[HN Gopher] Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-02-09 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.benkuhn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.benkuhn.net)
| some-guy wrote:
| Similar discussion to the "The dangers of high status, low wage
| jobs" post from today. I do think the stress is directly
| correlated with their financial situation.
|
| My spouse is in a PhD program. Advantages for her are a) her
| mother was also a PhD with a tenured job and b) she's married to
| me, who makes $350k a year (and to be clear, she works a lot
| harder than I do). I can't imagine people putting up with the
| same bullshit she does as outlined in the article, _and_ dealing
| with financial issues. Even if she doesn't get that tenure-track
| job, her opportunity cost for trying is much lower than someone
| who doesn't have those privileges.
| pmorici wrote:
| My wife got her PhD and some of the things she would talk about
| that her advisors told her just struck me as nuts.
|
| They would lament that it was "sad" people would leave academia
| to have families ignoring the fact that the jobs paid like crap
| and there was massive competition for any position. They acted
| like it was some conspiracy to keep people out of the field
| when it seemed to me to be mostly explained by people making
| straightforward economic decisions for themselves.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| I'd ask for a control to account for grad students with STDs, but
| what grad students have time for those?
| rank0 wrote:
| I am extremely skeptical of the authors claim that only 6% of the
| general population suffers "moderate to severe" anxiety or
| depression.
|
| How do you even quantify the intensity of a normal human emotion?
| It's all relative to an individuals experience.
|
| Human beings are fucked in the head. I believe it's always been
| that way and always will be.
| openknot wrote:
| The article opens with an anecdote about the experience of a
| philosophy PhD candidate, then moves on to explore statistics.
|
| I believe these types of analyses on the value of a graduate
| degree should be separated based on field. There are vastly
| different day-to-day schedules and expected career outcomes for a
| graduate student pursuing a PhD in, say, philosophy; versus
| economics; a life sciences field; mathematics; an engineering
| field; and so on.
| fatnoah wrote:
| Yeah, the issue isn't graduate degrees, it's graduate degrees
| with no plan (other than a tenure lottery ticket) for where
| it'll take you.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| The research into anxiety rates covered all fields though.
| openknot wrote:
| That is true, though I would assert that future career
| outcomes should factor in to the author's calculations of
| disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
|
| In specific, from the article: "It's a bit hard to get an
| apples to apples comparison with the "moderate to severe"
| description from the survey above, but let's be conservative
| and use the weights for moderate depression (0.396) and
| moderate anxiety (0.133). That means the average graduate
| student loses 0.99 disability-adjusted life years to
| depression, 0.34 years to anxiety, and 6.17 years to studying
| irrelevant coursework, writing a dissertation no one will
| read, wandering around looking for free food, etc."
|
| Consider an undergraduate student who then struggles in
| graduate school, but is likely to achieve a respected career
| with good pay and autonomy in the industry thanks to a PhD in
| a technical field, which could not have been attained without
| that degree. That student is set to have secured additional
| years with a high quality of life by achieving their dreams,
| after some years of struggle.
|
| Contrast this with an undergraduate student who struggles in
| graduate school in a non-technical field, where opportunities
| outside of academia open thanks to the degree are more
| limited. The DALYs in graduate school for this student have a
| lower chance of securing additional high-quality of life
| years after graduate school, compared to the student in the
| previous scenario.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Its all about choices really. My wife got her Master's in Nursing
| and works as a Nurse Practitioner. She had a 6 figure salary
| right out of school. She helps many people with their healthcare.
| She is still paying off the cost of school but has the means to
| do so.
| Victerius wrote:
| I'm trying to paste the link to the "100 reasons not to go to
| grad school" blog but HN won't let me paste? I'm on Chrome 98 on
| Android 9. Pushing the paste button does nothing. No URL works.
| Regular text works though.
| [deleted]
| manux wrote:
| It's quite likely some people will come out of reading this
| thinking we should stop sending people to grad school. Shouldn't
| we instead take this as a signal that it needs improvement?
|
| Grad students are one of the very few subpopulations of humanity
| allowed to take on extraordinary epistemological risks; a kind of
| immune system of our civilization. I'm not even talking about
| some elusive notion of "progress", just [intellectual] societal
| health. It would feel to me like a tremendous loss if we let go
| of such a component of society.
| b215826 wrote:
| Also worth reading: "Don't Become a Scientist!" by Jonathan Katz
| [1], "Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun [2], and "What Does
| Any of This Have To Do with Physics?" by Bob Henderson [3].
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181018063835/http://katz.fastm...
|
| [2]: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
|
| [3]: https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-
| phys...
| openknot wrote:
| Professor Katz's piece is highly flawed. From the article:
| "What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which
| means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to
| do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery
| of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally
| woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable
| middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If
| you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to
| people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are
| even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been
| ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
|
| Two issues: I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India,
| but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in
| China are outdated for Chinese citizens. Secondly, the remark,
| "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by
| getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs," is more indicative
| of the professor living in a bubble, instead of a serious
| assertion that a physics PhD is worse than a drug addiction.
|
| With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank;
| the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space
| industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing);
| national security; and many other fields.
|
| Katz's article reads as out-of-touch and unimaginative [edit:
| though thanks for sharing for the discussion]. The false
| premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics
| PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which
| takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a
| professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming.
| b215826 wrote:
| > _I 'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I
| can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China
| are outdated for Chinese citizens._
|
| After spending around 5 years in a mid-ranked American
| university, I have to admit that the quality of physics PhDs
| from top Indian institutions (IISc, TIFR, etc.) is at least
| an order of magnitude better -- they publish more papers in
| better journals, meet with their advisers more often, etc.
| (Of course, the best American universities still produce some
| of the best work in the world, but again, they are only
| responsible for a small fraction of the total PhDs.) Indian
| academia isn't centered around obtaining research grants, so
| most theoretical physicists are still free to pursue hard
| problems that interest them. This also means that Indians who
| return to their country with a PhD from a mid-ranked American
| university with a thesis in a low-effort area will find it
| hard to get a job. And the Indian tech sector isn't
| particularly keen on hiring PhDs (who would anyway be
| overqualified for most jobs in the Indian tech industry). So
| yeah, Prof. Katz's analysis is still spot on for Indians
| doing a PhD in theoretical physics.
|
| > _With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment
| bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the
| space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum
| computing); national security; and many other fields._
|
| Sure, but most students enter graduate school with the hopes
| of becoming a professor at a university, not work as as
| investment banker. Jobs at NIST and in the space industry
| (and most federal labs) are often limited to US citizens
| because of security clearance issues. Also, these jobs are
| extremely limited in number (compared to say, data science
| jobs).
|
| > _The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get
| with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured
| professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you
| don 't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer
| programming._
|
| Most physics PhDs I know who left academia are now working as
| data scientists. "Data science" wasn't a thing in 1999 when
| Prof. Katz wrote this essay, but at the same time it is not
| so different from a physicist becoming a computer programmer
| in the 1990s.
| valarauko wrote:
| As an Indian working as a biology postdoc, I can't speak to
| the experiences for people in physics, but at least in
| biology at this level Americans don't seem very interested.
| At my midsize institute that's got a reasonable reputation, I
| would be hard pressed to name a single American postdoc.
| Almost all the PhD students are American, and almost none of
| the postdocs. Chinese & Indians alone account for probably
| 60-70% of the postdocs, and they are the ones who stick
| around the longest (probably due to the extremely high bar
| both these nationalities face in terms of getting work
| visas). Speaking to the American PhDs the most common refrain
| I hear is an unwillingness to accept a postdoc salary for a
| couple of years (currently around ~ $55K) - when industry
| jobs are relatively easy to get for American nationals, and
| come with double the salary.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in
| the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical
| sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these
| figures).
|
| Yes, but if they go to Wall St with the same credential, they
| make 20x that.
| b215826 wrote:
| The essay is from 1999, so the salaries are a little off --
| it's something like $50,000 +/- $15,000 for most postdoctoral
| positions now. Yes, you can go to Wall St with a physics PhD
| and have a great career. But the thing is that many students
| (especially in elite institutions) enter graduate school with
| the hopes of becoming an actual scientist, not a Wall St
| analyst.
| pmags wrote:
| This is absolutely not a "typical postdoctoral salary", and
| hasn't been for more than two decades. Most major research
| institutions follow NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries:
|
| https://www.training.nih.gov/postdoctoral_irta_stipend_range.
| ..
| loeg wrote:
| With a biology PhD?
| kurthr wrote:
| Well, I know some really biologists who code really well,
| but you're right only pharma/medicine are likely to pay off
| your college debts, the first requires a lot of luck, and
| the other a lot more school. Biology is well known to be a
| terrible investment (by people in gradschool).
| guga42k wrote:
| yes. with massive capital investments in bio/pharma sector
| some in-house expertise required to improve ROI.
|
| ps: basic python and prob theory won't hurt.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Hot take - graduate school is frequently treated as a "backup"
| option when getting a job directly out of undergraduate appears
| difficult or unrealistic. This is a very damaging mindset, as the
| post-graduate options are not always much rosier than post-
| undergraduate, but comes with a likely mountain of debt and years
| of envy watching peers have multi-year head starts in their
| careers.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| I pivoted a Physics undergrad into an accelerated CS masters
| and my employability spiked accordingly.
|
| Really I only did the masters because I realized I should have
| done a CS undergrad but didn't want to spend 4 more years and
| even more 10s of K.
| klyrs wrote:
| I had the opposite view -- graduate studies in math rarely
| result in tenure; industry is a nice fallback for
| mathematicians with programming chops.
| michaelt wrote:
| It's a fallback in both directions.
|
| If you were studying creative writing and planning to go into
| advertising, but you graduated during a big recession and no-
| one was hiring? A few years of grad school might be more fun
| than a few years working retail, especially if mom and dad
| will help pay for it.
|
| If you've finished your PhD in STEM and it didn't inspire you
| to follow the long path to tenure? You might fall back to
| industry; with luck you'll make so much money it hardly
| counts as falling back.
| [deleted]
| Tomminn wrote:
| This may be the case in computer science but is _definitely
| not_ the case in science /philosophy. Not doing graduate school
| means effectively not doing science/philosophy. We sort of
| scoffed at everyone who dropped out at undergrad and thought
| they were obviously never serious about the field. I'm not
| saying the scoffing was correct, just that it was _mystifying_
| to us when someone _actually good_ didn 't go on to grad
| school.
| [deleted]
| vehemenz wrote:
| Even in philosophy, it depends heavily on program and
| concentration. Universities are not consistent about which
| programs fall under the Philosophy Dept, and even if we look
| at "proper" philosophy at a highly-ranked university, there
| are some areas that are considerably less rigorous than
| others. I think you'll find more "Plan B" students there.
|
| I could say a lot more on this and about the decline of
| academic philosophy, but you get my point.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| This may be true for lower-tier and middle-of-the-pack graduate
| programs but at the higher end, if anything, the opposite is
| true. There's an arms race among the candidates to get the best
| grades in the hardest classes, to get the best research
| experience, best letters of recommendations, perfect or near-
| perfect GRE scores and often GRE subject scores.
|
| Getting a good job sounds almost blissfully easy in comparison.
| shihab wrote:
| A little nitpicking about GRE, it really doesn't seem to
| matter anymore. There is a wave of schools making it
| optional, and often outright banning it from submission.
|
| Anecdotally, I have a near perfect-perfect GRE score
| (334/340, perfect score in quantitative), with at least avg
| position on other criteria (I think). I failed to get even
| interviews in many mid-tier US universities last year.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I had a relatively bad experience with graduate school but in
| retrospect it was better than working. Very little oversight on
| how I spent my time, got to do interesting work and being a grad
| student in my field (physics) was relatively high status when it
| came to dating the people I wanted to date.
|
| I walked to work every day and walked home every night. I slept
| well.
|
| In comparison, literally the only good thing about "the real
| world" is more money.
|
| My advisor was an anti-social depressive and I often felt
| spectacularly dumb. But in retrospect, it was great. If I could
| afford to go again, I'd do it.
| nikkinana wrote:
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The linked study that he consulted is behind a paywall. From
| context, it sounds like this is specifically referring to
| negative mental health outcomes due to PhD studies, which is not
| all grad school. The title seemingly can't possibly be correct as
| written, given schools of public health and medicine exist and
| have to produce some net positive benefit. It's not like public
| health globally hasn't improved since we discovered the germ
| theory of disease and medical licensing became a thing. Making
| some small number of people depressed isn't nearly enough to
| offset all of modern medicine.
| senkora wrote:
| > Once, for a conference, we visited a different philosophy
| department, at a less prestigious university, housed in a
| structure which had set the record for the largest poured-
| concrete building in the US.
|
| I'm guessing Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon University?
| freetime2 wrote:
| Perhaps Crosley Tower at the University of Cincinnati?
|
| https://actioncookbook.substack.com/p/the-story-of-a-terribl...
| aleffert wrote:
| Wean is large and horrible, but 1. I can't find any evidence
| that it was ever the largest and that never came up when I was
| a student (I did hear it won awards). 2. Philosophy is in the
| Humanities department which is in different buildings.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| The article seems flawed from its premise, which is that because
| there's X% (41 I guess) rate of moderate to severe anxiety in
| students attending grad school, grad school must be the cause.
|
| Classic case of correlation =/= causation.
|
| Besides, the cited research also says this: "Although this is a
| convenience sample in which respondents who have had a history of
| anxiety or depression may have been more apt to respond to the
| survey..."
| hirundo wrote:
| At the top of the article, in italics:
|
| > Caveats: ... "if the correlation is causal"
| jeffrallen wrote:
| But what about STDs acquired at grad school? Umm.. asking for a
| friend...
| mjfl wrote:
| Eh. My PHD sucks but it's better than a real job.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-09 23:01 UTC)