Via Priceeconomics. (hat tip Abnormal Returns)
After completing his PhD in computer science at Stanford University and tackling the job market, Chand John felt like a Porsche. This was not a good thing. Writing in the Chronicle of HIgher Education, he reflected:
So we have today’s employment climate. At one end, companies hire whoever can get the job done, like consumers buying reliable, affordable sedans. At the other end, universities, including deeply industry-savvy ones like Stanford, pump out Ph.D.’s who, like luxury cars, are too specialized and expensive for most employers.
Article after article describing the challenges PhDs face in the private job market decry universities’ pure focus on preparing students for academic careers as well as professors' assumption that their students' skills will transfer into the private sector - or that students will make it as academics. After all, the professors did.More insidiously, professors’ research depends on the assistance of a reliable army of poorly paid PhD students, who also teach undergraduates at rock bottom wages. Universities have little incentive to look too critically at the programs filling their laboratories with well qualified and inexpensive labor.
If universities want their PhD students to succeed, they need to stop treating them like poorly paid interns paying dues on their way to a career in academia and teach students how to leap over the PhD-industry gap.
After completing his PhD in computer science at Stanford University and tackling the job market, Chand John felt like a Porsche. This was not a good thing. Writing in the Chronicle of HIgher Education, he reflected:
So we have today’s employment climate. At one end, companies hire whoever can get the job done, like consumers buying reliable, affordable sedans. At the other end, universities, including deeply industry-savvy ones like Stanford, pump out Ph.D.’s who, like luxury cars, are too specialized and expensive for most employers.
Article after article describing the challenges PhDs face in the private job market decry universities’ pure focus on preparing students for academic careers as well as professors' assumption that their students' skills will transfer into the private sector - or that students will make it as academics. After all, the professors did.More insidiously, professors’ research depends on the assistance of a reliable army of poorly paid PhD students, who also teach undergraduates at rock bottom wages. Universities have little incentive to look too critically at the programs filling their laboratories with well qualified and inexpensive labor.
If universities want their PhD students to succeed, they need to stop treating them like poorly paid interns paying dues on their way to a career in academia and teach students how to leap over the PhD-industry gap.
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