If doing a PhD will bring no career benefits, it gets harder to submit to all of the limitations on one’s life that come with going back to a degree program.
I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Maybe reaching out to international faculties in your field could be an idea?
E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are quite a few professors in Europe who would be willing to guide you through (the relatively light weight bureaucracy) PhD process as long as you create and publish high quality research.
Usually a PhD process requires SOME formal training (e.g., attending a fee seminars), peer-reviewed publications and a cumulative summary over your research.
Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves; which is great because of flexibility without compromise on quality.
I mean, in CS, engineering, physics, there are plenty of areas where you don’t need a lab per se but can just simulate etc. I must admit that depending in the field interaction with fellow PhD students can be super great an valuable (that’s just gonna make life harder for you if you don’t take advantage of it).
> E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
Yea... I wanted to start PhD this year. Unfortunately it turned out that the only thing that counts, are my previous and future publications. Any work experience seems like a disadvantage. They value more someone with no experience, but with a couple of, usually not very inventive, publications.
I have over 18 years of work experience. I used to make more complicated things at work, than you can find in many published papers or even PhDs. So I asked a professor about how to start it.
It turned out that: the pay is much below the minimum salary + I will be thrown away if I won't have one publication in a good journal after the first year. If you also think that after sending a paper to a journal, they usually reply in six-nine months with a rejection or a list of comments to fix... it turned out that I have to start my PhD with a bunch of papers already written. And to have them count, they need to be exactly about the same topic as my PhD.
So, after rethinking all this, I stopped dreaming about a PhD. I can publish my paper on arXiv without all the academic fun.
This feels basically exactly like my experience too this year and last. I even had a professor tell me straight up when I emailed him that I basically wouldn’t get in since he already had prospective students with publications in the exact area reach out to him. I’ve kind of realized that without a string of publications ahead of time you’re basically out of the game before you even try. It’s like you have to have done PhD level work before you can do the PhD. It’s left me totally lost on what to do from here, getting a PhD has been a life dream for me so it’s hard to ditch the idea. I guess we might be in the same boat.
Don't despair. PhD life looks good from the outside because all parties involved (students, professors, administrators) have incentives to make it look good. The reality can be much different.
Besides, you've got to think how would you use this degree after you finish. Inside academia, you will be locked in a job with a mid-low salary with scarce options to advance. Outside of academia, PhD is less valued than most people think. I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
> I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
But what kind of recognition do they get? I know somebody who worked at some really good labs for ~10 years and did great work. He co-authored a couple of Nature (?) papers of which he did most of the work and writing. But ultimately with a BSc you're just a lab tech and nobody takes you seriously.
OTOH, that person just finished his Ph.D at Harvard but this is pretty much the end of the road for him--I don't think he's keen on navigating the cut-throat world of academia or commercial research.
It's kind of a lose-lose. If you love basic research, no recognition and you're stuck following orders. If you want recognition and some autonomy, you're stuck playing politics.
This is something that definitely weighs on my mind, I think. I've got an MSc, but I feel intense self-doubt and feel like I can't be an expert until I've gotten a PhD. In that sense maybe I've internalized the idea, and telling myself I'm not "qualified" to speak on issues of science in my field. And not to mention, doing a PhD brings the benefit of several years of being able to devote full time to learning and development. A full-time job can (should) be a growth environment but one's work will always be subordinate to business needs (most often applying knowledge you have rather than learning new things), and take most of the time of your week.
The quest for autonomy and recognition is rough, it's a very tough game and it's not easy to stay motivated at trying to make progress.
They get paid well. Most of the stuff they do cannot be published due to intellectual property reasons, so they indeed miss out on academic recognition. This is a trade-off one has to make.
Sad to hear the story of that person. Ideally, you should not start a PhD unless you have a burning question to answer and need ample time to study it. Given that a career post-graduation is not guaranteed, it's best to hedge your bets and study something that has immediate applications and/or gives you transferable skills.
The big draw for me is to be able to actually invent and innovate and not just implement old ideas over and over in a boring corporate space. All the exciting research jobs I see in my field (NLP) require a PhD, so I feel like I'll hit a career ceiling at some point and be implementing boring corporate solutions for the rest of my life and never really innovating.
But as you say, appearances can be deceptive and it's like the grass is always greener, so maybe I need to broaden my horizons somehow. It's definitely hard to find that path at the moment though.
Edit: Oh and I do have to admit the fancy title that lets me feel like I'm truly educated and learned, and satisfies credentialism in the world is a draw too... Peer pressure is a hell of a drug
Companies explicitly requiring a PhD is an unfortunate consequence of having too many PhDs being already out there and additionally produced each year. If you have done some interesting work and can get in touch with a recruiter, you can probably challenge that requirement in your case.
If you don't have a PhD, you do have to compete with everyone who has it. But it is still possible to gain an edge on them by simply studying what your prospective employers need. For PhD students, it is actually harder to do that unless their PI is doing something closely related.
Just a hypothesis: that professor would have abused you as a working slave. And he knew that no person in his right mind with significant work experience and “above minimum pay” could be Ok with it.
I suspect it had nothing to do with your qualifications - rather he probably wanted to avoid saying “sorry, but I wont be able to abuse you enough”.
At no institution in Germany have I head of “if you don’t publish in a year, you are out”. Usually you work 2 years as a slave with no context what your research is and after the first couple of years, you are allowed “to think loudly about a topic”.
This encounter is not “normal”... Keep looking. And yes: Academia knows that industry works on hard shit. And they often don’t want “outsiders to take a look under the rug”... They create a fake world to justify themselves more often than not...
>Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves
Nitpick: You may want to change "his way" to the gender neutral "their way" especially since you use women taking maternity leave as an example. :)
> I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure
Well, that's not quite true I guess, because in most areas of math, or theoretical physics, you certainly don't need much beyond pen, paper, and (usually) a reasonable computer.
In physics, I suspect the value of collaboration is a major effect keeping research bound to the universities and national labs. Single-author papers are quite rare. The big experimental groups infamously have 100- or 1000-author papers, but even in theory, a 10-author paper is no longer particularly surprising.
I don't know of any (halfway-reputable) independent researchers in theoretical physics, though. I'm not sure if the above reason justifies that. The more important thing may be that's it's just impossible to get funding without a university/lab appointment.
Actually --- that's a good question. Where does your income for your lovely warm-weather travel come from? Is somebody paying you for research, outside of the strictures of universities?
That’s certainly possible if you start the PhD after finishing a career like the author, and in some fields of research too. I just wanted to point out that more broadly speaking, an advanced degree usually brings financial benefits. The Fed recently published statistics on this that completely surprised me: in the U.S., people with advanced degrees earn on average about 50% more than bachelor’s degree holders, and 3x more than non-degree holders. I had no idea the average difference was that high until I read the report. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Comparing the field of people with PhDs to the field of people with BSs isn't exactly comparable to comparing PhDs to people with Master's degrees who are already doing all the relevant academic work and receiving academic acclaim in the field.
There may be financial benefit, maybe not. There's also the opportunity cost of giving up your career income for four+ years to get a grad student stipend (if it's a program with stipends at all).
I understand you were broadening the point, but I think "first-career PhDs" vs. "second-career PhDs" are the topic under discussion, and broadening it to "bachelor's" is too broad.
Super fair point, you are right. And FWIW, the source I linked to does not differentiate between PhD and Master's, IIRC. I do assume there's a positive benefit, but I'd have to see whether that's supported using some other source. And the GP comment is right as well, regardless of financial benefits; going back to school will come with some limitations and difficulties. I imagine that's true even in the post-career scenario.
Supposing a PhD earned 20% over a masters and it takes 3 years, then it could be a net negative return unless you have 15 years or more of career left after returning to work. That is a valid point and something to consider before going back. The Fed report I linked to is actually arguing that recent trends have changed the balance of opportunity costs when getting degrees. (Though I happen to think the report leaves out some important details and thus frames things in a misleading way.)
Even though I brought up financial side, what I dislike about boiling it down to financial opportunity cost of attending school is that tends to frame the entire outcome as a financial decision, and ignores the opportunity cost or future value of a life getting to do research. In my mind it's better to do the PhD because you want to rather than for the money, and I suspect that people who care more about the research than the money tend to fare better as a byproduct. (That's pure speculation though.)
Yes you're right, and I mentioned it depends on field of research. I did assume this discussion could be talking about MD or JD degrees as easily as a PhD in general - not for the GP comment, but for the average person thinking about going back to school.
The averages aren't that misleading though, since they represent the average choice of degree. If you know you're going to study history, then yes the numbers are too high for you, but the averages are correct for the average person.
You're right that a non-trivial number of professional advanced degree holders making more than $1M/yr. There are also many scientists and engineers and business people doing the same. People making more than $1M/year are statistical outliers, as are history PhDs in the U.S.
Not everyone who could get a PhD does. Compare those number to the 75th or 90th percentile of non-PhD Bachelor's holders, before, uh, getting your statistics PhD.
> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter
This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.) Think of a PhD more like a sabbatical to focus on your own research. There’s a goal you need to achieve but freedom in how you get there.
No, this differs from field to field and from country to country. There are only a tiny handful of departments dedicated to my subfield worldwide, and I know that they all require, at the very least, attendance at a weekly seminar so that you can share with your fellow students what you have been up to. In some places, the department can demand that one teach in order to hold a PhD position, or that one take part in the editing of publications produced by the department (which can be so much work that it distracts from one’s own research).
Not trying to say Mediterraneo10 should get a PhD, but PhD life probably sounds very nice to many people in the world without the kind of freedom and financial stability Mediterraneo10 describes. Credit to him/her in achieving such enviable life circumstances!
There isn’t much “fun” about PhD. People who “do it on the side” without “university housing, pay and support” are borderline masochists.
Doing so on your own motivation without family/peer-pressure has my respect. In a First World country generally you don’t have any benefit from a PhD... Much different in “not first world”.
I mean, that ignores the Master's requirement. All PhD programs I've ever looked at have a Master's as part of them, which has all the coursework.
For example, a political science PhD at Columbia (including the Masters) requires a full 12 courses, as well as teaching for at least a year (more if you receive a fellowship, up to 20 hrs/wk).
And you can't do your Masters somewhere else first and then just do the PhD part at Columbia, that's not an option.
Of course. But I was responding to GP which claimed "you don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to" as a blanket fact about PhD programs in general. For many (most?), you clearly do, despite there being exceptions of course.
> This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.)
At least in france there are some minimum legal hours of seminars you have to attend and classes you have to teach during your phd.
In the US the first two years of a PhD are heavily focused on classwork, with a research component; the latter years are the "sabbatical to focus on your own research." People who quit after the first two years are often granted a parting Master's degree, because that's basically what a Master's is - the two years of graduate coursework that kick off a PhD.
From my possibly outdated research, it might be because you don't normally leave university with Master's degree in the USA, just the Bachelors, and there is no "normal" Masters program - essentially you do mastery as part of PhD and then get "moved over" automatically to PhD.
Of course you can leave with Master's degree at that point, it's just that it seemed to me that USA generally didn't got for MSci style degree, not in CS related areas at least.
> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter.
Oh yeah. I went to med school after having an actual career. Going back to a heavy-handed bureaucracy whose primary intention is to herd a mob of people with the least benefit of doubt is incredibly infantilizing. It's hard to endure the first time, when you're in uni, but after you've already been an adult?
Working on my 2nd master degree on my 60 and found it not worth it. The problem is my interest even if coincide with the course the details are not the same. I would like to use my IT knowledge and my understanding of may philosophical fields ... but who cares about these in those seminars lecturer and classmates (all are seniors) are busy on digging the materials very narrowly. Guess I just quit and do my own knowledge research it would be better. But one thing I would miss is the need to study things which I have no interest - in my case (I am on Philosophy one a Greek guy and a Chinese guy before 500 BC) which work out very useful for my pursuit. Hence, still wonder.
An alternative: one of my lecturers (and a great one) was not a PhD. Full-time faculty member, researcher, lecturer, but somehow wound up there without a doctorate.
OK you don't want to teach, but I suppose my point is if people are already 'interested in your research' which is peer-reviewed & published etc. then maybe they'd consider hiring you without that formal training. Maybe, not like I've tried it.
>as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Sorry, I know this is a tangent. Do you have any blog posts about this, or advice you can give now? This would be my dream but I wouldn't even know where to start finding work.
> Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter.
I understand that this may be specific to your sub-field, but this is absolutely not the case for many students. It varies heavily with university and country. I believe it makes a big difference whether you're considered to be a staff member or a student. In the UK you're a student, in Germany, you're staff.
We have several part-time PhD and Masters students in our department and I think the requirements are generally relaxed for them. Most of them work remotely. Many of them also have other jobs, families, etc. One is a sci-fi author!
Here, teaching is something that students occasionally do to earn a bit of money. It's rare though, usually it's only lab supervision or grading - we pay lecturers to teach. So this is absolutely not the case for a lot PhD positions. In the US and other European countries this is different and requirements will vary.
Our lab's core hours are 10 AM - 4 PM. When you go into work is mostly dependent on your supervisor. In the majority of cases they're laid back and as long as research gets done, they're happy. I routinely arrived at midday and left at 6-7PM during my PhD (and I do the same in my postdoc). Similarly nobody cares if you need to take the morning or afternoon off for personal reasons. That said, I know some people who have more traditional supervisors who treat their group like a sweat shop.
Students funded by research councils here get around 8 weeks of holiday a year. I don't think anyone counts though and it's rare for anyone to actually book that much time off. As a postdoc, I get 30 days, plus up to 5 carried over (and that doesn't include forced closures over Christmas). Staff can accrue up to 35 I think. Winter sun is definitely an option. I knew someone at Oxford (mathematics) who took 3 weeks off and just shrugged when we asked if his boss knew where he was. I confess to taking the odd week off, forgetting to tell anyone, and having to call into an unexpected telecon from my campsite.
We do make PhD students attend seminars, but that's mostly to get them involved in research, asking questions, etc. Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing. On the plus side, our seminars are either on Wednesdays, followed by subsidised dinner with the speaker; or they're on Fridays and followed by pub in the evening.
> I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Well this is definitely not true, unless you deal with instrumentation or experimental work. You need infrastructure for sure, but unless you're actually doing practical work that can be remote access. Most students here log into our cluster to do work.
> I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
This bit is unfortunately true. The higher up you get, the more admin you need to do. And once you go permanent, teaching does become a necessity in most departments.
You mention eight weeks of holiday, and taking three weeks off at a time. That is no different than any non-remote office job in the EU, and it is nowhere near close to being able to leave cold Europe for the entire northern hemisphere winter. I realize that I am fortunate to have found a day job where I can work fully remote (though remote work is fairly mainstream now in my own country), but once you enter this lifestyle, it is really hard to ever go back.
> Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing.
Obviously anyone interested enough in a field to do a PhD, is going to be interested in the work all the other people are doing. However, that would preferably be done by reading, where one is free to schedule that reading at the times one sees fit, and one is free to skim (which I know everyone does, because otherwise it would be impossible to keep up with the volume of publications). If you have to attend a weekly seminar, you’re on someone else’s schedule, and then you’re stuck there for the entire time of the seminar.
Honestly, I think most institutions would be accommodating to your requests - particularly for mature students who have lives outside the university. Most places aren't going to kick you out if you don't turn up to the weekly seminar, but some people might frown upon it because it would be seen as not integrating. We also encourage PhD students to both give talks and to ask questions at seminars. Ultimately your PhD is not granted on the basis of your attendance to some talks.
I think the deciding factor is probably where your money is coming from. In the UK if you're paying for your tuition, you can usually demand whatever conditions you like. If you're being funded by a specific grant, that might confer some additional requirements defined by the department.
This may not be the case in your particular sub-field, but we have plenty of fully remote students and staff. I know several academics who work half the year in one institution and half in another - though usually that's due to family, not being unhappy about the weather!
My grandmother spent the last several years of her life living off a fixed income happily occupied with continuing education classes at the local state university. It seemed like a pretty appealing lifestyle to me. It occurred to me that you might even mainstream the idea. Instead of building retirement communities around golf courses, build them around universities. If I'm not mistaken, I think I've seen small advertisements for such things in the back pages of the New Yorker.
Given the costs of modern universities, and the current identity crisis they're facing, this might be a new business model for them, especially if wealthy foreign students are to no longer be admitted to the country.
At the same time, I'm reminded of an exchange from an episode of This American Life about how in some parts of the country state disability payments have become a de facto retirement and welfare system:
Ethel Thomas: You asked me a while back what would be the perfect job. I thought about it, and I said that the perfect job, it would be like I would sit at a desk like the Social Security people, and just weed out all the ones that come in and file for disability.
Chana Joffe-Walt: At first, I thought Ethel's dream job was to be the lady at Social Security, because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But no. After a confusing back and forth, it turned out Ethel wanted this woman's job because she gets to sit. That's it. And when I asked her, OK, but why that lady? Why not any other job where you get to sit? Ethel said she could not think of a single other job where you get to sit all day. She said she'd never seen one.
I brushed this off in the moment. I was getting in my car. It was getting late. And also, it just did not seem possible to me that there would be a place in America today where someone could go her whole working life without any exposure to jobs where you get to sit, until she applied for disability and saw a woman who gets to sit all day.
That makes a lot of sense actually, because the reason we really need (as in need, not just want) retirement and welfare payments, are because some people are either not able to work or no longer able to work.
Oh, that is a really fascinating episode of This American Life. Thanks for sharing!
I would highly recommend anyone take a look at it - it explains where people go and what happens when those linchpin factories in a small town close down, and the growth of disability programs.
I spent my 20s trying to get rich enough to become a professional student. My 30s too. Its looking like this is also how I'll spend my 50s, which are approaching like a steam train. Bring on the MIT Golden Years Home for the Intellectually Dissatisfied.
I did it the other way round, became a professional student, then PhD student, then postdoc. Now that it's no longer very likely that I'll get tenure - for various reasons that mostly have nothing to do with my scientific performance - I'll have to spend time trying to get rich enough so I don't have to be a professional student any longer. I'll have to fund a company for the first time, while getting close to my 50s, and better earn some money with it.
I don't regret anything, the bottom-line of the story is just that it's hard to know in advance which strategy is better, and even afterwards you can never be sure. That's the problem with the counterfactual reasoning that is the basis of these kind of life decisions.
Sorry for the roadblocks it sounds like your career has hit.
I think I chose correctly - I'd only really enjoy a PhD if I were doing it as a member of the Leisured Aristocracy. I only regret not having entered that club, despite having worked through three software booms where everyone else with a compiler and powerpoint deck apparently got stinkin' rich.
I guess I don't see why it wouldnt always be optimal to try and gain financial independence first. That allows maximum flexibility and a time buffer to switch careers/industry if needed.
You know, just about every major university needs good IT people to run the place. Many offer free tuition as a perk of working there. For example, MIT is currently looking for a software developer:
Many do offer free tuition as a perk of working at them, but look very very closely, there's often a catch. I spent entirely too many years trying to find my way out of the maze created. They did a great job at leading me around by my nose for a long time, more fool I.
Not the OP, and it's definitely not my style, but some people really like taking classes. They love the environment and energy that a university life gives them. I've known one or two people who have spent decades just taking classes (and accumulating degrees).
This is really weird to me but to each their own. I think it's partially because of ADHD but I really hate doing HW/writing essays that I feel are useless, which tends to be pretty common in uni.
But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
It's a bit like ordering the chef's choice in a restaurant. Sure you might hate a piece and never come back, but you might also find new combinations of flavours that you start to love but looked tasteless.
Anyway how many of us haven't felt great because we can code and suddenly we are more logical? What happens when you suddenly start to study logic or even learn something extremely simple as
De Morgan's laws [1]?
PS. I would also say that good universities are very, very different from high school. When the professors say something, they've studied it for years so they use precise language and are strict in their teaching. Definitions mean everything for them and you can't just say language is fluid to score a point which seems popular nowadays.
PPS. University is free in my country, so I don't consider cost-effectiveness to get a job. Especially as it seems pretty much anyone can get a coding-gig (we had a hot-shot consultant from a very prestigious firm (if you have lived in US, you've heard of it) ask me why his CSV file wouldn't work in our software. He had just taken an Excel-file and renamed the file-ending to CSV instead of exporting it! He could code, it was just that his knowledge was very, very shallow. We where quite expensive too).
>But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
I really strongly disagree with this. Good learning is inherently pleasurable[1] and if it isn't then there's something wrong. If a subject doesn't feel like it has enough purpose, it's not worth taking. Your brain is a fairly good predictor of that, contrary to what school would lead you to believe.
I think overall you'd be way better off just learning the things that you want to learn, that are applicable to something you actually care about instead of taking a class and learning things your brain tells you are useless and you will probably never use. I haven't read it in depth but I think ultralearning is interesting for the learning-for-application approach.
I'm probably a bit biased though because I use incremental reading[2] and no matter how good university teaching is it just can't compare to learning by myself (with occasional help from an expert, rather than being handheld)
Do you limit this philosophy to adult education? Because for childhood education it seems totally off - I wonder how many kids wouldn't learn even basic multiplication because it wasn't pleasurable at the time. I wonder what literacy rates would be with such a hedonistic approach (I don't use hedonistic to disparage, but rather in its literal sense of engaging in a pursuit of pleasure).
I doubt it even makes sense for adult education - I don't enjoy learning JavaScript nearly as much as I enjoy C#, but I require both for my job. SQL was an afterthought at the time, but it's proven to be incredibly important. If I only did what made me happy my career would be incredibly limited.
That’s tech biaised perspective. For a lot of topics there isn’t much resources available online, or not of good quality enough to get started and for this university classes are really helpful. Moreover, university and using the internet are not mutually exclusive: a lot of universities offers remote degrees. Depending on the languages you speak it can be very cheap (French univ are around 400€/year + one travel for final exam).
While I'm fairly interested in tech things, I don't really have a tech background. Could you give me an example of topics with few resources online? The majority of subjects I can think of have good resources online, the only issue is navigating them as a beginner (which can be helped by finding some sort of mentor).
There are sites like MIT courseware that are completely free and allow online learning. Though of course, there are signaling benefits to online degrees.
That's interesting, can you point me to any good resources on remote degrees (especially MSc) from French universities? My brother really wants to do one part time but can't afford it.
Google is not a very good teacher for learning about stuff you didn't even know you didn't know about. Sure, it's not impossible on your own, but it's where formalized education excels.
University is also an excellent facility for making contacts in your field. Not every expert hangs out on Slack.
I would say because there are things that you can more effectively directly from others. It's easy to learn facts by yourself. It's more difficult to learn what they mean, or how to analyze them, or (sometimes) even how to pronounce the terms. (Side note: maybe this is why there are such great debates in the tech world about pronunciations...)
That's not to say you can't learn remotely, but rather than in many fields, it certainly helps to have a teacher/guide.
I think there's a huge difference between having a guide and being in university. Having a guide is really helpful but going to university for that benefit feels a bit misguided because you're stuck learning what other people think you should rather than what you could actually apply.
Teadrunk said it in another reply - peers. I really want to hang out around smart, curiosity-driven people who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge. I realize that describes a small subset of PhD candidates and professors, but I believe they exist.
A PhD is supposed to train you to formulate, grapple with, and solve novel problems that contribute to the progress of the chosen field.
As well as prepare to train students in the future.
It’s a skill that cannot be learnt from books or lecture videos. You need intimate apprenticeship under an expert.
People are very different, and most can't learn more effectively by themselves. This is an approach that works well for some students and very poorly for the majority for whom a structured learning environment is pretty much a prerequisite for sustained progress.
People learn effectively in different ways. In my mid-30's, I've come to realize that I get the most from my time taking university classes to study robotics vs trying to learn it on my own. For me, I find the added pressure of a grade helps push me harder. As a younger person grades were annoying, but as an older person I just use the pressure to my own advantage.
While I do think a lot can be learned on your own, university in the traditional way gives you some things you might find useful:
- Peers that aren't just voices on an internet board
- Validation of the syllabus, and a sense of which parts are more important in the field. For instance, my econ tutor who was a famous Marxist didn't find it of high importance for me to study Marx.
- A timeline that is relatively inflexible. If you're in uni you need to learn how that proof works be the time of the exam, and you'll have to put off other things in your life. Outside of uni you can learn it today or when those things have happened.
The main benefits I would agree on are signaling and networking.
I am much less certain about the depending on university to force yourself to study things and being handheld by a prof/tutor.
Flagellation by university to get yourself to learn things is not a reliable long-term means of learning. I think it's far better (and I have had more success) when I learn for myself.
While there is some benefit in having a mentor, I think being handled and being told exactly what to learn isn't the most productive. A lot of times you'll end up learning really useless things as opposed to listening to your brain which generally has a decent grasp on figuring out what is worth learning to actually apply.
The statement "being told exactly what to learn" is so counter to my own university experience (admittedly almost 20 years ago now).
It seems to me that going to university to be told what to learn is counter to the actual goal of going to university, namely to have first-class access to resources (people resources, knowledge resources, laboratory resources) to pursue your own learning goals.
I've been tempted to go back to university in order to learn more about organic chemistry and chemical engineering, for instance. There's certainly a lot of information online, but a world-class chemistry lab with access to chemicals would be a great resource to have available to me, along with readily available mentors to help guide me when I have questions.
As for homework and essays, that sounds more like high school than university, from what I remember. It's always possible things have changed in the last 15 years, though.
That helps... my dream involves personal financial independence though. I'd want to study what I wanted without regard for what was publishable, whether I was tainting myself with the Cross-Disciplinary Death Scent, whether the people I worked with were cited enough, etc. In other words, a hobby PhD.
It's a ridiculous and selfish goal, somewhat like wanting to own a tropical island or talking about spending ten years sailing around the world.
When people talk about cheap or free, good-quality, higher education, the reason why it is so is because it is subsidized by the state. You usually have to meet several conditions to qualify.
Most universities don't let random students (foreign or domestic) come study for free. You either have to be really good or pay your way.
In all seriousness though, I can only think of one or two occasions personally where citizenship had an effect on a PhD admit decision, and in those cases the source of funding and external politics were the deciding factors.
At which point you need to decide whether you're going to devote years of your life learning Slovak from what's likely 0 to a professional level and then hope you get accepted into a university, or pay $ to study elsewhere.
Even if peers speak to you and some courses are offered in your preferred non-Slovak language, much of the world is inaccessible with a language barrier. You either go all in or look elsewhere.
Not true, there are plenty of foreign students everywhere in Europe with small languages and if the program is English they do just fine.
It really depends on the person. Some really cannot stand not understanding everything around them on the street, in the supermarket etc, others find it thrilling and a positive challenge to work through, they often take language courses in parallel to uni studies, but some never learn the local language and stick to international circles or English speaking locals.
There are many ways and tons of people do it to their satisfaction.
I wish you the best of luck. This is, quite honestly, the main reason why I wish to attain financial independence. I really would love to be a professional student, and my interests are all over the place, so I could keep it up for sure.
My wife, with two BS degrees and a MS from Stanford, is currently enrolled as undergrad with an Archaeology major.
Why? Insurance. She pays 1/5 what the open market would cost, even factoring in the tuition and fees. Because she at 60 is grouped with young healthy people.
The college is not upset about this. In fact they have a whole program and an advisor to assist older folks in negotiating the paperwork.
When I went to submit a physical copy of my PhD thesis to the relevant office, the person in front of me was an old lady, at least in her 70s or even her 80s.
We had an interesting conversation. She had completed a PhD in Greek literature, I think. Self-funded. Taken the standard time. She was sorry about all the domestic responsibilities she had put on her husband. She had, with her, a younger friend (a lady probably late 50s, early 60s) to help her with computers :D
Made me feel very differently about all the hard work I had done. Very inspiring and uplifting. She said, she did it because she was bored and wanted to go beyond her two Masters degrees.
This suggests all kinds of interesting questions about the point of university.
For undergrads it's clearly a combination of finishing school, networking hothouse, and social club, with some education thrown in.
For postgrads, it's a long-shot chance at tenure (extremely unlikely unless you're the product of an Ivy, but it's nice to dream) and perhaps some improved job prospects. (Also unlikely, but not as much.)
For universities, it's a cash grab. First they get the fees, then they get the bequests. Also, some education is thrown in.
Considering the age/wealth profile is now heavily skewed to the over-50s, it would make sense for universities to cater more for mature students. Remaking university culture as life-long access rather than here-come-the-teens would break a lot of cultural expectations - but might also be the only way to keep the university model alive over the medium term.
> This suggests all kinds of interesting questions about the point of university.
The point of a university is that it is a store house of universal knowledge. That's even where the name came from.
The point of professors is to generate more knowledge and to pass it along. The most important place in a university is the library, although much of the library these days might physically be rack of flashing lights and cooling fans in a dark room somewhere.
The task of young adults is to prepare themselves for a career, do networking, build social contacts, and broaden their education. That they do that at university as well as everywhere else is irrelevant.
It's OK for anyone of any age to go to a university to gain knowledge, because that's its main purpose. It's great that anyone can obtain formal recognition for a level of knowledge gained, at any age.
> Form postgrads, it's a long-shot chance at tenure (extremely unlikely unless you're the product of an Ivy, but it's nice to dream) and perhaps some improved job prospects. (Also unlikely, but not as much.)
Meh, I'm probably atypical (though not unique) but my postgrad was mostly a matter of doing what seemed the most interesting and fun/bearable at the time. I continued as a lecturer for a couple of years for the same reason. I've left academia but I'm ultimately following the same path, although I'm now also thinking a bit more about the impact of my work on society.
Yeah for me it was just the easiest way to get a job. Didn't really ever go to lectures, was in the students' union maybe twice, got a flatshare in final year with people I had met doing my year's industrial placement.
As an undergrad I had a friend in the math department who came back to school to get a PhD after some years of making enough $$ to retire on in software. He did not aspire to an academic career. He just liked math and enjoyed spending time on it. He helped us rando undergrads with our problem sets. He is one of the happiest individuals I have ever met. A PhD makes sense at any age for happiness reasons if you don't have financial obligations hanging over you.
> A PhD makes sense at any age for happiness reasons if you don't have financial obligations hanging over you.
Conditional on actually wanting to go that deep in courses and research. Many PhD students take a couple semesters of courses (the hardest year of their life) and they quit after they realize the research they're going to be doing for at least the next few years. It's certainly not for everyone.
Ideally, both - but in STEM you would get a stipend that you could live off of if you had no children so if you could only do one or the other I would say the first.
A lot of people have a romantic perspective on grad school, similarly to how the flower children of the 60s viewed travel to India. You turn on, tune in, drop out, and go to academia to become enlightened.
It's not all it's cracked up to be. People are people wherever you go, and you'll see the same shit in academia that you encounter outside, except you're paid much less (if you get paid at all).
There is one big plus, and that is that you're not the only one who bought into academia's narrative of enlightenment, so you're likely to get more respect from your peers and family if you go to academia than if you do meaningless stuff like sell ads for Google.
I'm a bit more sceptical/cynical even, about the people PhD programmes typically attract.
Very low-EQ, highly competitive, highly self-regarding. In my experience PhD departments are worse that top-tier software engineering groups, as PhDs tend to be depressed and underappreciated in addition.
I think the whole model is one big mental health meat grinder, and the meat going in is quite bitter in the first place.
God forbid anyone pursues higher education because they want to become a better researcher.
I would suggest you spend some time thinking about your EQ rather than spending time on the internet posting nonsense generalizations about entire classes of people.
I can only speak from my experience; and it seems perfectly reasonable for me to do so.
I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place. It's what produces such contention in similar software engineering groups.
There is no conflict between this motivation and my description of the psychology of people that tend to persue PhDs.
I am completely baffled by this response. At a minimum, that is not what narcissistic means in any sense of the word. I cannot understand how trying to improve yourself, whether as a research, programmer, or just general human being, makes one "narcissistic." I would love to understand this if you care to explain.
Imagine having to work with someone that judges based on your education rather than you as an individual! Probably something only a PhD would do, right? :)
> The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self".[2]
PhDs typically have, as an aspect of their core identity, their role as a scientist/philosopher/(..researcher) (cf. doctors being doctors, etc.).
Concern with excellence in this dimension then can often lead to narcissistic injury (aka., a threat to self-esteem, ego, etc.). ie., to fail to be excellent is a threat to one's identity. It makes the whole affair rather fraught.
Contrast with one's life passion being, say, a parent -- or a volunteer. A passionate volunteer is typically a less bitter pursuit, insofar as ones "psychological economy" depends only in sacrifice which is under one's control.
The bitterness of the PhD world, which I observe, frequently comes with this cycle: I am a philosopher; I am an excellent philosopher; but some other PhD is better than me; so I am not the best philosopher; so I am a terrible philosopher; but I must be the best philosopher etc.
And so on in ruminative cycles.
....
The building up of one's own intellect, one's own skill, one's own ... is a narcissistic (self-oriented) project. The pursuit engages in a significant amount of material and emotional sacrifice for the sake of internal intellectual gratification.
It is useful for society that such people exist: those who act to further their own ability to such (prima facie) pathological and self-destructive ends. Those caught up in it, however, are often rather bitter about it.
Most people understand "narcissism" to be pathological behavior. If you use it to not mean pathological behavior, most people are likely to not understand you.
I’d be careful with “most people” claims. A narcissist is in the dictionary as “a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.” That includes above average, not limited to a pathology (which people who are not doctors are unable to diagnose). I’m certain I’ve heard and/or said something along the lines of ‘oh he’s a bit narcissistic’ multiple times in my life. Having completed an advanced degree, I’ve met quite a few researchers I think are reasonably described as being a little narcissistic about their work.
I object to projecting your own personal non-dictionary definitions on others. Are you thinking of clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder? That is not the same thing as Narcissism.
My personal usage and understanding is quite close to the dictionary definition (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/narcissism): inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. Those are not positive traits, which goes back to my original point: if you use the term not intending to imply something negative about the person, you're likely to confuse others. That confusion is why this subthread exists.
@mjburgess was using it to refer to negative attributes, and so was I. You stretched the idea into something it's not by saying it has to be "pathological", and that it has to negatively impact others, and you claimed that unless people adhered to those criteria, the term wouldn't be understood. Neither of those claims of yours is supported by the definition you just provided, nor have you demonstrated that "most people" agree. Narcissism can be a negative attribute about someone without being pathological and without affecting other people in a material way. Being narcissistic is judged as a negative attribute to have by the dictionary.com definition with the purely subjective words "inordinate" and "excessive", but it doesn't otherwise agree with what you said above.
I am unaware of any colloquial use of "narcissism" that would include going to grad school to learn more about a subject. Poster steev was also confused by this usage. You are correct, I have provided no evidence our confusion will be universal, but: don't be surprised if it is.
I don't speak for mjburgess, is that really an entirely fair or good faith summary of what @mjburgess said? Is it the strongest plausible interpretation of the comments above? If it was said that learning alone is narcissistic, then I agree with you, that'd be confusing. I don't quite see that anywhere above, but maybe that's what was meant.
Don't you think that researchers sand-bagging paper reviews with requests for citations of their own work is a tad narcissistic? That behavior is rampant in academics, among many other behaviors seeking public name recognition. I don't fully agree with the views above, and they seem to have a pessimistic flavor, but I don't see the word narcissism being misused according to the dictionary definition you provided.
Anyway, I don't really care what the definition of the word is, it just seemed like you had an extreme version in the opposite direction that is at least as prone to confusion. It doesn't exactly help prove the point if your version has the same defect, or if weasel words are used to back-up the claim, right?
> I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place.
This claim is independent of the negative behaviors; it's intended as independent support by claiming that the desire to be a better researcher is inherently narcissistic, without regard to the negative behaviors. As to my personal definition being extreme: well, yeah. I've never heard someone use it to mean anything remotely positive. The justification for using it that context was, to me, non-sensical. But I am a descriptivist; words mean how people use them. So I won't call it wrong. Just: don't be surprised if people are confused.
I think the key to a good exerience obtaining a Ph.D. is the choice of a good advisor. My advisor explained that the process of getting the degree was to teach us to find important problems and learn what we needed to solve them. Typically, that involved collaboration. He also stressed that it was a doctorate in Philosophy even though our department was in the Physical Sciences and Engineering School. That advice served me well as a scientist in a corporate materials analysis group.
Now that I am retired, I still find challenging projects to work on, mainly helping to improve open source electron microanalysis software.
'Sitting at my desk, staring at environmental impact reports and grant applications on my computer screen, I began to think, “They cannot pay me enough to do this job.”'
Honestly, this sounds like most PhD programs I'm familiar with.
I think the most important takeaway from this article is not that getting a PhD will make you happy... but rather when you start having that feeling it’s time to make a change.
Very inspiring to highlight education and learning is lifelong. Ph.D. even though symbolism (not really needed if only aim is knowledge assimilation and creation through learning), will serve as a big boost in confidence for middle age workers, who think there aren’t enough opportunities for them.
Also Ph.D. gives chances to work with younger people keeping middle and older generations more active and alive.
I hope to continue learning in my middle and old age like the post, not sure of Ph.D. though. But may consider if it opens a way for me to work alongside young researchers can learn new things from them and feel alive.
This hit very close to home, especially point 1. I was told recently that something was not my research topic but someone’s else in the lab despite having written about in my application for the lab and the other guy switching to that very recently. The main issue is power imbalance. I need my advisors signature graduate so I have to accept more abuse than I would otherwise. This lead to a loss-loss situation were I’m particularly dissatisfied and put more energy on my side projects and papers than on thing I’m told to do.
I think we should be careful not to conflate the pursuit of knowledge with acquiring a PhD. The latter is a very constrained and narrow way to do it, and can easily disappoint.
As I get older, the (non-financial) value of the PhD keeps diminishing in my eyes, whereas the pursuit of knowledge hasn't. As I have less time on Earth, I want to optimize my time, and much of PhD work is orthogonal to my goals of gaining knowledge. A PhD will force you to spend years on an extremely narrow topic (of course, acquiring some breadth along the way). When you're older, that time is precious. It better be a problem you really are passionate about.
Consider:
1. You likely will work on your advisor's research ideas and not your own.
2. You will have to fulfill several steps tied to the culture of academia, and none of these is needed to acquire knowledge. But tradition is tradition, and you have to do it.
3. There can be a lot of politics involved - also orthogonal to acquiring knowledge, but you will have to put up with them, play them, and suffer because of them.
4. Professors will often work you harder than you'll want at an older age. Their rationale is often a variant of "Well, if you want a career in research/academia, this is the workload you will have to deal with". But a 60+ year old usually has very different goals. Of course, I have seen plenty of professors who are sympathetic to such people.
Overall, if you're at an older age, don't do it unless you already have a research problem you really want to work on, and can find a sympathetic advisor who cares more about you than their own careers.
Disclaimer: My view on this topic is a bit biased. I spent most of a decade in grad school (at a younger age) but eventually quit the PhD program. I was at the point where I felt I had attained most of the benefits of a PhD except that final paper (acquired a lot of knowledge, published in journal, lots of personal development/introspection, gained much from being around the intellectual environment, etc). I quit because my work was not good enough to get my dream research jobs (in academia or industry), and spending the 2 or so more years fulfilling my advisor's requirements knowing it would not lead me to my dream jobs was just pointless. Sure - I could get a postdoc and do enough good work there to land my dream job, but I decided it wasn't worth the gamble.
I often fantasize about becoming financially independent and going back to university and hopefully do some research (in a different discipline this time). I do miss the intellectual discussions, etc. But while the studying and research problem aspect appeal to me, I really don't have the patience to put up with all the negatives I listed above. And I didn't even get into how in some disciplines (or sub-disciplines), journal publications are a racket (with both the publisher and academia being guilty parties). If I ever did anything interesting and novel enough, I'd likely write it up in a blog post or at most post to arxiv. I really don't want to participate in the current journal publishing culture.
But of course, kudos to the person in this submission!
In my view, a broader statement -- not necessarily a counterpoint -- is that the grad school experience is highly variable. For instance my own experience was quite positive.
>>> 1. You likely will work on your advisor's research ideas and not your own.
You choose a professor based on how their research program appeals to you, and there is often room for compromise. This is a conversation that happens before joining their group. There are some benefits to starting with at least a suggested project. In my case, such a project idea came with a fully equipped lab including a quarter million 1986 dollars worth of gear. But my unique interests and abilities definitely steered my project in a direction that my advisor had not originally imagined when I started out.
In the humanities, where the cost of research is close to zero, you might have more latitude, again depending on how you choose your advisor. I have a friend who literally created her own project and pitched it to a couple of departments who agreed to let her pursue a dual discipline PhD in education and psychology. She was 60.
>>> Overall, if you're at an older age, don't do it unless you already have a research problem you really want to work on, and can find a sympathetic advisor who cares more about you than their own careers.
True at any age. I think that in general, there aren't really that many top rungs for professors to grasp for, and most are comfortable having a relatively stable career and focusing on the educational aspect of their research programs. I live in the shadow of a great university, and some of my relatives are professors, and this pretty much describes their attitudes. They have their own grips about the system, but every system has a system.
I sympathize with not finishing, and would never hold it against anybody. One thing finishing did for me was force me to keep going until my project was really ready to go out the door. Granted that's something I would also have learned the hard way, had I started a start-up, but that was just not on my radar as a physics student in the 1980s for whatever reason.
> For instance my own experience was quite positive.
As was mine, despite not completing it. However, I don't think I'd want to deal with the negatives at an older age.[1] To put it another way, if you're older and want admission to grad school so you can learn a lot, and are not too particular about actually completing the PhD, then you probably will enjoy the experience and can ignore my previous comment.
Also, if you have the resources, a second BS or MS can be fun. I knew at least two students who were in their 60's pursuing a second BS (one of them was pursuing both a BS in math and physics, with little background in them). They both enjoyed the experience and were quite content. However, a PhD is quite different from that.
> You choose a professor based on how their research program appeals to you, and there is often room for compromise.
If you've had prior research experience, this advice may work. If you haven't, then you will likely be wrong about whether a particular professor's research program appeals to you - and you may not realize this until you've been in the program for a few years.
> I think that in general, there aren't really that many top rungs for professors to grasp for, and most are comfortable having a relatively stable career and focusing on the educational aspect of their research programs. I live in the shadow of a great university, and some of my relatives are professors, and this pretty much describes their attitudes.
Having spent time at both a mediocre and a top school, what you describe was more in line with what I saw at the mediocre school, and not at all like the top school. Most of the professors in the engineering departments were always trying to climb the rung, and competing with everyone to do it. Things got very petty. My advisor, who was already a Fellow of 3 large professional bodies (IEEE, physics (AIP? I forget), etc), was still quite competitive, extremely protective of his research, upset if a paper got rejected and would try hard to find out who the referees were, etc.
I remember wondering why he was so invested in all of this. He was fairly old, had achieved a lot, and what more could he achieve?[2]
He was not an outlier there. Even the more laid back professors would eventually exhibit some of this behavior because not doing so would demean them in the eyes of their peers (and yes, one of the benefits of academia and tenure is supposed to be that you're relatively immune from this, and yet...).
Now at the mediocre university, it was more like you described. In fact, not many professors even had PhD students. There it was more about the research and not the career.
And yet, in my last few visits to the department (again, engineering), the professors told me that even there the culture was shifting to being more career focused. The pressure to get funding was much more, etc. The common sentiment from people who had joined the department in the 80's through the 90's was "The level of work I had to do to get tenure (number of papers, funding, etc) will not get anyone tenure now in this department."
I see you were in physics, and the experience there can be different. In some universities it is less funding driven than in engineering, and there probably are fewer rungs to climb (or perhaps they don't value those rungs as much). In the top university I went to, the physics department was actually in the college of engineering, so the pressure for funding, publishing, etc was similar to engineering.
> I sympathize with not finishing, and would never hold it against anybody. One thing finishing did for me was force me to keep going until my project was really ready to go out the door.
For me, a lot of the problem was that I sincerely doubt anyone will ever find a way to test my results. Unfortunately, a lot of theoretical/computational engineering/physics is that way. Did I really want to become an expert in something that no one will ever prove/disprove? It wasn't just my research, but much of my discipline, and a lot of why papers would get accepted/rejected had to do with groupthink.[3] It really felt like I was doing literature where subjective opinion matters so much. I remember asking some of my peers if they even believed their research, and for many it was a strange question: They were in the business of publishing papers and getting research/academic jobs, not seeking the truth. If it's publishable, it's good!
Ultimately, I picked the wrong area to do research in. Also, one of my undergrad professors told me it was a hot, young discipline. He was right in some ways but was mostly wrong. It was very mature by the time I entered grad school, and that usually means a lot more time (years) studying to get to the state of art before you can make a meaningful contribution. As a general rule, I tell people going for PhDs to find a discipline that is not mature - it'll be easier to make meaningful contributions that way.
[1] Arguably, I probably did not want to put up with it at my younger age, and it probably contributed to my decision to quit, but it would have been one of the minor factors in that decision.
[2] And several years later, I know - there were lots more rungs on that ladder. There always are, until you become a president of a university or the head of the NSF or something.
[3] Yes - they did care about your formalism, techniques, novelty of ideas, etc. But there were far too many subjective ways to reject a paper as not being interesting enough to be published in this journal, etc.
I seem to remember California allows those over 60 to take classes for credit without paying tuition. I believe for both the CSU and UC system. A met a few who did it when I did my education in both systems. I hope its still around.
when I was a college student I have to admit I resented continuing education programs. Here were thousands of people like me were racking up of thousands of dollars in debt literally mortgaging our future to pay for these classes and there were senior paying little to nothing to take classes. I still am not sure how we can justify a system where we convince impressionable minors that they need to in-debt themselves for decades and then allow seniors to take the classes free? this just seems inequitable to me.
It make sense. You could go online and take many of those courses or better courses for free. But you signup go in person and pay thousands per year to get a degree. That degree is a key that opens up employment opportunities and wealth. Most people your age go to school for future employment opportunities and pay the cost as an investment.
The cost reflects the demand.
Seniors have no employment goals. There is no need to limit supply because it doesn't affect the marketplace. These seniors buy books and pay for other costs and schools can get additional government money. It helps society because you have more educated people with additional knowledge who may share back with the community at little cost.
This opinion sounds evil to me (not a reflection on you personally).
> It helps society because you have more educated people with additional knowledge who may share back with the community at little cost.
Same could be said of younger people - but they can actually do the good over many more decades than the senior people! So the social good is much more compounded!
> Seniors have no employment goals. There is no need to limit supply because it doesn't affect the marketplace.
This has many assumptions baked in that are hard to justify, such as:
- Younger people will 'flood' free PhD programs and successfully complete them, the price is the only thing keeping the flood under control. This sounds wrong because a PhD will still take time, effort & interest to complete.
- The job marketplace for PhDs is a fixed pie and a zero sum game. This sounds wrong because I buy into the belief system that more progress for all leads to more jobs (and prosperity) for all.
- It is morally justifiable to keep poor or disadvantaged - yet interested - people, out of the hallowed academic gates, by simply pricing the programs high. This is egregious for self explanatory reasons.
You are probably "telling it like it is", but I really hope that awful status quo is overhauled for the better, and for more access to all - old and young.
not an American, but I also view this very critically. In Germany the university is free, but in reality it's just hugely subsidised. I just can't justify pumping a lot of money into free (real) university education for seniors. The money is needed elsewhere. There's a huge difference between a university and other education-institutions, university-education is just such a luxury. You can take classes with highly-esteemed researchers etc. It's really unbelievable valuable, but also quite a societal investment.
There should, of course, be ways for pensioners challenge their intellectual ability, but studying at a university is just way over the top I think. There must be another way. Maybe expand the adult-education-centres with special programs for seniors, I don't know.
EDIT: this comment is not about getting a PhD. I would not lobby for any age-restricted subsidy for getting your PhD, since I think PhDs are producing an immense amount of benefit for society, regardless of whether they're in humanities or natural science.
On the contrary. Seniors have paid taxes their whole lives so others can get their heavily subsidized goodies. I think it only makes sense that they have the same rights to education and other things that they have helped fund for others. Many seniors today simply did not have the opportunity to study because they had to go to work at an early age. It wasn't uncommon to be a provider at 17 or 18 in the past.
From a taxation point of view I'm under the impression that for a country such as France for example seniors are gonna get _on average_ way more benefits during their pension than the equivalent of their lifetime contribution. Mainly due to demographics and life expectancy evolution. And also for home owners due to the housing market.
I do not think this should be a reason to limit the access to university to seniors though. What better use of life to increase and share knowledge, maybe even contribute to it. It would be such a low point for society to bar access to knowledge only because it is not profitable.
> From a taxation point of view I'm under the impression that for a country such as France for example seniors are gonna get _on average_ way more benefits during their pension than the equivalent of their lifetime contribution. Mainly due to demographics and life expectancy evolution.
(I'm making a digression here from the main topic, so don't read on if you're not interested.) I'm not sure why you would think pensioners in France will get far back far more than they paid in.
Under the current system in France, when you're working, you pay into one or more of the dozens of different pension plans. Each plan is designed to be self-sufficient. It receives money from those who are currently working, invests or saves the money, and pays out those who paid in in the past and who are now retired.
Doing things this way has several pitfalls. The main problem is that if demographics change (greater percentage of pensioners as compared to workers) it puts a strain on those left in the workplace. This doesn't mean however that each pensioner is getting more than they paid in, it just means that proportionately there are less people left paying into the plan.
The retirement system is currently being revised. In the future, there will be one universal plan where each euro paid in will buy a certain number of points, which will have some value when you retire. Since the value of a point can fluctuate, pensioners may end up getting more or less than they paid in. (They'll get what the plan can afford to pay out.)
The only people that really got substantially more out of the pension plan than those that take part in them today were those that lived right about at the pensionable age when those systems were introduced. They did not pay in at all and yet had immediate benefits because it has always been the working that were paying for the pensioned people to begin with.
If the pension funds had been managed responsibly (which is not the responsibility of the people paying in to them) then there would have been plenty of money to make the system work. Pension funds management has been responsible more than once for funds not being able to make good on their obligations resulting in a reduction of pensions. In many countries this has already resulted in the pension age being raised from 65 to 67 and there is talk about raising that even further.
Long term financial planning for pension funds and actuarial computations including an adjustment for increased longevity are simply things that go with that territory, that these adjustments are necessary is further proof that the responsible people messed up.
Universities' financial affairs should also not be the limiting factor in people's quest for education and knowledge. I'd much rather that people that are pensioned have access to free university courses because it will always be a very small minority that is driven to do so and they have a unique perspective to bring to the table compared to the rest of the university crowd. You are also automatically pretty sure that they are not following courses because they want to get another job, but mostly because they are really driven about a particular subject, which tends to make for the best kind of students.
And here I thought I was doing well going to college in my 40s. I'm finding it hard to get recognized at all ghosted interviews or no response at all. It seems being new to IT (career-wise) is not for anyone over age 25.
Perhaps that could be a regional thing? The things I hear about the Bay Area for instance make it sound like another planet. A friend of mine (27) just got IT certifications (never went to college) and he has a cool new job in IT support, working on becoming a sysadmin. But either way, keep trying!
The challenge of coming up with ideas, writing proposals for compute resources or funding, and trying to deliver on the research was fun. Most of my PhD was industry funded so there was potential for product integration.
The added bonus is that you're around really smart and motivated people in a variety of disciplines. I was exposed to the hard problems in Finance, Accounting, and Economics hung out with opera singers, stage directors and novelists.
The years I didn't have funding were pretty miserable. 40-60 hours in the lab plus 20 hours teaching per week for $23K kind of wears you down.
I see little difference between using scarce university resources to produce human capital that will not be used and art.
I'm sure the author enjoyed it, but it, but it doesn't seem that she will use her new educational skills at all. To the extent that her professors could have done something else, she sucked up a lot of resources that could have been used lot productively.
Well, then we should start thinking about focusing on the study areas which indeed produce human capital. There are still far too many academic studies today that bring little or no benefit to the economy, where graduates hardly find jobs and instead increase social costs. As long as we don't do that, it doesn't matter if someone is still studying and doing a doctorate at 66. At least then they will already have an old-age pension and will not have to draw unemployment benefit or social assistance.
If economic benefit is all that matters to educational resources, you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians, who rarely produce anything useful in the same generation. Yet what they do might bring massive new technologies or other improvements to society decades later. You can make the same argument about lots of degrees. Value to society is rarely obvious. Steve Jobs audited a class in calligraphy which seems utterly useless, let it lead to the Mac and the importance of fonts and graphics in computers in general.
It's rather obvious. There are even offices that collect the relevant statistical data.
> you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians
No. Both disciplines are required by a lot of companies today. If you have a look at www.indeed.com there are currently 3.5k jobs for physicists. There are subjects where there might be a dozen jobs per year per thousand graduates. But engineers are missing everywhere.
There's lots of mathematical and physics research with clear near or mid-term applications - a good example is DARPA grants, which are motivated by specific government needs, and which "feed" many mathematicians and physicists.
If you want to make a contribution to the development of vaccines or remedies, or to medical care, then you simply need to study accordingly. I agree with you that it is an undesirable development that nowadays everybody wants to study, no matter what, or preferably something where you can get a bachelor's degree with little effort. On the other hand, there is an increasing lack of qualified, experienced professionals, such as those needed in nursing or in the construction industry. If I need someone to repair my heating system today, I have to wait a long time and pay a lot. And through my taxes I pay at the same time to the many unemployed historians and social scientists.
I doubt very much that there’s causation between senior citizens getting degrees and a lack of specialized professionals. Things rarely work that way. I’d be glad to pay for unemployed historians and social scientists, they enrich our intelectual culture and help shape my country. I’d be even happier if they got jobs of course.
Go up to the comment of gbronner to which I responded. If people are bothered by the fact that retirees study and do their doctorates, they should ask themselves the questions I have asked. I think it's good if pensioners keep themselves busy in a meaningful way, as long as it doesn't put an additional burden on society. Imagine how much society benefits when pensioners use their time to study cell metabolism and use the vast amount of data available to discover connections and mechanisms that lead to new antibiotics or other useful drugs instead of being bored and spending the rest of their lives in front of the television. And unlike you, I don't think it makes any sense at all to let people study stuff that primarily costs society, both for the study and for the subsequent maintenance of these people. Enrichting the intelectual culture is good, but for this we do not need the legions of historians, publicists, media scientists or philosophers, or other fields of study whose sole purpose seems to be to create offspring of their own kind.
The graduates of the above mentioned studies I know of work at the academy of their field, or in the administration and help expand the state administration and bureaucracy.
My comment was independent of study area. A 66 year old woman has a life expectancy of perhaps 18 years, but an expected labor force participation of only a few years.
It is difficult to start a PhD worthy job in a new field at 66, as there's still a lot of domain specific learning (in the private sector), and most companies don't want to commit to making that investment in someone likely to voluntary retire, or quit due to health issues.
So, instead of working for 6 years, she got a very expensive degree that society is unlikely to benefit from, as there's often no way to apply these skills in the economy
Sure. But you complain that resources are wasted when retirees go to college and get their doctorates. I replied that resources are already being wasted on a large scale when there are academic studies that generate more economic costs than benefits. I have clarified my position in my further comments if you are interested.
Assuming facts not in evidence? With all those career changes and job skills, why assume the OP author will never teach nor publish? Opportunities to do so will only increase with a PhD.
Agreed. There are a fixed number of PhD spots. What sense is there to give that spot to a 66 year old senior rather than someone younger who will actually do something productive with the expertise and credentials?
I'm all for continued learning but can't that be done in a non-credentialed manner that doesn't disadvantage young people?
- There are a fixed number of funded PhD spots but there's really no limit to the number of PhD spots in a faculty. I don't know if this was the case but if you can fund your own PhD, very few universities will refuse your admission. Anyway, PhDs are extremely cheap labor - most of the research money is spent on materials/hardware and travel expenses for PIs.
- The vast majority of PhDs don't do anything productive with their research topic or work in their research field later on. Doing a PhD is about advancing human knowledge and a lot of personal growth - it has very little to do with productivity. The current trend is that you get burned out and sick of your research area and decide to do something totally different. There are very few areas where you do a PhD for credentials or to advance in your career.
The amount of possible PhD positions in a department is limited by the number of faculty, because each student needs a supervisor. A supervisor can only supervise so many students at once before he or she feels overworked, and each PhD student to supervise may distract from that scholar's own research.
Sure it's a finite number but it's not uncommon for a faculty member to have 5+ PhD students. It all depends on the number of post-docs or senior PhDs they have in the group. The major limiting factor is really money - if a faculty member gets a $5M grant, they will hire as many PhDs as they want or even get some faculty hire for the project.
Mate, most people live to grow old. What fulfillment in life would one have if many productive and/or desierable tasks were reserved for the young? Wouldn't it make the later years even harder for them?
For some reason, my comment seems to have come across to you with an unintended tone. I was only trying to gently urge you to consider that even the relatively old have some years of life left and we draw the line at different places for different things. For instance, at that age, it is practically impossible that someone can start studying medicine and become a surgeon. In the places where I have lived, there is a small window of time in one's youth where one can study to become a doctor. So, in those societies, they drew a line in a way where for some professions, they did indeed delineate like you suggest. However, in many places the Ph.D doesn't fall on the side of the line where you prefer. However, it is ultimately, just that people draw the line at different places and there will be no decision that will keep everyone happy. So, in this case, perhaps you and I can not come to an agreement given the brief exchange we have had. And with that, mate, I wish you a good day.
I was accepted into a PhD program in Chemistry in the early 80's but decided to work as a programmer instead (and still do); I then thought about getting a PhD in Computer Science in the early 00's but a professor talked me out of it since it appeared that most of the jobs were in academia (right before Google started hiring them in droves).
Don't let anyone get to you! I recently finished my PhD at the same age. The late Clayton Christensen[1] was one of the most accomplished business professors and I believe he started his PhD at age 37.
On some of the academic subreddits, one of the semi-frequently occurring posts is "am I too old to go to grad school?" and inevitably the post is from someone who is under 30. It always drives me crazy that people think any age is too late to start a career in a non-physically demanding field.
I earned a PhD in the humanities before going into tech. I loved it, and it was a tough slog to make the pivot. I know there is a lot of advice encouraging folks to “optimize their human capital” but I spent my 20s full time making my mind a great place to live in, and OP is an inspiration for doing the same at any age.
Continental drift would have been accepted sooner if the oceanic magnetic maps had been declassified earlier.
(a case of parallel construction affecting science: the data were only declassified after they covered enough of the sea basins that it was no longer obvious what the common boomer cruise routes were)
I hear the sports bettors are jonesing so hard they're even betting on what will be a dictionary's "word of the year". If they're that patient, maybe we should offer some continental plate racing?
(my local mountains are actually rebounding up faster from the last glaciation than they are being eroded down by weathering — kind of the orogeny version of Wirth's Law)
THANK YOU for sharing this. All we got these days are pandemics, deaths, protests, anger. Even HN, that I like so much with all those brilliant people sharing their great projects, is now politics and anger.
I mean read about your successful victory is inspiring. Thank you.
Ugh, first world problems. I'm currently considering a Ph.D at age 26, but this kind of story fills me with a strange loathing and determination not to fall into this trap when I get older. If, at 50, I still need to go to an "academic counsellor" who asks me "what I enjoyed as a child", then I'll consider myself a failure. I don't think self-enjoyment is a legitimate purpose in life. Thus if, at age 50, I'm still wondering "what I enjoy", I'll consider myself a zombie. By that age I want to be dedicated to something outside of myself, some revolutionary new thought, or the advancement of some great cause, even religion or God, or even just the well-being of my kids and grandkids. Even a short hedonistic life of partying I consider to be a a greater success than this kind of zombie-like continuation of academia with no external goal.
I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.