Andrew Norton on the inefficiency of PhDs:
“To start with, it’s not clear that the PhD is fit for purpose. It can’t be a qualification for university teaching, since most PhD students are already teaching. Nor do PhDs clearly provide a contribution to scholarship, since many PhDs are not of high quality (and probably even more are not read except by the student, his/her supervisor, and the examiners). Menand – a Professor of English at Harvard – suggests that ‘if every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.’
And to this Menand adds the ‘huge social inefficiency’ involved in spending so much money putting people of high intelligence into ‘programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get’.
But what to do about it? … perhaps a literature review submitted to examiners plus one or two published articles in a peer-reviewed journal would be a sensible alternative to the multi-tens-of-thousands-of words dissertation, though presumably the requirements would differ by discipline.
Whatever the merits of this idea, Menand’s book gives little hope that it will happen. Those who have survived the current system and control the universities have no incentive to change. Not only do they want to avoid greater competition in the academic job market, but they want to keep getting the army of PhD hopefuls to do the teaching, so the permanent academic staff can get on with their research.”
If universities were institutions competing like businesses to produce the most good research this kind of waste would eventually be competed away. However, they are not set up to maximise useful output, but rather the prestige of the people who are most associated with them. The people in control no longer have a selfish reason worry about the waste of a PhD because it no longer affects them and by making it excruciating for others to become affiliated with the university they make their club safe, powerful and exclusive.
Why doesn’t an innovative university try to snap up the smartest young students by offering them a way around a dreary PhD ? In the long run they might attract more ambitious students who go on to do good research and so raise the prestige of that institution. Probably making any such concession to students makes an institution look less impressive in the short run (the main concern of incumbent academics who may not be there for the long run), and may even put off bright potential students who would not want to be associated with any institution which would allow them in without requiring them to walk across hot coals first. The ability to make people do annoying things to reach you is a sign of status and power – just as a powerful boss might intimidate you with a long wait for a meeting, so Oxford can keep you in the waiting room twiddling your thumbs for decades just to show everyone that it can.
Tagged: education, signalling
