[ISL]

Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups.

The truly disillusioned won't mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.

The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Professor A may be exploitative, while Professor B may fight tooth-and-nail for student success. The statistics are low, too. Most professors will only graduate a few students per decade.

[jseliger]

In many disciplines, too, the answer is "don't go to any program." Most humanities fields, for example, have numerous essays written about why doing grad school in them is a poor life choice, like my contribution: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....

One could say the same of most social sciences.

[tharne]

I was at a social event and got to talking with a professor at an Ivy League school. He had a really insightful take on this. He said that the only fair way to present a doctoral program to prospective students is to compare it to trying to become a rockstar.

Every day tons of people form garage bands and have dreams of becoming rock stars. But...they do so knowing they almost certainly won't make it.

This professor said that starting a doctoral program should be viewed the same way, as a sort of moon-shoot that will take a lot of time and resources from other pursuits. If you're okay with that, go for it, and if you're not, find a path that works better for you.

Unfortunately, the administration of the school he worked for told him he would be removed from his position if he shared this philosophy with prospective students.

[scott_s]

That is a good framing. When I explain it to people, I compare it to the NBA. Except it's like trying to get into the NBA when all of your coaches over your entire basketball life up until that point have been in the NBA. Proximity can trick you into thinking you just have to "decide" to pursue such a position, not knowing that such positions are the result of a ruthless tournament system.

[xhkkffbf]

The thing is that there are more prosport athletes hired each year than there are new professor slots in most disciplines. There are probably 3-5 new players on each NBA team each year which amounts to 75-150 people taken from the draft. Most academic disciplines have only a few dozen slots available each year.

[scott_s]

The reason I pick the NBA is because there are only 450 positions available (30 teams, 15 players per team). This is the least number of total positions in popular team sports in the US. The ratios will never be perfect, they just need to be relatively similar. The point is to use something which people already have an intuition for; everyone already has an intuition for how unlikely it is for any given high school or college basketball player to play in the NBA.

[gammarator]

The problem with this analogy is that rock stars don't depend on the wannabes for their success.

In contrast, universities and their faculty absolutely need a large supply of low-wage teaching and research assistants to function today.

[gowld]

A PhD program is not a trade school. It was originally designed for the intellectually inclined aristocracy to put their minds to good use. If you understand that, you are fine.

[tharne]

That's a really good way of thinking about it.

[abnry]

I like this. The analogy I always use is trying to be a major league baseball player, because I think the farm system captures the dynamics of the grad student component of academia.

[newen]

Unless becoming a rockstar is equivalent only to becoming an Ivy League professor, passing a PhD program really isn’t that hard for most PhD programs even in the best schools. To pass a PhD program, you just need to come in every day and do your work for <8 hours a day for a few years. As in, actually treat it like a job.

The students who did their PhD the quickest in my program did exactly that. The students who failed or took longer usually slacked off, skipped days, focus on other stuff, etc etc etc. I know one person who disappeared for weeks and then quit. Thing is, he could still have come back and resumed his PhD even after that disappearance.

You could argue that it’s difficult for students to plan and do work on a consistent basis while having full academic freedom and very little direction (my advisor when I joined with almost no research experience told me to “read papers” and then we’ll discuss what to do after you do; like what does read papers mean anyway; I had no idea at the time but I learned by asking fellow students). But it’s not something that you get lucky in. It’s something that you keep at it until you finish it.

[aj7]

Very honest and correct. At least in the sciences, there are “outs” in related business and engineering careers.

[AndyMcConachie]

It's not really any better outside of the humanities. Maybe the prospects are slightly better, but grad school is still a crappy choice.

I got a bachelors in Computer Science and then worked for 15 years before going back and getting a masters. While there I was asked to work for free on numerous occasions, we can call if different things, but that's how I saw it. Already knowing the value of my labour I finished my masters and then left. I definitely had the option to continue with a PhD, and I'm almost certain that had I applied I would have been accepted. But I just wasn't interested in being exploited.

I remember one class which I dropped in which the entire class was project based, and we were to work on projects that aligned with the research of the professor. On the first day there was no syllabus given, so I asked what the readings were and received a grumpy response basically saying, "Readings, yeah there will be some readings." Or something similar. It was incredibly clear the instructor just wanted grad slaves to advance their stuff. I dropped that class, but I could cite numerous other examples.

I paid for the privilege of working for free and learned some stuff along the way. Maybe I should have spent the two years and money on travelling and seeing the world instead. I likely would have learned more, but I wouldn't have this fancy grad degree.

[matthewdgreen]

Computer science professor here: I love to have students work on research in my courses, provided that they understand this is the point of the course and they choose to do it. Some of my best students (who went on to great careers in industry or academia) did terrific research projects of their own choosing.

I don’t ask students to do research projects because I expect “free labor” from them (unless they’re my PhD advisee, in which case it’s just poorly-paid labor.) In fact, most of the time I expect that undergraduate and MS projects will fail, or only be partially finished simply due to the schedule constraints those students have with other courses.

For students who are actually interested in conducting real research, the value to the student in being advised by me comes from the fact that they’re working on a research project that’s in my area of expertise and interest. The value to me is that sometimes I learn something new. There’s much less value in my advising students to do projects in areas that I wouldn’t be interested in researching myself, not because I’m looking to cash in on students’ labor, but because I won’t be able to offer them as much guidance.

[mnky9800n]

Yes I think what the person you replied to identified as work isn't really much work at all in the sense that you would find in a software dev job or something like that. You aren't asking your students to write another database interface or something. You are giving them projects to let them know what you do, what that part of the field is about, and to expose them to ideas that they might carry forward. The view presented is so cynical is hard to take serious tbh.

[toxik]

Counter anecdata: I am taking a CS doctorate degree, and have never been asked to work for free, and never been cheated out of course time to work on what the professor thinks is interesting.

[abnry]

I think the lab-heavy (i.e. non-digital) programs have this problem more. When I was in grad school, I knew plenty of chemistry students who were expected to work 6 days a week.

[aj7]

At Berkeley, the following phenomenon was well known. Towards the end of your program, you’d have to “fight” your advisor to finish. (You were trained, productive, and still earning the salary of a second-year grad student.) The “pets” didn’t have “fight.” It was adjudged that they could do more for the professor’s reputation on the outside.

[eastbayjake]

A classic of this genre from 2011: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/29/voices-of-the-defe...

[MaximumYComb]

I feel that a significant majority people don't weigh up the value of courses for both undergraduate and graduate. Having a read through your contribution seems like you made the same conclusion, albiet slightly late for your own benefit.

[M5x7wI3CmbEem10]

if you don’t mind the financial aspect, would it be okay to do a PhD for enjoyment?

I’m thinking someone could work at Facebook over the summers while studying because they take PhDs

[dopu]

Completely agree. I've become increasingly convinced that we'll need a fundamental restructuring of the academy if we want to fix any of these issues. The fact that places like MIT or Stanford will hire professors simply because they output Nature papers every year, regardless of the fact that they are totally abusive to their trainees, is a perfect demonstration of it.

[lumost]

Doesn't this explicitly favor the high-output at any cost professor? A professor who had a high nature output could attract more PhD students and structure their program such that they take more of the credit than you would expect.

This wouldn't work in all fields, but there are quite a few disciplines where the biggest barrier to research is having funding and someone to do the work.

[astroH]

Couldn't agree more. Moreover, given that a huge part of the value of the degree is related to the prestige of the University, bad-mouthing your own institution only serves to reduce the value of your own degree. Who cares if I write an honest and bad review about a restaurant that I have no stake in. I just can't envision a scenario where people try to devalue their own diploma.

[musicale]

This is a good point. Anonymous reviews are not possible with such a small and easily identifiable set of reviewers.

[subrat_rout]

To add on top of it, majority of graduate students are from countries like India and China and their life/career is tied to F1 visa status which make students even more vulnerable to disclose any sincere/legit info. about the program they are in.

[etattva]

Only 5% of graduate stduenst in US are International. In engineering, computer sciene and MBA they constitute 25% of population. In phd, less than 5%.

[C1sc0cat]

Yelp has its own problems with gaming reviews not sure applying that to PHD programs is a good idea.