Reform the PhD system or close it down
22nd April 2011
The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.
Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of these ‘doctorates’ are in bullshit fields like Queer Studies and Holistic Therapy. In the Middle Ages there were a limited number of doctoral degrees, all of them professional: Medicine, Law, Theology (for those aiming to be prelates). Nowadays, professional degrees are looked down on as ‘not a real Doctor’, and these people who would have had problems surviving an undergraduate course of study in a medieval University parade around with initials after their names.