[Calavar]

The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.

[gowld]

What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?

[bombcar]

Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters.

It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.

[TFNA]

> The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.