A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also t…
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
It seems to me that people are talking past each other because there are actually some very different types of H1B hires.
On the one hand, you’ve got the people who are genuinely hiring highly skilled/educated specialists (often American educated) that for one reason or another are hard to find and it’s worth the effort to sponsor an immigrant for the role. This is what the program is *supposed to* be for, and it’s the stuff Musk is (or at least claims to be) talking about when he’s referencing himself and people like him to advocate for the program.
On the other hand, you’ve got “body shops” specializing in importing a large quantity of almost exclusively Indian tech workers educated in India who are (sometimes) reasonably competent but not generally anything special, whose main selling point is they are willing to work crap jobs for comparatively cheap and on a temporary basis. The people against expanding the H1B program are mostly reacting to this crowd.
The thing is I’m pretty sure the second category is quite a bit larger than the first one.
`1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student'
A quick glance over my department's graduate application pool shows that there simply aren't as many domestic students applying for PhDs. Grants have a limited duration and we (professors) need people to do the work. I work in a field where hiring domestic students is beneficial and I can't find them---and I'm very willing to recruit a domestic student with lower GRE scores!
A major reason for this, I'd speculate, is that being a PhD does not pay well for the amount of work required. In the DMV, where I am, you will be living with roommates into your late 20s/early 30s unless you can find a partner with a decent income.
I'd certainly like to pay graduate students more but funding amounts on grants haven't changed in years and cost-of-living isn't considered when deciding award amounts, anyhow. Oh, also the F&A at my university only goes up. And despite what graduate students may tell you, professors don't tend to draw much income from grants ($2,500 per grant per year is typical for me).
So if we want more domestic PhDs, increase funding to agencies like the NSF and force down administrative costs at universities.
There will be no motivation to improve pay or conditions for PhD students while a system exists where they can all be supplied from overseas. There will always be people who will put up with it - for immigration purposes, lower standards, even private money in some cases etc - if you broaden the scope to the whole world.
Academia thinks it's special in this regard - pretends science is a pure search for truth which transcends nationality - but it's not. Just supply and demand like everything else.
Of course, once the system is in place it becomes self perpetuating. While I was going to conferences (about 10 years ago) I was always struck by author lists from US labs. Seemed like 80% of labs had 20% Chinese names, and the remaining 20% of labs had 100% Chinese names.
Yes, there seems to be a bit of a dearth of self awareness in some of these comments, where they are “defending” H1B hiring with arguments that are exactly what the H1B detractors are arguing about!
“When you say no one in America wants to work what you really mean is no one wants to work for the crap wage you are offering” is usually an argument aimed at the other end of the pay/immigration scale, but there is no reason it shouldn’t apply to tech or academia.
I think I pretty clearly stated that this was a supply and demand issue, as well as the constraints professors are faced with in terms in paying graduate students more. The amount of research we do would dramatically decrease if we were made to pay higher wages. I'm fine with that but I simply wouldn't receive funding in the current environment if I said I was going to do less.
Academia is special because we are the last bastion of actual research. Industry, much to our consternation, has cut down on R&D to the point where it's almost non-existent. Bell labs, etc. simply does not do the type or amount of R&D that would lead to their previous discoveries, like the BJT transistor. This is my experience in working with government and industry labs.
Do we need more PhDs? It sounds like what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities. Traditionally that work has been done by grad students pursuing PhDs, but if there is no good job market for them (or at least, not a market that justifies the opportunity cost and extra crap about teaching and attending classes vs going into industry with your BS or MS) then of course you aren’t going to get many applicants.
I think it depends. In some fields, there are literally no job prospects for a PhD graduate other than being a professor and there are 50 PhDs for every retiring professor. I don’t think we need any more of those.
However there are a reasonable number of jobs in government and industry for PhDs in fields that involve data analysis. So this can include social sciences and a natural sciences.
I’m in Biology and it’s really a mixed bag. There is a huge oversupply of PhDs especially in biomedicine, and they’ve been accumulating since the 90s when there were huge increases in government Biomed funding, which led to profs hiring more PhDs and post docs. The Biotech / Pharmaceutical industry is large but not big enough to absorb all of these people. So there are a lot of people with PhDs that are employed in jobs that in years past they could have gotten with a masters or bachelors. It beats working as an adjunct or being in a string of temporary post doc positions into your 40s…
I’m in aerospace and we don’t exactly have a glut of PhDs, but we have quite a few. For the most part it’s not clear it really does much for their careers that the same amount of time spent in industry would not have done (in a lot of cases we literally just treat it as 3-5 additional years of professional experience).
There are a few *very* specialized roles where we need true domain experts, and related PhDs would obviously be a big plus there. There would be more if I worked at a “lab” or something lab adjacent like a NASA site. But even that is quite limiting - that person is obviously very valuable for that project, but for the company’s overall bottom line, a good program manager with a breadth of experience is better.
In my engineering field there is minimal benefit to a PhD. The only students who stayed to get a PhD were foreign students who seemed slightly terrified of the real world and were pushing off entering it as long as possible.
`what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities'
So far as I am aware the process of obtaining a PhD---attending classes, possibly teaching, etc.---is the only good way we know of producing such workers...but then I am a professor with several PhDs under supervision!
Then why are there so many excellent laboratories (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bell Labs, every company’s R&D department, CERN, etc. etc.) that are not degree granting institutions, that mostly employ professionals, not students or professors?
By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research. Why does all the class-teaching and dissertation writing and defending necessarily attach? Why not have professional researchers as a career track unattached to the ivory tower and tenure and writing shitty papers and delivering boring lectures? It mostly seems like an excuse to overwork and underpay 20-somethings while hanging out the carrot of a tenure track job that’s really a lottery ticket with crummy odds?
Those places employ a great many PhDs, which is why they're quite excellent at producing new knowledge. The career path for a typical PhD is basically academia (not likely) or industry/government labs. Lots of other options, too.
`By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research.'
That's not a definition of a graduate student I'd recognize, and even if it were I couldn't train them to do research without them attending class, etc.
What you call `shitty' papers 1) come from all of the places you mention at the top of your post, too, and 2) require a student to understand not only their work, and how it fits into the overall research community, but also the work of others. Graduate students also do not just do what their advisors tell them: we're mentors, not dictators directing automatons. We teach students how to think and provide them the tools and experience to make discoveries. Research is a tremendously creative process and researchers almost always benefit from learning about related and not-so-related fields to make breakthroughs. Classes are really great for this.
Like say students in my lab need to learn a specific concept but also students in other labs need to learn that concept, too. Rather than two professors spending time to individually teach their students the concepts, we send them to a class where one professor teaches them. Also, I may be better at teaching some concepts than others but my students need the other concepts to perform their research, so I send them to a class with a professor who is better at teaching those concepts than me.
“We teach students how to think” And clearly it’s *impossible* to learn how to think as an industry professional. Do I not know how to think because I didn’t spend years being barely paid labor grading your papers?
All I’m really saying is it’s unclear to me why academia should have a monopoly on this stuff. There’s more than one way to learn and there are a ton of people who are just as smart as you that don’t have a Dr title. You’re the one who is having trouble attracting people to work for you apparently - perhaps you should consider the incentives and working conditions on offer.
That said I’m being somewhat unfair if you are in STEM since as you note there are at least real opportunities for PhDs there outside academia, so it’s much less of a pyramid scheme.
I never said it was impossible to learn how to be a researcher as an industry professional, merely that industry will not undertake the burden to produce competent researchers. That job is outsourced to universities, many times directly as corporations pay their employees' tuition.
Grading papers is a tiny fraction of a PhD's time. I was a TA and/or instructor the entirety of my PhD and I found plenty of time for research.
Who said anything about being smart? A successful PhD candidate will generally spend days or months making no progress whatsoever. Simulations and experiments that fail. Lines of inquiry abandoned after months because of flawed assumptions. Persistence is essential and the ability to discern what may be fruitful versus a dead end. Industry does not tolerate this.
You said that you can’t teach students to be researchers without sending them to formal classes. You said that you “teach students how to think”. The inverse implies that those who do not attend formal university class cannot learn to do research, and those who do not work as a grad student never learn to think.
I, and a lot of my employees, have absolutely learned all of the things you list by some combination of undergrad work and on the job experience. Persistence and “Discerning what is fruitful vs a dead end” is a huge part of what we do! Perhaps on some shorter time scales (though many projects are on longer scales than a PhD program).
Now, are we experts at doing basic scientific research and publishing it in academic journals? No, but that’s effectively a tautology. If our customers wanted more basic science and less systems integration of mature tech, my people are certainly capable of learning it. They know how to think! On the flip side, there’s plenty that PhDs must unlearn when they move to industry (e.g. they tend to have less experience working in larger teams with external dependencies, managing customer expectations, and are generally less “practical”, and the habits they learned in academia can inhibit their success in those areas).
On the gripping hand I also know multiple professionals that moved on to work at universities to manage and support labs - turns out a lot of that science needs an engineer or project manager’s touch to actually get done. Even looked into that myself but got turned off by requirements to submit a DEI loyalty oath alongside my resume. But, unlike being a grad student, these roles did offer reasonably competitive pay and working conditions. They seemed to get plenty of applicants.
It's a lot more efficient to send students to formal classes. They will also learn things that I am unaware of and uninformed about, perhaps finding a new way to examine the problem or bringing an alternative technique to bear.
`If our customers wanted more basic science and less systems integration of mature tech, my people are certainly capable of learning it. They know how to think!'
This is hubris. Do you have any actual experience in getting work published in reputable venues? If not, why do you think you can do something without actually having done it?
`turns out a lot of that science needs an engineer or project manager’s'
Yes, which is why both are commonly involved in research.
Hubris? All I’m saying is I have plenty of people working for me that are just as smart and capable as your grad students and could learn the same things they do. Which is hardly a leap at all since most of them graduated from challenging undergrad science and engineering curricula with top marks and excellent experience - that is, they had precisely the qualifications that your students have when they come to you. I’m not saying that I could step in and take your job today, merely that I could learn the “formulate and perform experiment, do statistics, write report” part of the job reasonably expeditiously, and that I could become competent in that without also teaching an undergrad course. I would however expect to be paid a reasonable wage for this and have no particular desire to spend half my time scribbling equations on whiteboards to dozing freshmen, which is why I was never in a rush to run back to the academy for a doctorate.
The idea that teaching and research are intimately connected, such that one must be good at both or neither, and that only academia holds the key to science strikes me as itself quite hubristic. As I said in another comment, several of my professors who were by all accounts successful scientists were shit teachers. Sticking them in a classroom was a waste of their time and a disservice to the students but, well, “that’s how it’s done”. Many of my best teachers were adjuncts or assistants that might never get a tenured position and had never published anything of note - giving them a reasonably secure terminal job was also “not how it’s done”, though it would benefit the careers of thousands of STEM professionals.
If engineers and project managers, who did not go through PhD programs, are commonly involved in research, what are we even arguing about? I bet you’d have a hard time hiring any of them at a grad student wage, which takes us back to the original point: you need H1Bs to get PhD candidates, not because people who can be successful in your program are so rare that you must go to the ends of the earth for them, but rather, I suspect, because lots of capable Americans have more attractive options they choose instead.
As a professor I agree with your posts on this topic. There is no reason why a trainee needs to be trained at a university to become a researcher. He or she could be trained more efficiently, I’d argue, in industry.
I think what happened is this: there was a huge increases in the number of PhD programs being offered, especially in industries like Biomed. Also in the 2000s stipends for good PhD programs actually were not a bad deal, because of the tech bubble and then the Great Recession it was at least steady employment.
Now a lot of companies don’t bother to hire entry level because due to the glut of PhDs, they can hire for slightly more someone who has more skills and less needs to be invested in training. In addition, training your employees is riskier now because a lot more people jump from job to job now compared to the past. You might lose the person you trained up to competitors. Better just to hire someone who’s already trained.
I’ll admit I’m being more harsh than I should and I’m a bit sorry for that.
I actually know and/or work with several people (now successful professionals) who got hosed by crappy PhD advisors. Ranging from “just a terrible project manager” to “a huge two faced bitch” to “actively sabotaged their dissertation work because they wanted to keep them in the lab longer”. It’s a system that works great if you have an amazing mentor, but if you’ve got a mediocre or bad one, you’re really over a barrel. Not exactly indentured servitude, but not precisely *not* that, you know? It’s a tough sell when the alternative is making six figures in a job you can move on from with relatively little friction whenever you feel like it.
Plus at least when I was in school they really didn’t do a good job of showing undergrads how to navigate that path - you kinda just had to luck into being good buddies with a prof (or one of the prof’s students) and getting an unofficial “this kid is going PhD places” tag.
I went to an “elite research university” and had some absolutely amazing professors who were both brilliant teachers and clearly were producing excellent science that informed their teaching. I also had a bunch of profs who lazily mumbled through lectures from (literally) 30 year old notes they scribbled before they got tenure, who were clearly just desperate to go lock themselves up in their lab with their grad student minions. The world would probably be better if we just let that guy be a prime investigator on something and save the teaching for someone who gives a shit about it.
And all of that is in a STEM field where most of the research is based on grants from customers that pretty clearly have a practical need for the science - I think the landscape is a lot worse in the ouroboros of departments where “research” publications largely exist because we’ve decided one must publish to get a PhD, and one must publish and create PhDs to be a professor.
At the end of the day, PhD programs are optimized for producing “professors” as we currently define them. A lot of that is useful outside a university environment, but a lot of it isn’t. There’s a lot of cruft from “that’s how we’ve always done it” dating back to Oxford or whatever. And it’s a system that really is pretty rough on everyone who isn’t at least “on the tenure track”.
You can definitely be trained on the job at a company to be a good researcher. That’s how it used to work at a lot of companies. You’re probably right that nowadays a lot of companies prefer to outsource their training to PhD programs but it’s obviously not the only way to learn how to do science.
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
It seems to me that people are talking past each other because there are actually some very different types of H1B hires.
On the one hand, you’ve got the people who are genuinely hiring highly skilled/educated specialists (often American educated) that for one reason or another are hard to find and it’s worth the effort to sponsor an immigrant for the role. This is what the program is *supposed to* be for, and it’s the stuff Musk is (or at least claims to be) talking about when he’s referencing himself and people like him to advocate for the program.
On the other hand, you’ve got “body shops” specializing in importing a large quantity of almost exclusively Indian tech workers educated in India who are (sometimes) reasonably competent but not generally anything special, whose main selling point is they are willing to work crap jobs for comparatively cheap and on a temporary basis. The people against expanding the H1B program are mostly reacting to this crowd.
The thing is I’m pretty sure the second category is quite a bit larger than the first one.
`1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student'
A quick glance over my department's graduate application pool shows that there simply aren't as many domestic students applying for PhDs. Grants have a limited duration and we (professors) need people to do the work. I work in a field where hiring domestic students is beneficial and I can't find them---and I'm very willing to recruit a domestic student with lower GRE scores!
A major reason for this, I'd speculate, is that being a PhD does not pay well for the amount of work required. In the DMV, where I am, you will be living with roommates into your late 20s/early 30s unless you can find a partner with a decent income.
I'd certainly like to pay graduate students more but funding amounts on grants haven't changed in years and cost-of-living isn't considered when deciding award amounts, anyhow. Oh, also the F&A at my university only goes up. And despite what graduate students may tell you, professors don't tend to draw much income from grants ($2,500 per grant per year is typical for me).
So if we want more domestic PhDs, increase funding to agencies like the NSF and force down administrative costs at universities.
There will be no motivation to improve pay or conditions for PhD students while a system exists where they can all be supplied from overseas. There will always be people who will put up with it - for immigration purposes, lower standards, even private money in some cases etc - if you broaden the scope to the whole world.
Academia thinks it's special in this regard - pretends science is a pure search for truth which transcends nationality - but it's not. Just supply and demand like everything else.
Of course, once the system is in place it becomes self perpetuating. While I was going to conferences (about 10 years ago) I was always struck by author lists from US labs. Seemed like 80% of labs had 20% Chinese names, and the remaining 20% of labs had 100% Chinese names.
Yes, there seems to be a bit of a dearth of self awareness in some of these comments, where they are “defending” H1B hiring with arguments that are exactly what the H1B detractors are arguing about!
“When you say no one in America wants to work what you really mean is no one wants to work for the crap wage you are offering” is usually an argument aimed at the other end of the pay/immigration scale, but there is no reason it shouldn’t apply to tech or academia.
I think I pretty clearly stated that this was a supply and demand issue, as well as the constraints professors are faced with in terms in paying graduate students more. The amount of research we do would dramatically decrease if we were made to pay higher wages. I'm fine with that but I simply wouldn't receive funding in the current environment if I said I was going to do less.
Academia is special because we are the last bastion of actual research. Industry, much to our consternation, has cut down on R&D to the point where it's almost non-existent. Bell labs, etc. simply does not do the type or amount of R&D that would lead to their previous discoveries, like the BJT transistor. This is my experience in working with government and industry labs.
Do we need more PhDs? It sounds like what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities. Traditionally that work has been done by grad students pursuing PhDs, but if there is no good job market for them (or at least, not a market that justifies the opportunity cost and extra crap about teaching and attending classes vs going into industry with your BS or MS) then of course you aren’t going to get many applicants.
I think it depends. In some fields, there are literally no job prospects for a PhD graduate other than being a professor and there are 50 PhDs for every retiring professor. I don’t think we need any more of those.
However there are a reasonable number of jobs in government and industry for PhDs in fields that involve data analysis. So this can include social sciences and a natural sciences.
I’m in Biology and it’s really a mixed bag. There is a huge oversupply of PhDs especially in biomedicine, and they’ve been accumulating since the 90s when there were huge increases in government Biomed funding, which led to profs hiring more PhDs and post docs. The Biotech / Pharmaceutical industry is large but not big enough to absorb all of these people. So there are a lot of people with PhDs that are employed in jobs that in years past they could have gotten with a masters or bachelors. It beats working as an adjunct or being in a string of temporary post doc positions into your 40s…
I’m in aerospace and we don’t exactly have a glut of PhDs, but we have quite a few. For the most part it’s not clear it really does much for their careers that the same amount of time spent in industry would not have done (in a lot of cases we literally just treat it as 3-5 additional years of professional experience).
There are a few *very* specialized roles where we need true domain experts, and related PhDs would obviously be a big plus there. There would be more if I worked at a “lab” or something lab adjacent like a NASA site. But even that is quite limiting - that person is obviously very valuable for that project, but for the company’s overall bottom line, a good program manager with a breadth of experience is better.
In my engineering field there is minimal benefit to a PhD. The only students who stayed to get a PhD were foreign students who seemed slightly terrified of the real world and were pushing off entering it as long as possible.
`what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities'
So far as I am aware the process of obtaining a PhD---attending classes, possibly teaching, etc.---is the only good way we know of producing such workers...but then I am a professor with several PhDs under supervision!
Then why are there so many excellent laboratories (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bell Labs, every company’s R&D department, CERN, etc. etc.) that are not degree granting institutions, that mostly employ professionals, not students or professors?
By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research. Why does all the class-teaching and dissertation writing and defending necessarily attach? Why not have professional researchers as a career track unattached to the ivory tower and tenure and writing shitty papers and delivering boring lectures? It mostly seems like an excuse to overwork and underpay 20-somethings while hanging out the carrot of a tenure track job that’s really a lottery ticket with crummy odds?
Those places employ a great many PhDs, which is why they're quite excellent at producing new knowledge. The career path for a typical PhD is basically academia (not likely) or industry/government labs. Lots of other options, too.
`By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research.'
That's not a definition of a graduate student I'd recognize, and even if it were I couldn't train them to do research without them attending class, etc.
What you call `shitty' papers 1) come from all of the places you mention at the top of your post, too, and 2) require a student to understand not only their work, and how it fits into the overall research community, but also the work of others. Graduate students also do not just do what their advisors tell them: we're mentors, not dictators directing automatons. We teach students how to think and provide them the tools and experience to make discoveries. Research is a tremendously creative process and researchers almost always benefit from learning about related and not-so-related fields to make breakthroughs. Classes are really great for this.
Like say students in my lab need to learn a specific concept but also students in other labs need to learn that concept, too. Rather than two professors spending time to individually teach their students the concepts, we send them to a class where one professor teaches them. Also, I may be better at teaching some concepts than others but my students need the other concepts to perform their research, so I send them to a class with a professor who is better at teaching those concepts than me.
“We teach students how to think” And clearly it’s *impossible* to learn how to think as an industry professional. Do I not know how to think because I didn’t spend years being barely paid labor grading your papers?
All I’m really saying is it’s unclear to me why academia should have a monopoly on this stuff. There’s more than one way to learn and there are a ton of people who are just as smart as you that don’t have a Dr title. You’re the one who is having trouble attracting people to work for you apparently - perhaps you should consider the incentives and working conditions on offer.
That said I’m being somewhat unfair if you are in STEM since as you note there are at least real opportunities for PhDs there outside academia, so it’s much less of a pyramid scheme.
I never said it was impossible to learn how to be a researcher as an industry professional, merely that industry will not undertake the burden to produce competent researchers. That job is outsourced to universities, many times directly as corporations pay their employees' tuition.
Grading papers is a tiny fraction of a PhD's time. I was a TA and/or instructor the entirety of my PhD and I found plenty of time for research.
Who said anything about being smart? A successful PhD candidate will generally spend days or months making no progress whatsoever. Simulations and experiments that fail. Lines of inquiry abandoned after months because of flawed assumptions. Persistence is essential and the ability to discern what may be fruitful versus a dead end. Industry does not tolerate this.
You said that you can’t teach students to be researchers without sending them to formal classes. You said that you “teach students how to think”. The inverse implies that those who do not attend formal university class cannot learn to do research, and those who do not work as a grad student never learn to think.
I, and a lot of my employees, have absolutely learned all of the things you list by some combination of undergrad work and on the job experience. Persistence and “Discerning what is fruitful vs a dead end” is a huge part of what we do! Perhaps on some shorter time scales (though many projects are on longer scales than a PhD program).
Now, are we experts at doing basic scientific research and publishing it in academic journals? No, but that’s effectively a tautology. If our customers wanted more basic science and less systems integration of mature tech, my people are certainly capable of learning it. They know how to think! On the flip side, there’s plenty that PhDs must unlearn when they move to industry (e.g. they tend to have less experience working in larger teams with external dependencies, managing customer expectations, and are generally less “practical”, and the habits they learned in academia can inhibit their success in those areas).
On the gripping hand I also know multiple professionals that moved on to work at universities to manage and support labs - turns out a lot of that science needs an engineer or project manager’s touch to actually get done. Even looked into that myself but got turned off by requirements to submit a DEI loyalty oath alongside my resume. But, unlike being a grad student, these roles did offer reasonably competitive pay and working conditions. They seemed to get plenty of applicants.
It's a lot more efficient to send students to formal classes. They will also learn things that I am unaware of and uninformed about, perhaps finding a new way to examine the problem or bringing an alternative technique to bear.
`If our customers wanted more basic science and less systems integration of mature tech, my people are certainly capable of learning it. They know how to think!'
This is hubris. Do you have any actual experience in getting work published in reputable venues? If not, why do you think you can do something without actually having done it?
`turns out a lot of that science needs an engineer or project manager’s'
Yes, which is why both are commonly involved in research.
Hubris? All I’m saying is I have plenty of people working for me that are just as smart and capable as your grad students and could learn the same things they do. Which is hardly a leap at all since most of them graduated from challenging undergrad science and engineering curricula with top marks and excellent experience - that is, they had precisely the qualifications that your students have when they come to you. I’m not saying that I could step in and take your job today, merely that I could learn the “formulate and perform experiment, do statistics, write report” part of the job reasonably expeditiously, and that I could become competent in that without also teaching an undergrad course. I would however expect to be paid a reasonable wage for this and have no particular desire to spend half my time scribbling equations on whiteboards to dozing freshmen, which is why I was never in a rush to run back to the academy for a doctorate.
The idea that teaching and research are intimately connected, such that one must be good at both or neither, and that only academia holds the key to science strikes me as itself quite hubristic. As I said in another comment, several of my professors who were by all accounts successful scientists were shit teachers. Sticking them in a classroom was a waste of their time and a disservice to the students but, well, “that’s how it’s done”. Many of my best teachers were adjuncts or assistants that might never get a tenured position and had never published anything of note - giving them a reasonably secure terminal job was also “not how it’s done”, though it would benefit the careers of thousands of STEM professionals.
If engineers and project managers, who did not go through PhD programs, are commonly involved in research, what are we even arguing about? I bet you’d have a hard time hiring any of them at a grad student wage, which takes us back to the original point: you need H1Bs to get PhD candidates, not because people who can be successful in your program are so rare that you must go to the ends of the earth for them, but rather, I suspect, because lots of capable Americans have more attractive options they choose instead.
As a professor I agree with your posts on this topic. There is no reason why a trainee needs to be trained at a university to become a researcher. He or she could be trained more efficiently, I’d argue, in industry.
I think what happened is this: there was a huge increases in the number of PhD programs being offered, especially in industries like Biomed. Also in the 2000s stipends for good PhD programs actually were not a bad deal, because of the tech bubble and then the Great Recession it was at least steady employment.
Now a lot of companies don’t bother to hire entry level because due to the glut of PhDs, they can hire for slightly more someone who has more skills and less needs to be invested in training. In addition, training your employees is riskier now because a lot more people jump from job to job now compared to the past. You might lose the person you trained up to competitors. Better just to hire someone who’s already trained.
I’ll admit I’m being more harsh than I should and I’m a bit sorry for that.
I actually know and/or work with several people (now successful professionals) who got hosed by crappy PhD advisors. Ranging from “just a terrible project manager” to “a huge two faced bitch” to “actively sabotaged their dissertation work because they wanted to keep them in the lab longer”. It’s a system that works great if you have an amazing mentor, but if you’ve got a mediocre or bad one, you’re really over a barrel. Not exactly indentured servitude, but not precisely *not* that, you know? It’s a tough sell when the alternative is making six figures in a job you can move on from with relatively little friction whenever you feel like it.
Plus at least when I was in school they really didn’t do a good job of showing undergrads how to navigate that path - you kinda just had to luck into being good buddies with a prof (or one of the prof’s students) and getting an unofficial “this kid is going PhD places” tag.
I went to an “elite research university” and had some absolutely amazing professors who were both brilliant teachers and clearly were producing excellent science that informed their teaching. I also had a bunch of profs who lazily mumbled through lectures from (literally) 30 year old notes they scribbled before they got tenure, who were clearly just desperate to go lock themselves up in their lab with their grad student minions. The world would probably be better if we just let that guy be a prime investigator on something and save the teaching for someone who gives a shit about it.
And all of that is in a STEM field where most of the research is based on grants from customers that pretty clearly have a practical need for the science - I think the landscape is a lot worse in the ouroboros of departments where “research” publications largely exist because we’ve decided one must publish to get a PhD, and one must publish and create PhDs to be a professor.
At the end of the day, PhD programs are optimized for producing “professors” as we currently define them. A lot of that is useful outside a university environment, but a lot of it isn’t. There’s a lot of cruft from “that’s how we’ve always done it” dating back to Oxford or whatever. And it’s a system that really is pretty rough on everyone who isn’t at least “on the tenure track”.
You can definitely be trained on the job at a company to be a good researcher. That’s how it used to work at a lot of companies. You’re probably right that nowadays a lot of companies prefer to outsource their training to PhD programs but it’s obviously not the only way to learn how to do science.