[mhartl]

I share Marc's (and your) skepticism about the value of a Ph.D., which is part of why I said that graduate degrees are overrated. I also counsel undergraduates to consider the large opportunity costs of graduate school. But I was taking issue with the sloppiness of the statement "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world . . . do not have PhD's", which would seem to be true whether or not having a Ph.D. is particularly valuable. It's sort of like saying "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world are not left-handed". Well, yes, but that's true even if you replace "the world" with "baseball", and yet lefties have proportionally more impact in baseball despite still being a minority. The question is, can the same be said of Ph.D.s (in the world, I mean, not in baseball)?