PhD programmes need to better prepare students for careers outside universities, researchers warn.
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This happened when I was in grad school back in the late 90s. Clinton increased the budget of the NIH significantly (thanks Bill) which led to a huge increase in training grants allowing PhD programs to expand. However, faculty positions did not expand, so many PhDs had to find alternate careers (most people go into PhD program to get a faculty/researcher position). This actually worked out really well for bigtech, which hoovered these folks up. I worked with tons of ex-physicists who were great programmers especially at machine learning. It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs.
By georgeburdell 2025-06-241:021 reply I have a PhD and I felt that I had to deprogram myself to fit in with BigTech. With a PhD, I would uncompromisingly pursue a single goal. Ideas were worth something. In Big Tech, ideas are in abundance but time is short, and I must compromise to follow through on my commitments. The only thing I really have an advantage over non-PhDs is that I get suspicious of good results
Edit: totally unrelated, but PhDs in the West basically seem to be immigration schemes, and universities are happy to play along.
By gopher_space 2025-06-243:11 Money brought in by foreign students is greater than money brought in by out of state students, which is greater than money brought in by local students. The way tuition is set up as a general concept will lead to this situation if your institution lasts long enough.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-06-240:071 reply > It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs.
This is contrary to my life experience (even for math or physics PhDs).
What makes a great PhD thesis is to question an insane lot of assumptions of deep results in the field of your PhD thesis, and show that if you base these on a very different foundation, these results generalize to whole different areas; e.g. you found a bridge between seemingly unrelated areas of studies.
On the other hand, managers deeply hate it if you question a lot of assumptions behind the work that you do, whether it is some special case of something deeper, and aren't obedient to the manager's leadership.
In other words: a great PhD program teaches you to think and work all the time on things managers will hate you for.
Certainly a subset of PhDs who work at bigtech fail to have any impact. I've seen a few brilliant but inflexible people hit up against the immovable parts of a corporation. I've also seen brilliant PhDs who refuse to study for a software engineering interview... and then fail miserably. But by and large, based on hundreds of individuals, I've found that quantitative PhDs can drop into many SWE roles and contribute- both mundane improvements to code quality, and massive improvements to the foundations of projects.
By znpy 2025-06-247:29 > I've seen a few brilliant but inflexible people hit up against the immovable parts of a corporation.
With such an attitude it would have only been a matter of time before they hit up the immovable part of academia as well.
It's global.
Here is something on Australia :
https://theconversation.com/australia-has-way-more-phd-gradu...
Key quotes :
The number of PhD completions has been steadily growing over the past two decades, from about 4,000 to about 10,000 per year.
According to our calculations* based on the information available, the cumulative number of people in Australia with a PhD has increased from about 135,000 in 2016 to about 185,000 in 2021.
The incentives are for Universities to get smart young people to do their work cheaply.
What happens to the graduates afterwards ceases to be the University's problem.
The only strange thing about it is that the smart young people are taking so long to figure it out.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-06-247:26 > The only strange thing about it is that the smart young people are taking so long to figure it out.
They find out very fast, but come to the conclusion that academia is one of the few places where their intelligence is valued.
> The only strange thing about it is that the smart young people are taking so long to figure it out.
I don't think it's so strange. They're smart in their chosen fields, but intelligence is not wisdom or hard experience. Moreover, intelligence breeds confidence, often overconfidence, the idea that you'll be the one to beat the odds. I suppose the same thing happens to young, talented athletes, for example.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-06-247:27 > Moreover, intelligence breeds confidence, often overconfidence
Quite the opposite: intelligence is linked to depression: https://engl105sp2020.web.unc.edu/2020/02/is-there-a-link-be...
By tptacek 2025-06-240:07 My understanding is that there are lots of industry jobs in NIH's ambit that tacitly require PhD's (very much unlike the technology industry).
By jojobas 2025-06-2323:45 That sure applies to maths/physics PhDs, not so much for arts ones, these are still competing for a handful of academic jobs and the rest go to menial jobs with huge debts.
That's a great question. To the extent that increasing the budget caused more smart people to get PhDs and more of them were able to contribute to the scientific effort (as well as help bigtech develop ML and contribute back to science), I think it was a good idea.
It might have been better executed- somehow matching the increased supply of grad students with increase supply of faculty positions, or perhaps just growing it more slowly to let the inequalities equilibrate a bit more. But ultimately, I think it was a good thing, in that it increased the total science being done.
By redczar 2025-06-244:42 Thanks for the clarification.
By wileydragonfly 2025-06-240:15 Yeah, NIH had two guys (Lauer and Collins) that tried to do all kinds of things to spread out funding to junior researchers and increase the number of jobs. The entrenched investigators fought them every step of the way and Trump has since run both off.
One of the problems is that universities exploit graduate students as cheap labor in teaching and research while they're in school, so the universities have an incentive to admit more incoming students than can be placed in academic jobs.
By musicale 2025-06-245:23 Underpaid grad students and postdocs are the dirty-but-not-exactly-secret source of research productivity per dollar in the US.
But the pyramid is unsustainable even if each PhD only trains one or two new PhDs every 5 years.
And then charge undergraduates more, making them take classes they don't need, in order to justify paying those graduate student GTAs.
By lapcat 2025-06-240:45 I'm puzzled by this response to my comment about the cheapness of grad student labor.
Grad students are doing work that would otherwise have to be performed by full professors, who are vastly, vastly more expensive than grad students. So in my opinion, to blame undergraduate tuition on graduate students just seems... bizarre?
By rapjr9 2025-06-243:28 Some grad students are finding a third path, remain a grad student. The pay is poor, but sometimes the work is interesting enough. After 8-10 years you've made enough contacts and gotten enough job interest that you have choices for doing something else. If you invent something truly new and useful that can lead to an income as well. It is quite obvious that getting a PhD is not a sustainable path to working as a professor once the number of PhD's exceeds the retirement rate of the profs.
