別擔心，底下有轉貼中文版。
The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
The Economist:
ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.
In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.
One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”
Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
Rich pickings
For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world’s university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.
Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world’s students.
But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.
Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.
A short course in supply and demand
In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.
In America the rise of PhD teachers’ unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers’ union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later…
http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223
2011-10-26 旺報 【記者簡立欣／專題報導】
無獨有偶，去年年底英國《經濟學人》發表了一篇討論歐美博士過剩、供需失衡的文章，標題是〈免洗學術：為何念博士往往是浪費時間（The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time）〉，中文版在部落格中揭露後，一個月內被推薦6萬1000次。該文表示，念博士是「進難攻、退難守的抉擇」；就經濟上而言，博士無法創造超越碩士的產值；學術職位也早已供需失衡，博士訓練因此成為人力浪費的來源。
文章指出，博士生的輟學率驚人地高，美國僅57%博士生在10年後順利取得學位，人文領域的博士生通常是撐最久的。這些原本都是全國最好的學生，離開博士班的理由是因為指導不佳、糟糕的就業前景和缺乏金錢資助。
順利在學界之外找到工作的畢業生亦不盡順遂，主因是博士生研究領域太窄，學校多半無法輔導學生職涯規畫，而指導教授對無意待在學界的博士生往往興趣缺缺。這些最終只得從事和所學無關的博士生只能自力救濟。
此外，令人沮喪的是博士生和碩士生所差無幾。研究顯示：英國擁有學士學位的男性收入所得比沒上大學的男性高出14%；擁有碩士學位的男性高出23%；擁有博士學位的男性高出26%，和碩士差不多，但完成碩士學位最快只需要一年。某些領域，博士甚至沒有較高收入，如數學、資訊、社會學和語言，擁有博士學位或碩士學位對收入沒有影響；工程、科技、建築和教育領域，碩士甚至比博士的收入高。只有醫學、商業、財金和某些科學領域，博士和碩士的收入才有較顯著差距。
還有人認為一些博士班教的技能，只要花更少時間就能習得。例如30年前，華爾街有些公司顧用擅長解微積分方程的物理學家當定量分析師，於是現今就有為了金融業教授高等數學的短期課程。相較之下，只上過一門微積分方程的物理學博士就沒有競爭力。
來源: http://news.chinatimes.com/mainland/11050504/112011102600264.html
