@bluebayou Which diploma mills are you talking about that crank out PhDs? Something like the for-profit Capella University? I’m not too aware of any non-profit diploma mills (do they even exist?).
To answer your last few questions: absolutely yes! There would have to be some value to the research going on there otherwise they wouldn’t be doing them at all.
@roethlisburger
Can you give a few example of PhDs that would not be helpful to society/the economy? So far I can only think of Art History and even that one can argue provides some benefits to society.
Why would you think that, and what benefits are you specifically referring to?
I live in NYC and work for a prosperous company. Many companies like this one have extensive and valuable art collections. There are many jobs for art history PhDs, such as owning the consulting companies, working for auction houses, etc. that are straight-up lucrative. Galleries are big business in some places, and employ lots of people. Many are owned/run/staffed by art history Phds.
I haven’t read the whole thread closely because I suck at math and hate taxes, but I did read this this morning and I thought it was an interesting perspective on the issue.
Staying with her point, our tax system is such that there are always winners and losers. For a long time now we have been trying to minimize the losers by running obscene deficits, which one would think can not continue indefinitely. It can certainly be argued that the current proposal is a more sophisticated version of the “pull funding for the NEA/PBS” shtick Republicans have run for years, and takes pretty direct aim at individuals who have reliably voted in support of the concept of higher taxes, at least in theory if not for themselves. But outside of the kick sand in the bull’s face part of this plan, the cold truth is that the current plan does at least acknowledge that congress is going to have to start making hard decisions about what the tax code is rewarding and what it is not eventually.
Even in STEM, a lot of the research isn’t all that valuable(just think about all the PhDs who can’t even get an interview for a tenure track position in the US).
When I’m done, I’ll have a history PhD. My focus is on history of medicine and sexuality with my research being specifically on eugenics and genocide. A transportable field (yes, really. I’ve already looked).
We’re very seriously considering moving to Canada or Germany after I’m done with my program. This bill is another push in that direction.
Public education has easily spent a half million dollars educating me. Politicians are driving people like me away. As much as I’d like to repay my debt to society, I’d like even more to eat and have health care.
My kid is working in materials science and isn’t planning on going into academia. Not all PhDs are aiming for tenure track positions. And I certainly haven’t noticed the demise of tenure so far in the US. I’m not defending it, merely saying that it still seems to be going strong.
If your kid goes to an elite research university or LAC, you may not notice a decline in tenured professors. However, even at those schools, it might be interesting to you to compare number of current tenured faculty numbers with 10 years ago.
ps - surprising to me this isn’t common knowledge to parents of grad students, but that just shows how we all live in rather isolated bubbles - shouldn’t be surprising, not really in mainstream news very much I guess
Right, but as a policy matter, would those folks be just as valuable to industry with a terminal MA/MS? (~7/8 years out of the work force for a PhD vs. 1/2 for a MA.)
Most kids probably have no clue and really no interest.
Beyond that, even at elite Unis, definitions are a-changing. I know of one Uni in that top 10 category that bestows the title “Professor” on faculty that are still not fully tenured. Kinda like Law firms now have non-equity “Partners”.
Oh I agree with you. Most kids have no interest. Most parents don’t care. Probably a majority of the population favors ending tenure, and eliminating most PhD programs in the US. Taxing university tuition waivers for graduate students may get us there a little faster. It won’t impact some of the tippy top programs that find a way to work around it.
I find it hard to believe that most parents want to eliminate PhD programs and end tenure all together. Having nothing but a patched together adjunct set of teachers (no profs with a long term commitment to the college and no TAs to run sections/labs) is going to hurt state universities and directionals, too. And giving up our premier position in research in the world would probably also give a majority of our citizens pause. How can we be “great” again if we aren’t in the forefront of research?
I think if you tell parents that this plan may drive the cost of college UP (so doctorate students can still afford to be in doctorate programs), then I think people would care. But like so many things, it is complex, and people don’t take the time to dig through the obfuscating layers of info thrown up on some “news” sources. Later on they will go, “But we didn’t want the cost of college to go UP!”.
perhaps I misunderstood your point, science nerd, but what I ‘read’ was a tautology and can be distilled down to: research is valuable bcos it exists. Conversely, if it was not valuable, no one would be doing it.
@ucbalumnus , @Dave_N The problem with all progressive tax schemes (and even the estate tax), besides the issues with unequal treatment under the law, is that they destroy incentives. People always respond to well crafted incentives, and wealthy people always find a method to minimize their exposure. Even in the middle/upper middle class, a spouse won’t work when 60% of their combined income is consumed by taxes, and much of the remainder is taken by child care expenses. Estate taxes only encourage wealthy people to work around them using a variety of vehicles such as family trusts or GSTs. They also destroy continuity of leadership for privately owed businesses. Income inequality is absolutely a good thing because it provides incentives. Lack of income mobility is the real problem. Wealthy people and large businesses do not want competition, and use the government as a vehicle to maintain their position. That also includes higher education, and government primary & secondary school systems. The outstanding feature of the US has been the relative ease of income mobility, primarily through widely available education, group based capital, and of course hard work.
Progressive and high tax systems tend to lock in the status quo and quash growth. Look at Europe for many examples of stagnation. They have nearly free (although spartan by US standards) higher education but no place for the graduates to go. As a result the largest European employers cherry pick the better grads and the grads spend most of their working lives in one or two employers (or government).
The US is much more tolerant of failure, and hence encourages risk-taking, and the most common path for people to re-invent themselves is education. The same progressive ideas that have made education widely available to the poor has made it far less affordable to the middle class (via lack of cost control and variable education pricing). But the sweet spot (and source of competition and most employment) is in the small business sector which will not thrive without capital for investment, and then for business reinvestment. Progressive taxation robs ordinary citizens of the capital needed to invest in those businesses by taxing away the seed money for new business formation.
If you read the tax bill the standard deduction will rise significantly, and colleges could adjust their Ph.D. tuition downward or raise compensation to account for the rest. In any case the vast majority of students will be in the 12% bracket so the impact will be minimal.
How are they going to “raise compensation”? Someone is going to have to pay for that… and they aren’t getting more government grants, I am pretty sure. And often the credit hour cost is set for all graduate programs (not just PhDs), so they would be foregoing income from paying customers to change the price. This will push a lot of students upward into a higher bracket. My kid (who is not at a tippy top school) would be pushed to just a hair under the 25% bracket.
The House themselves project that this particular change will bring in 65 BILLION more dollars between 2018 and 2027. On the backs of grad students – I don’t think that qualifies as “minimal”.
^ Ha ha, @bluebayou, that is exactly how many economists think: We measure value by willingness to pay. If someone is willing to pay for it, by definition it has value. If no one is willing to pay for it, it must be because it has no value.
Now I’m not a big fan of that line of thinking. But I do think there’s something to it in this context. Ph.D. programs at many second- and third-tier universities do have value . . . to the universities themselves, because it gives them a cheap pool of TA and RA labor. So they’re willing to pay for it, up to a point. But if it becomes too costly to them because suddenly they need to actually compensate TAs and RAs enough to pay their suddenly increased taxes, it won’t be worth it to the universities, and that labor pool might disappear, or at least shrink dramatically.
Then who’s going to lead all the discussion and lab sections in large lecture classes? They’re not going to get too much more classroom time out of their full-time faculty, though they could increase class sizes (even further) and/or offer fewer classes, reassigning faculty to pick up more of the slack. They might try to hire more adjuncts to replace the grad students; there seems to be a very large pool of unemployed or underemployed Ph.D.s in many fields these days, eager to snap up adjunct teaching gigs despite the low pay and sometimes grueling hours spent trying to piece a living out of multiple gigs at multiple institutions, sometimes far-flung so the commutes also become onerous. Adjuncts may already be cheaper than grad students, and they will become even more so if the cost of grad students increases dramatically. (Though they often do somewhat different things; I’m not sure how many adjuncts would be willing to just lead discussion sections or run lab sections, as opposed to teaching their own courses which at least gives them some psychic rewards). But that pool will eventually begin to shrink, too, if many universities drop or drastically reduce their Ph.D. programs. So they might need to hire less qualified adjuncts, people who have only a masters, or maybe not even that.
So I see this as leading to both an increase in the cost of undergraduate education, and possibly a decline in quality—bigger classes, fewer classes, a larger percentage of classes taught by less qualified people. I know many people on CC don’t care about that because we’re operating in a different segment of the market, but I think it has really unfortunate societal implications.