Comments on: Time to degree

By: trish

trish — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 06:51:52 +0000

Tim, grad students as cheap labour must depend on the university. At UBC in Vancouver, health care is free for everyone and tuition is free for PhD students so the only cost to the supervisor is the student stipend (only 17K even if the student isn’t TAing). Add on a couple scholarships to this and grad students can be very very cheap labour. I feel lucky that my supervisor didn’t try to take advantage of that!

By: tim

tim — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 05:20:17 +0000

“There is also the fact that PhD and Masters Degree candidates represent cheap skilled labor.” Hmmm. By the time you pay for graduate tuition, stipend, summer health care benefits, and 60% IDC, a graduate student runs about 60K per year, at least in the private school where I work. It would be much cheaper for me to hire a data manager or statistical consultant on an hourly basis, especially if you calculate the additional time it takes me to train graduate students, check their work, and provide professional (or, almost inevitably, personal) counseling. I see funding and training graduate students more as a service to the department and discipline—and, for some of my colleagues, a way to achieve a form of academic immortality—than as a cost-effective way to get research done.

By: james

james — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 22:26:44 +0000

There is also the fact that PhD and Masters Degree candidates represent cheap skilled labor. The continual expansion of project requirements mid-project leads to certain unpleasant conclusions on the part of students.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 21:30:52 +0000

At least in my experience, it was just harder for everyone to finish because they realized it wasn’t really for anything. You spent a lot of time enduring the general negativity of grad school and at the end the best you could hope for was the downward spiral of increasingly irrelevant post-docs. But you are too invested to get out without a Ph.D., so it was hard to be terrifically efficient getting something that would mean less and less to you at the end, and when you finally finished, you left physics anyway. It’s anthropology in my case, not physics, but otherwise: hoo boy, can I relate to the above. Having given up on the idea of an academic career, I have only a fairly nebulous sense of personal achievement as motivation to finish: “I’ve come too far to give up now” and “Just think how great it’ll feel to be done!” and so forth. And just as James says, the “rational” thing would be to just buckle down and finish the damn thing and get on with life, but when you’re working full-time and you haven’t done any coursework in years and the whole thing seems utterly disconnected from the “real world,” it’s easier said than done.

By: James Landry

James Landry — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 19:50:55 +0000

It’s more complicated than that. Many of the theorists who took a long time went directly into management consulting after they got out. At least in my experience, it was just harder for everyone to finish because they realized it wasn’t really for anything. You spent a lot of time enduring the general negativity of grad school and at the end the best you could hope for was the downward spiral of increasingly irrelevant post-docs. But you are too invested to get out without a Ph.D., so it was hard to be terrifically efficient getting something that would mean less and less to you at the end, and when you finally finished, you left physics anyway. Rationally, one would expect people to just buckle down, finish as fast as possible, and then get a job doing something else, but that’s not how people reacted. Most of them never expected to do anything but physics when they got in, so there was a strong cognitive dissonance, and it became extremely difficult to resist the feeling of failure and thus spend your time cultivating hobbies not at all related to finishing your Ph.D.

By: djw

djw — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 19:04:49 +0000

Matt, exactly. There are perverse incentives to stay on the student rolls even when you’re substantively done (if you don’t have a job) in many cases: keep deferring student loans, easier to access teaching work in your home dept in many cases, etc.

By: RS

RS — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:59:59 +0000

Trish, it is not at all uncommon in the UK to be on similar or worse wages going from PhD to post-doc I’m afraid.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:23:22 +0000

James—Perhaps time in degree is increasing because job possibilities are worsening? A worse market encourages you to try to fatten your cv before you leave grad school; not to mention that it makes an extra year in school look better compared to going on the market.

By: James Landry

James Landry — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:06:49 +0000

Re: physics It is true in general that theorists take longer than experimentalists, but that was not true for my class, where all the experimentalists but one got out before something like five theorists. Time in degrees is increasing as job possibilities are worsening. It’s not a good combination.

By: trish

trish — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:02:42 +0000

It took me five years (and one month) to complete my PhD in Ocean Sciences. I’m now looking for a postdoc and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a big difference between North American and UK postdoctoral positions. The ability to do my own research seems limited in the UK and it looks like I’d have less academic freedom that I had during my PhD. Is this the norm for UK positions? Is it something to do with the reduced length of time in the PhD program? (I know that my abilities to do research have increased greatly in the last two years of my PhD). The salaries also seem a lot lower, and one postdoc I was shortlisted for in London seemed to assume that I was still in my early to mid 20s and could “put up with” student-style living for a few more years. We turned them down for financial as well as academic reasons, as I would have had less buying power than provided by my PhD stipend. Maybe a system with longer PhDs results in better positions afterwards. Of course, this is based on the very small sample of jobs in my field, so I’d be very interested to hear from others in similar situations.

By: Junius Ponds

Junius Ponds — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:38:58 +0000

The US average numbers are a little disspiriting. It’d be nice to see numbers broken down by specialty; for instance, as I understand it, it takes theorists in physics less time to complete a PhD than experimentalists.

By: Richard Zach

Richard Zach — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:28:30 +0000

The last (1994) NRC ranking of graduate programs (data searchable at phds.org) includes a "median time to degree". This data, however, is difficult to interpret. Probably it can at best give a relative measure of time-to-degree.

By: RS

RS — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:14:46 +0000

Of course the plus side of a US PhD (in the sciences) is all that extra training, the down side all the teaching to pay for it.

By: cure

cure — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:09:32 +0000

Matt, the UK PhD certainly seems to be shorter in general than the US version. I’m finishing up an M.A. in Economics right now; with that degree, I could be out the door at LSE with a PhD in econ three years from beginning. In US economics, it seems that 4 years is quite quick, and 5 years is the norm. Given the salaries that an economics degree commands, the opportunity cost of a US degree nearly makes up for the high tuition/no stipend for Americans in a UK program.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:52:07 +0000

I can’t speak for the US but I am in the final few months of my D.Phil in the UK and it will—assuming no disaster in the next 2 or 3 months—- have taken me a little over 3 full time academic years (but chronologically actually just over 4 as I took a full year leave of absence to work). [This doesn’t translate into US PhD terms as I know they are structued very differently…] I could certainly have finished many months sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that a larger percentage of time than I’d have liked was spent teaching, or otherwise working, in order to earn money for luxuries like food and a place to live. Several friends of mine are in a similar situation where they’d really rather not work but have to and all of the people in the situation have complained that working interferes with their thesis time. I wonder if financial burdens are the main reason for longer PhD times.