On the day of the solar eclipse when most of Columbia University was stationed outdoors with their free library-procured cardboard glasses, ready to view the sun safely, Phillip (name changed), wearing a suit and tie, was holed up in a conference room with three other professors, defending his doctoral dissertation. His wife, also a PhD student at UC Berkeley was patiently and somewhat anxiously waiting to hear the confirmation that after six grueling years, Phillip will finally graduate from Columbia with a PhD in Economics. Later, at his desk, under a banner of “'Congratulations, you are ‘PhinisheD’”, they cut a cake and opened a bottle of champagne. Four floors underground, in a basement floor with no windows and bright orange lockers from another time, Phillip’s relief permeated every corner of the unventilated room. He was going to start working at Amazon. He wanted to be a professor or a researcher for an international organization. Neither of those options materialized. His only other option was to become a post-doctoral candidate at Stanford University. This would mean that in a year’s time, he would have to go on the job market again. While that could translate into an academic job in a year’s time, he was unwilling to put himself through that. I asked him how he felt about working for Amazon. He explained to me that his work is about labor policies, such as optimizing insurance. I expressed relief that he would at least be using his powers for good, not evil. He said he is so exhausted he no longer cares about what he would be doing.
I almost got a PhD in Economics four years ago. The pandemic and my own crippling anxiety talked me out of it and I left with yet another masters. I often wondered about the path not taken. In the months that followed this decision, I battled the heaviness of feeling incompetent. In the last two years, I have come to be proud of the self-awareness that led me to this decision. But even as I continue to be surrounded by PhD student friends and roommates, I wonder what it is that makes people inclined to continue even as they fret and complain incessantly about the poor pay and work-life balance.
While motivations can be greatly varied across fields and individuals, a doctoral program is supposed to prepare you first and foremost for an academic career. Most, if not all doctoral students dream of the day that they will walk into their first job out of graduate school as a tenured track assistant professor. But, these jobs are far fewer in number than the number of doctoral students graduating each year. According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, the trend in academic hiring has been definitively downward (see chart). At the same time, the number of doctoral students ending up in postdoctoral positions has been rising, as have been the number of students opting for industry roles.
Yet, the number of doctorates being awarded continues to rise. Even as it has become common knowledge that the academic job market is shrinking, interest in pursuing a doctorate has not dwindled. This is most surprising in the Humanities because it has far more limited outside options. Yale University’s Report of the Humanities Doctoral Education Advisory Working Group released in 2021 recognised that while most Ph.D. programs in the humanities at Yale (with the exception of the History of Art) have aimed predominantly at tenure-track faculty positions, the majority of Yale doctoral students do not land such jobs.
Sarah Cole, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University says that the “precariousness of the job market is unquestionably an issue and has been for decades.” Yet, she says that the department has not seen a dearth of applicants, many of whom want to pursue academic roles after graduating. A typical PhD in Literature is funded for six years at Columbia, but most students take seven or eight years. Looking at data, PhDs in non-science and engineering fields take longer and also pay worse once students graduate. Both of these are outcomes of the subject matter being more contemplative than the sciences, which usually have some way of quantifying the outcomes of research.
“Some of our best students sometimes decide not to finish,” says Cole. Given the dearth of academic jobs, even faculty have changed gears in recent years. She says that being a professor is no longer regarded as the gold standard and that “they [faculty] are thrilled when students get other kinds of jobs.” She also says that they are cognizant of the dissertation requirements that have made PhDs run this long and there is a conscious effort to change the norm so students can finish within the six years for which they have full funding. Overall, she thinks that the merits of a PhD come from the will to deeply engage in a subject. “Scholars have helped shape how we think of the world, even if it's not always obvious,” she says.
But, if there are no academic jobs out there, should you still get a PhD?
For many, an academic job isn't a goal to begin with. Lucas Trojanowski, a second year doctoral student in Applied Physics at University of Michigan says he would be more fulfilled in either an industry or a national lab position. “I continue to have a passion for conducting research rather than administering research...As you take on a professorship, the bulk of responsibility becomes securing funds for your students, administering your students, administering classes, and as a result, I feel like my true passion for, you know, the scientific contribution would have to be put to the wayside in favor of administration,” he says.
For those who wanted to advance not-for-profit science, national laboratories could be quasi-academic institutions. But getting into one of these straight out of graduate school isn't necessarily easier. Most students have to complete a post-doctoral role before they can be staff scientists. Siddhant Gupta, currently an Atmospheric Scientist at Argonne National Lab says that after finishing his PhD at the University of Oklahoma, “I knew I wasn't done with research yet and wanted to do a postdoc and get a scientist position eventually. I was able to get both with time.” He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a postdoc before moving to Argonne. “My priorities included a decent living wage, a better location than a campustown in the midwest, and a challenging research project. I was quite lucky to get all of those.”
Success in a graduate program requires skills much beyond grit and intelligence. You have to walk a tightrope during your entire time to ensure that you are producing good work, maintaining a stellar relationship with your advisors, forming professional relationships with others in your field and slowly but surely carving a space where you may reasonably fit in after graduation. In practical terms, this chiseling effort takes the form of a constant struggle between what you may want to pursue, what your advisor wants you to pursue and what might be in demand when you graduate. That is why your supposed passion could easily die a slow death under these multidirectional pressures. “I can personally say that as of now, I've not been able to focus as much on the research that I would like to do,” says Lucas, citing that the old research already under way requires new hands on board.
If an academic job is what you are after, your chances may be determined very strongly by the prestige of the school you graduate from. A study from 2022 shows that in the US, 80% of all domestically trained faculty were trained at just 20% of universities. Just five US universities- UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty. Moreover, academic departments hire not according to your talent alone, but also according to their needs. Whether your research interests will be in demand when you graduate can be as hard to predict as the success of your chosen cryptocurrency in five years. So, if you specialized in development economics, but no university has vacancies in that area, you are not getting a job even if your research is ground-breaking.
It would be foolish not to account for that one thing no one likes to talk about- luck. When an undertaking has a lifecycle this long, uncertainties loom large and there are many factors that are not in your control. In some fields, that is the movement of advisors and the funding attached to them. Lucas’ current advisor had left the University of Illinois to come to Michigan. His funding at Illinois that was paying for the tuition and stipend of his PhD students was no longer his. "And so he said, well, I just simply need to drop students or push you to graduate ASAP. So in that sense, my PI absolutely needed to make really tough decisions about, …very sadly kicking out, essentially, really talented physicists because we just simply lost the money from it during the transition," says Lucas. He did qualify that all of these students did land on their feet eventually.
This is not as unusual as you’d think. Siddhant Gupta also moved, somewhat grudgingly from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to University of Oklahoma at the end of his second year to follow his advisor. “My PhD cohort [in Oklahoma] was non-existent and useless, which did make the experience harder. But I had a great adviser which made life easy. I saw others with not so great advisers suffer a lot and counted myself lucky. While not relevant to science, the place you complete your PhD and the community does matter for mental and physical health,” he says.
Research thrives in a collaborative environment. Yet, the need for survival can often make competition baked into the system. When you and your peers are eyeing the same handful of jobs, the pressure will be felt. Among the many reasons for mental health concerns among PhD students, such as social isolation and burnout, is the often overlooked structure of academic research. Your success depends on how you and your work are perceived by those who have ‘made it’ in the academic world. No matter how hard you try to detach your self-worth from your work, it is a career that constantly evaluates how smart you are, based on the work you have produced. You don't just want to be considered bright because it feeds your ego, you need it to succeed. This not only creates pressure for PhD students, but often also creates a structure of hierarchy within academic institutions that is known to be stifling for women and minorities.
You’d assume that people embarking on research careers would research all the pros and cons of it before they start. So are they just overly optimistic about their prospects, have self-destructive tendencies or is there something else that makes the self-inflicted pressure and relative poverty worth it?
“Even if it felt awful in the moment. I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I absolutely love the work I do and the scientific community I'm a part of. There's weird personalities and people but in the end, even their motivations are mostly to advance our scientific understanding of the atmosphere. So, it's great,” says Siddhant.
Through his testimony and those of numerous others I have spoken to in the last four years, I have learnt that I was right in not going down the path of academic research. Almost everyone who has done a PhD will say that it was worth it in the end. But, it will take a trained psycho-analyst to understand how much of this is a result of cognitive dissonance. If you are miserable for multiple years, because you don't think you are doing as well as your peers, because you are afraid you will not find the cure to world poverty or the looming energy crisis, is the PhD truly worth it for you?
An academic path is not necessarily nobler than a career working at a car wash. Academic debates can be ugly, some online academic communities are shamefully sexist and racist, and accounts of plagiarism are more frequent than one would imagine. Many, if not all academics ache for fame and glory as much as an NBA player might. It is worth it to look at academics as humans first and foremost, even if they might be smarter in an area you know nothing about.
It is your own flavor of humanness that determines if a PhD is right for you. If you have questions you want answers to or areas of your field you want to advance because you believe in them, it determines your passion for research, the necessary condition for survival. The sufficient condition is a tremendous amount of patience and low levels of risk-aversion. When the journey is upwards of five years long, things will fall apart many times before they fall into place. A person like me who can’t stand in a queue at a popular bakery if she thinks her favorite cupcake would be gone by the time she gets to the counter, would deal with uncertainties in less pretty ways. Many can do a PhD, but it is worth doing only if you can do it somewhat gracefully even as you try to wade through murky waters in white cotton pants.