fair, it's also ignoring any interest growth that she would have made on retirement savings while working for a company.
Now, one might argue that for quality of life and doing what she loves, this might be worth it if she became faculty at this point. However, the chances of this happening are slim. So, at the end of the day, she'll probably examine her options and in many cases (I have had friends and students that have taken different paths to leave physics--ranging from teaching high school to finance) leave physics to do something else.
So, the question isn't whether it makes sense to do a career in physics vs say a career in CS. It's a question whether it's worth the opportunity cost to do a PhD in physics and perhaps a postdoc in physics before doing something completely different. There are of course some areas of physics where people are able to find industry positions doing physics, but this is often not the case...
I think that departments need to be upfront about this and provide students with training opportunities to do other work if they are interested in doing so after their PhD...
The calculation may be different for those in engineering fields...
(full disclosure: currently slogging away on my dissertation).