College vs Grad School

sakky
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:13:50 +0000

You mean to tell me that a PhD student would have been unemployed (income = zero) if they were not in grad school? That is the only way your numbers make sense.



I never said any such thing. I am saying that people with (in her case) an anthro degree are probably not going to be making a lot of money right out of college. Heck, most people with any liberal arts degrees don’t exactly make high starting salaries.



And starting point for an MBA is a red herring, because if you look at the actual data (something you seem reluctant to do except when it fits your pre-conceived notions) you would see that most PhD students don’t go immediately to grad school either.



Then you can input what you feel are more realistic numbers. Like I said, I gave my theoretical MBA student quite an advantage by presuming that #1, he was able to get a $60k job right out of whatever undergrad degree he got, and, more importantly, #2, he really was able to get into B-school with only 2 years of experience.

So let’s say that the PhD student goes to grad school when he’s 24 or 25. Let’s also say that the MBA student goes to B-school when he’s 27 or 28 (which is the median age for incoming MBA students). Work out the numbers, and they don’t change substantially.



Time to degree? Please, whatever is in the water in Cambridge is affecting your reasoning. 4 years to finish? Look at the data:

Baby Steps on Speeding Up the Ph.D. :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs

Average time: 7.5 years. Shortest discipline: Chemistry at 6 years.

Maybe Harvard/Mit kids are faster. Sakky, you’re there, why not get the data.



The data is here, and the median is probably around 5 years (of course, it depends on the discipline).

But again, I already acknowledged this particular point in my previous post: some people do indeed take longer (and heck, some don’t even finish at all). But that’s not my point, and never was. My point was, for this particular girl that I discussed, she clearly made out like a bandit. She got a top consulting job at age 26, which is younger than most people even start an MBA program.



Better yet, take a course on analysis of data to learn why you don’t make a case from outliers.



Actually, I think I should be making several courses to you. First of all, you made several severe errors in your NPV analysis, particularly with your double-counting of “opportunity cost”. I would recommend that you take a course on basic finance.

Secondly, I would also recommend that you take a course on statistics as well. You talk about outliers: and that’s what I’m talking about also. Some people do indeed take a long time to finish their PhD. On the other hand, some take a very short time, and particularly, those who figure out quickly that they don’t really want an academic career at all can take a quite short time indeed because they’re not trying to build a strong academic CV. They just want to do the bare minimum necessary to finish, and if their resulting publication list is poor, who cares? They’re not trying to get a research job anyway.

But, please, newmassdad, next time, do your calculations more carefully.



Doesn’t look to me like many students are finishing these programs in < 5 years: ~10% of students in a STEM field complete the PhD in 4 years or less, ~20% in arts/languages, ~5% in social sciences. I don’t believe that people enroll in these PhD programs intending to take the better part of a decade to complete them. If your goal is to make lots of money by becoming an associate at a consulting firm or the like, it doesn’t seem like a PhD in anthro (or whatever) is anywhere near a sure or expedient route there. How can you know as an entering PhD student that you won’t face bureaucratic/life issues that could keep you from finishing your degree quickly?



All of this is completely obscuring my point. Not once have I ever recommended that people choose to get their PhD if they already know beforehand they want to be a consultant. These people should instead just try to join consulting firms right out of undergrad, not least because then they will figure out if they actually like consulting or not (and many find out that they don’t like it).

What I am saying is that many PhD students will find out that they can’t or don’t really want to become researchers/academics, and instead will enter other careers, in which case it doesn’t really matter how strong their publication list or advisor backing is, because your employer in your new career will not value them. What those employers will value is the strength of the brand name of your school.

Consulting is just one example of the above. I know many other PhD’s who are no longer involved in their research field and are now involved in other careers. Like I said before, I know some Chinese guys who got PhD’s and are now back in China working as regular businessmen. I know one guy with a PhD who is serious contemplating running for political office soon. Do you really think the voters are going to care about how many journal citations you have and the impact factor of the journals you publish in? Heck, do you think most voters even know what that means? I don’t think so. All they are going to see is that you have a PhD from School X.

The bottom line is this. Nobody knows for sure what career they are going to have. Just because you think that, right now, you want a research career in a certain field doesn’t mean that you’re still going to want that same career 10 or 20 years in the future, or even if you do want it, that you’ll be allowed to get it. For example, during the dotcom bust of 2001, a lot of people with PhD’s in computer science and electrical engineering got laid off and couldn’t get jobs in their field. Many of them ended up moving onto other things, at least temporarily. {For example, one guy I know with a PhD in CS who got laid off from his dotcom ended up working as a club DJ for over a year, and said it was the most fun job he had ever had in his life.}

The salient point is that *nobody, including you, knows what’s going to happen with your career in the future. * What brand-name schools do is they provide you with a marketing advantage in case you find that you want or need to change careers. Somebody with a PhD from Harvard or Stanford or MIT is going to be able to better market himself for other careers and hence enjoy better career flexibility than somebody with a PhD from Wayne State University. I hardly see how that is a controversial point.