Are PhDs losing lustre? Why fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.

I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).

Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.

It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.

At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.

In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.

As usual, lot of PhD bashing in the comments. My experience was generally positive.

The good things

1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great.

2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places

3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives.

4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too).

The bad things

1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell

2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless.

3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough).

Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.

Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!

As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.

Incidentally if you are interested in doing a PhD the University of oslo has 64 open phd and postdoc positions currently. PhDs will get a competitive salary (typically something like 50-55k USD/year, this is much higher than anything in USA for example), free healthcare, pension, in the first year you qualify for cheap student housing if you have moved from abroad, and tbh, Norway is kind of nice to live in in my opinion as long as you pick up a winter sport and don't mind the darkness.

https://www.mn.uio.no/english/about/vacancies/index.html

I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but:

1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.

2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.

3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.

4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.

From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising.

It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research. It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.

The obsession with the ‘STEM’ acronym (well, really the grouping rather than the name) also winds me up, but I better not go there…

There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison.

Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.

Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.

Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.

Good. Academia is done growing. We're in a steady state, which means if you're in grad school, look at your advisor. Look at the other grad students who have him. Look at the work of the grad students who came before you, with this advisor. Think about the ones that will come after.

Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking.

If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work and getting the education, go for it. If you have to make the PhD pencil out financially, think long and hard before enrolling. And if your ambition is to be a full professor, reread the first paragraph.

I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years

The PhD is has become the de facto replacement for the advanced workforce training programs (apprenticeship, guilds, corporate talent development programs) that many civilizations used to use. For some fields, you really do need to bang your head against a small number of problems without anyone holding your hand before you become proficient.

Not all PhD graduates get there; many just skate by because no one wants to fail them. They are an essential part of the modern labor force, though.

From my experience, there has been a noticeable decline in PhD positions available within academia, likely due to tenure and career longevity, and reduced retirement benefits. As a result, many PhDs are forced into the private sector. However, many organizations have removed middle management layers, making merit based advancement less likely, and instead time becomes the dominating factor.

So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.

As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it.

It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.

On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.

My younger brother has his phd in engineering from a top tier university and I often worry about what it will mean for his career long term. He’s at a consulting firm now, but I’m not really sure where he’ll go next. He’s incredibly intelligent and hard working, but I’m unsure what firms are looking for engineers that have the phd price tag.

I also have many friends with humanities phds that I really hope figure something out. They are all extremely intelligent. But one is literally getting a phd in Shakespeare. Cool. I love it. But there’s like 3 openings a year and they aren’t even at a top tier school. It’s all a mess.

People seem to be getting stuck on the PhD opportunity cost piece for STEM. The matter of fact is that Americans don't do PhDs in STEM: if you look at the top schools and top departments, they are 70-90% international students. The PhD then is a phenomenal deal: by and large people are coming from places where FAANG jobs don't just fall on your lap at SF salaries. You get a free education in the US, and can jump straight into the job market as top-educated talent.

Also I think from NSF stats STEM PhDs are on a slow and upward trend, unlike the countries mentioned in the article.

Please if you do get a PhD, don't feel bitter if you don't get paid much more than people without one after you graduate. This is a toxic mentality that (anecdotally) I find quite common in the computational sciences specifically.

I was this close to picking up the PhD route in applied mathematics for science and engineering. I took up a job in a map company, "just for the time being" and not commit to the "Finite Element Method" or something around "Port Hamiltonian Systems" for 4-5 years straight, without knowing if it will find any applications in the real world.

8 years on, I'm still in the same map company along with 3-4 others who have joined after or mid-way their PhDs (and some more who didn't bother) and we do routing for hundreds of customers and basically have everything a PhD group has, including Seasonal Seminars on Routing Algorithms.

Finite element Method is not as exciting as AI (I used to think at some point that it would) and Port Hamiltonian Systems is something not a lot of people talk about, except maybe Dr. Volker Mehrmann and his group :)

Academia is not for the faint hearted and a PhD isn't just about research anymore. It's just a low paying job now, sadly. I still say things like "if I ever happen to go back to academia", as if I did a lot there. But I am an academic at heart, just that pursuing a PhD didn't certify it any better or seem to provide more freedom for exploring my passion for studies or a particular topic.

A lot of people will point out the utility of a doctoral degree is low, but there's another angle.

Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees.

I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need

Anecdotally, a prestigious consulting firm (one of McKinsey/Bain/BCG) essentially stopped hiring MBAs and instead hired several friends from my PhD cohort despite the B-School ranking hire than most of our graduate programs.

I've always wondered what signal they were acting on. Perhaps the value of the MBA has been watered down, or it was just too easy to game the admissions.

In Elbonia people have to play a game to stay in academia.

Every year you have to accumulate enough points. The main source of points are publications. But they're not valued based on the gravitas of your writing, rather than which publisher is willing to publish. And these valuation seems to be random. Senior people will often offer to open doors to younger reserchers in exchange for their name to be put in their papers. Stealing someones ideas is not even the goal as is getting more points.

I have no idea how this translates to other countries, but as someone who - with one or two different choices in my youth - could easily end up as a sociology scholar, and who has a lot of friends who chose that path, I'm deeply flabbergasted.

A young naive version of me seen academia as polar opposite of working for evil bigco, but the reality that the amount of politics and backroom scheming is just mind boggling.

The article cites a trend without providing any real facts or information for understanding the topic. I.E. which field are seeing growth and which are seeing contraction. It's a bunch of vague guesses at the cause like 'cost of living' without ever to find and present any facts that could validate whether such hypotheses are actually true. Consider the most common phd is in education, we could easily see a decline in doctors of education and not realize that chemistry phds rose 4%. The effect of the change are very different in this scenario than 4% reduction in fundamental research.

> Financial insecurity is also one of the chief concerns for doctoral students in Japan

I question the premise that low pay caused this drop. PhD research was never about financial security , instead it pays in prestige and expertise of notoriously ramen-eating overworking geniuses. Prestige has certainly gone down since they became so commodified, and expertise can end with a Master's. Most PhDs are not even computer science and related fields (where the most interesting research roles are in companies).

We should rethink the duration and archaic formulation of the doctoral programs. Our times are faster

One of the extra problems in the UK is that PhDs in STEM were massively centralised into “Doctoral Training Centers”. It used to be whenever I applied for a grant I would add funding for a PhD. Now that’s forbidden, and instead most universities have little PhD funding, and a few have far too much.

This means most students don’t get to be integrated into a research group, and many supervisors get very little funding for students as their university doesn’t have the funding.

If you are high skill enough to do a PhD in anything meaningful, why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted? An american has even less incentive, as the reward of a work permit is not on the other side.

Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.

I got a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1994. I was a researcher for a few years and converted to software in 2000.

The degree turned out to have a lot of transferable skills - especially in researching and solving problems.

Just 25 years later I am a Principal Engineer in the Oz Telco industry writing Rust!

I don't regret the degree for a moment - although when I went through the degree was free, even at a top tier Australian university.

Not surprising at all. The PhD pipeline has been broken for years: low stipends, ridiculous workloads, a shrinking number of stable academic jobs. Who wants to spend 5-7 years in a grueling program only to end up in postdoc purgatory or fighting for adjunct gigs? And the irony is that academia needs PhDs...

I was going to do a mathematics PhD years ago but I’ll be honest and I’m not bashing the process or the outcome here.

I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.

Anyone considered doing a PhD after retiring early from their primary career? Seems like it would be a good option if you were financially set for retirement and had “a few years to kill” before accessing your savings/investments. It would reduce the stress of doing it (no great fear of failure, more perspective), cover living expenses, and give you a socially respectable occupation. On the other hand, maybe it would be kind of awkward being a grad student at like 45+ years old?

Honestly, from the stories I hear... Obviously,the money is one factor, but even if people got a little bit more money, they would still go for a PhD (at least in europe, where you don't need to go under debt so much, if you need to). The problem is that a lot of people don't even receive more money than people with Msc or even less. That's just too bad (even if in some countries this is not only illegal, but people actually follow the law - which is not something you should take for granted).

But even after the money consideration... you still have all the "lost credibility" in the system, because the institutions are not properly funded, and also because science is very dependent on grants,politics, and stupid criteria + nepotism and corruption inside the institutions, etc. That goes beyond PhD applications to even "who can sell the coffee in campus". On PhD apps, I will never forget when one of my housemate just said to me that he would leave the country because one teacher said to him in advance that he would not enter on PhD, because everything was bought out.

I think this is only the ""beginning"" of at least 10+ years of colleges having a hard time/ losing credibility year after year (sometimes because they are failing, and other times because they dare to have opinions different than people like Musk, which is not fair for academia). Either way, should I feel sorry for them? For the institutions, sure. But for the people who rule the institutions right now? My only fear is that they will be substituted by even worse individuals.

What's the point in advancing thinking-based skills, when thinking has been successfully outsourced? What's the point of colleges, universities and research?

I feel like the only places a doctorate is useful is in the research field or academics and generally neither actually pay that well for the doctorate to be worth it.

Am I out of loop.

This is supply / demand.

There were just a bunch of articles about 'not enough' positions for PhD's.

So, now there are fewer enrolled.

Doesn't this happen in every field. There are two many people for the jobs, so people stop perusing those fields. Then the cycle kind of moves around, to, now we don't have enough people.

As a software engineer, PhD is worth it if you know what you are getting into. Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. It's a long journey but it's worth it if you know what you are doing.

The article mentions Australia, Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Were there any counter-examples where the cost of living was supported and PhDs were doing well? I did not register to continue the article.

My supervisor once told me that if you want maximize your career earnings, only a masters is worth it. Of course he said this in regards to engineering, but I found it interesting at the time.

The choice is simple: work for next Nvidia or pursue academia?

Odd that, based on the comments, so many HN'ers are fixated on the opportunity cost of doing a PhD, as if the reason for doing a PhD was to earn more money.

Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious.

Very few true eccentrics left.

As is typical on HN, most comments are about how PhDs are of little value or how academia is not what it once was, whereas the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.

My Professor dreams died years ago. I’m just trying to survive this hell.

Yup. Forget college or post-graduate degrees. This is no longer a meritocracy. We are in a grinding and grifting mindset. This is a jokers/jesters economy.

Forget pricey degrees. Just start streaming, become controversial af, gain an audience of young followers, sell them on quasi-legal gambling platforms, rake in that cheddar.

Or become a “political talking head” that doesn’t contribute to the conversation but instead provokes audiences with click baity material.

Or if you are traditionally attractive, start teasing the waters with “Just Chatting” streams and potentially switch up to selling OF subs. Nothing wrong with it, got to make that cheddar. Right?

I’m calling it now. The alignment with neoliberal economic policy is the downfall of not just the United States but the end of capitalism itself.

Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves.

PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs.

The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.

because higher education is too expensive to consider it

I mean £21k student stipend and job prospects of £26k-£42k (assuming not finance or AI) can you blame them.

Blaming "High living costs" is like blaming the victim of a theft for carrying something of value in the first place.

Come on use the words that are actually plaguing PhD programs, exploitation of cheap labor and minimum pay for working endless hours

I got caught cheating in my very last college course so can never get my PhD. I use to be atrocious at school bc I had adhd and was about to drop but did a complete 180 and finally learned how to learn which changed everything. I discovered my love for Math and my immediate and only goal from that point forward was to get my PhD.

My temple became the library and would go there immediately after class and every weekend at 8am. I graduated at the brink of COVID so could no longer go to my favorite and on my very last final of my college career couldn’t take the noise of my roommates cheering me on and also just wanted to be done to used chegg on a small part of my test and got caught.

Do I deserve to get my PhD? No. Why? I showed my academic integrity can’t be trusted. Do I still want my PhD? 1000% Yes. Do I regret my decision? No.

My school told me I could either not be awarded my degree or receive it with the exception that “cheater” be branded everywhere on it. I originally wanted to go with no degree at all but figured I’d own up to my mistake and use the label to rebrand myself as someone who learned their lesson and won’t make the same mistake again.

During COVID I obviously couldn’t find work so utilized my spare time to pick up a new hobby and landed on tinkering. That lead into my discovery of software and the rest is history. I fell in love with software engineering and have been doing it for the past 4+ years.

I’m extremely proud of myself and all that I’ve accomplished because with absolutely no incentive or motivations or even help I managed to learn a new subject completely on my own. A cheater can post code that isn’t theirs’ to their GitHub over the course of 4 years however a cheater can’t show you 4 years worth of work. Also if you think a tech job might’ve been my motivation, I did try to obviously get a job but failed at yet another goal and quit several months ago. I’m working construction but still learning and coding each and every day.

A PhD is becoming an expert in a specified subject and then thinking up an idea no one has ever had before and backing up your ideas with proof. In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen. I think (big emphasis on think) I can do that completely on my own. If I’m being honest I’ve actually already begun and don’t know if it’ll work out, come to fruition, or even be read but at least I tried. If I try the only cost is my time but if you’re in a program it costs time and money.

Phds are a scheme for immigration

it's a huge waste of life time, family life and money; but it can be fun if you are a no-life, or a Billy no-mates

on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.

The simple answer is they have low market value and aren’t a good investment for anyone - the student or the nation. Yes we need some researchers but not as many as we train.

Distinctions only hold esteem over time if they are worthy of it. The last two PhD’s that crossed my feed had dissertations on “The Architecture of Whiteness” https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377

And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561

If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.