“There’s no crying in baseball” . . . the status quo of Ph.D. programs?

In recent weeks there has been a ton of newfound attention directed at how US Ph.D. programs are structured. Are they doing what they are intended to do? Are the numbers of doctorate degrees being awarded realistic when compared to available jobs? Does the system need an overhaul, or worse, a complete re-design from the ground up? Are they merely black holes of scientific feudalism where the dreams of so many young talents are sucked in and destroyed, like distant supernovae? The NIH has even convened a review panel to address these questions from the top($)-down.

Well, I don’t have the answers to any of those questions. But I do have lots of opinions about them, some anecdotal and some grounded in data. But does any of that matter?

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in a large program funded primarily by NIH research grants. Frankly, I feel like it’s semi-dangerous for me to express my feelings, and I’ve thought long and hard about writing this. Backlash, the permanence of the internet, being a “complainer” . . . I know all about these risks. And like everyone, I am conflicted in that the system is producing great science and scientists, it just doesn’t seem to be serving all of its students and trainees effectively.

You know what I noticed about the NIH review panel? Everyone on it is an “insider”, meaning that none of them are graduate students or post-docs. That’s not a surprise, because who would put grad students or post-docs on that panel? But I also noticed that none of them seem to represent grad students or post-docs either. I mean there’s a couple of deans, but I won’t try to be funny by pretending they speak for the workers. Regular Cesar Chavezes, eh?

Have you ever seen a labor discussion where the labor wasn’t represented? That whole football lockout thing? The workers may be very rich athletes, but they have reps. Countless auto strikes? I seem to remember something about the UAW. Look up a labor battle (because that’s really what this is, right?) and try to find me one without worker representation. It’s unfortunate, and I wonder how much change we can expect if we aren’t invited to the table. They say they plan to “gather input from the extramural community, including students, postdoctoral fellows . . .”, but to me that sounds like a SurveyMonkey email in the making. We aren’t at the table, we’re at the kids’ table (although I would love to be proven wrong).

Think about that . . . we are primary stakeholders in this conversation, and yet we wield no power in its eventual outcome. What are we gonna do? Strike? Unionize? I don’t think so. We don’t even know what we want, just that we don’t like what we see.

We are the vassals whose fiefs need reforming, but most of us are rather nervous about rocking the boat or too naïve about the scale of the problem to offer well-formed opinions or suggestions. I’m no different. I know that my understanding of the Ph.D. workforce as it exists today is incomplete. I have never run a research lab and I don’t know the intricacies of convincing the government to give me money to underpay an army of 35 year-old post-docs so that I can make it to my next renewal. I am not an economist, and I don’t know how to analyze supply-side vs. demand-side labor arguments. Frankly, I don’t even know exactly what I want to do with my Ph.D. when I get it (although it better let me use these comm. skills, yo).

I certainly don’t feel satisfied in the prospects before me. I don’t look highly on the option of being 35 or 36 years old and still making $35-38K a year after spending 10 years in college (and college-plus). I don’t think a <10% chance of grant success, few risk-friendly funding opportunities, and having the age of tenure review line up dangerously close with the average age of first NIH grant are very peachy prospects. “Research freedom” is a good thing, as is the comfort of tenure, but those get pretty fuzzy and dreamy when you compare them to the real life sacrifices and risks we have to go through to get there. Cost/benefit is one concept I do get.

It’s easy to feel discouraged when you’re the one rowing the boat with a whip cracking in the background, though. What do the PIs think?

I can only relate anecdotes from a recent sample size of n=2, but I think they’re worth mentioning. After discussing these recent announcements in the presence of two faculty members (also in the presence of beer), here’s paraphrased versions of the reactions I got:

• Faculty member 1 – Male, middle-aged, tenured, Chinese immigrant: “I knew that the only way I was going to come to the US and be successful was to be better than everyone I knew. I worked longer and harder than everyone around me so that I could get a job in the US and become a professor.”
• Faculty member 2 – Male, young, in tenure review, moved through Ph.D. and post-doc to faculty as fast as anyone can: “If 1 in 11 of people getting Ph.D.’s are getting faculty jobs, I’m surprised it’s even that high. This is like baseball, you have to be the best every day, work harder than everyone around you and do beyond what you think it takes just to get a shot at the big show. You have to be like Tiger Woods. Not everyone is going to make it, and this is how we pick out the very best of the best to become faculty.”

The “genius mentality” . . . also that you have to be cut-throat competitive and never stop working for the future. That made me think, and I don’t know where I stand on it now. We can’t hand out faculty job opportunities to everyone who comes through a Ph.D. program, and I see how making a system intensely competitive can shake the cream to the top. But something about this doesn’t feel 100% right to me.

I think most (ok, many) of us rowing the boat have the potential to be successful professional researchers, but we have to be more than cogs in the research factory on the way up. The Tiger Woods mentality will find you some geniuses, but it will also lose you a lot of really smart people that might decide they’d rather play on Wall Street or in the ER because they have a better chance at owning a car from and in this decade. I don’t think it’s right that 90% of the people I get my degree with won’t be professors, but 100% of us are being trained to do only that. Most of all, I feel like the incredible diversity of genius, intelligence and skills that our research students possess should be channelled into a multitude of innovative jobs, not force-trained into one. I have met so many people gifted in teaching, communicating, writing, critical thinking, art, design, ethics, management . . . the list goes on. A Doctor of Philosophy degree can help anyone skilled in those areas be a better thinker and a deeper explorer of the world around them, but we aren’t giving today’s Ph.D.s real chances to create a new world of value out of their degree.

Are we training the minds of tomorrow with the system of yesterday?

I’ll admit I do feel a bit discouraged sometimes, and that probably fuels my worry. What Ph.D. student doesn’t, from time to time? But those feelings should be directed at an experiment, not at the entire outlook for the future of the degree we chose.

I’m interested to hear what my fellow grad students think, and what junior and senior faculty think of it too. This may, in fact, be baseball. And there’s no crying in baseball. But there is a whole lot of coaching, and we need it right now.