The decline of real expertise in Europe

I’d intended to do a PhD but realised I could earn actual money instead

I earned actual money while taking the PhD the first thing I did was to get the PPL

In those years I would earn more starting in some company. but I mean, if you are the kind of person who wants to be at the cutting edge of your field, a PhD is a good path. On the other hand, if a grey mouse in middle management is your aim, then you have no use for a PhD. Used correctly a PhD gives you freedom.

I only know two people closely with doctorates

One has a D.Ed, negotiated as a retirement bonus from his employer, a university. Absolutely zero employment value To give an indication of personality, he wrote school textbooks as a hobby and learnt Welsh as a challenge.

The other has a PhD in history, and is a young school headmaster. He said it considerably accelerated his career because of a disproportionate value placed on the qualification in education. He’s a maverick, and I’m surprised he was successful in a hierarchical system.

Both complained of frustration spending considerable time re-writing their theses to satisfy their tutors.

In the UK, you get a stipend for doing a PhD. It’s not as much as you would get as a wage, but I remember living quite well. To temper the negativity slightly, one of my colleagues has a son who has a commercial / university partnership whereby he researches a topic closely related to a widget the company designs. I suspect it will work out well for all parties. The real counter-argument would be if he could do the same R&D without academic input, in which case he could be paid more. But realistically there are fields where national / international facilities and academic input is a necessity.

Speaking personally, one thing I got from a PhD was an appreciation of how complicated everything is. At school you learn science in terms of hard facts. Can’t speak of university as I never really went (did a glorified vocational course instead – my partner is currently studying Physics and seems to be having a very different academic experience). But in a PhD you really do start to question everything. In my own field I started off thinking ‘the answer to that is obvious, why isn’t it discussed in the textbooks?!’ then learned that somebody had my idea in 1902 (too old to be in the textbooks) and all the work since then was adding layers of complexity to the problem. I have a box full of hundreds of research papers that, in any 5kg textbook of psychology, will be distilled down to a couple of paragraphs at most.

One of my colleagues got a job working for Apple on iPhone cameras, so there can be value in the small print. Critics might say that I have had a thorough education in how to make simple things complicated. It has certainly not helped in my career, as I have come to find rote-learning simply intolerable.

LeSving wrote:

Used correctly a PhD gives you freedom.

I’m sure it does. The point of the article (and I think the point many of us were making) was that most PhDs seem to be done without any goal in mind, are in totally useless subjects, and thus bring little or no benefit to the holder.

I’ve certainly never found my freedom curtailed for lack of a PhD. If you want to work in some commercial aspect of a business then it has little value as far as I can see. Whether you define that sort of career as ‘a grey mouse in middle management’ is up to you, but it doesn’t feel like that to me.

My degree being in medical chemistry, at the very start of my career I did talk to a few recruiters about scientific roles within the pharmaceutical industry – actual bench chemistry. But the money being talked about for such roles was so appalling low compared to the commercial options that it left me thinking I may as well have gone to work in a supermarket.

kwlf wrote:

Speaking personally, one thing I got from a PhD was an appreciation of how complicated everything is.

I got that from my degree. At school it’s sort of like you learn the material and it’s presented as clear and well-defined, so without critically analysing it one starts to think of it as linear process of learning where eventually one might learn the whole subject, being introduced step-wise to greater levels of detail as you move through the system. At university you realise that it’s all incredibly complex, there’s so much that no-one can ever learn it all, and what’s presented for you to learn has been arrived it without much thought or design, loosely based on what’s well understood vs what’s not and what people have decided to put a lot of research time into. One gets an enormous sense of everything being so open-ended that was not really apparent at school, at least not to me.

On the Southern European colleagues, I don’t know. They are in entry-level jobs in their 30s, but they also have colleagues in the same jobs in their early 20s. In their shoes, I’d be wondering what all the qualifications were for!

It’s a government program to lower unemployment numbers and increase social stability by giving people something to do other than ruminate over having no economic opportunity. It’s obviously also supportive of academia, which would otherwise be in the same situation as the students.

As a side effect it encourages a non-productive philosophy in which people do not identify with work, creativity and personal achievement. That then makes the economic situation worse in a kind of economic death spiral.

Re PhDs and advanced education in general, supplying them to the world has become a huge U.S. industry. Local students benefit via scholarships from the money spent by foreign students, and in that way it’s good. However we are also educating many people who do not share our values and in some cases are a threat to our well being.

I basically hated the university environment, and my purpose there was to get what I needed (in which I was successful) and leave Within a couple of years I was working in a company where the average degree level is very high, and in due course I ended up managing the technical efforts of a number of those people in R&D. There was a reason that happened.

It’s a government program to lower unemployment numbers and increase social stability by giving people something to do other than ruminate over having no economic opportunity. It’s obviously also supportive of academia, which would otherwise be in the same situation as the students.

As a side effect it encourages a non-productive philosophy in which people do not identify with work, creativity and personal achievement. That then makes the economic situation worse in a kind of economic death spiral.

As a deliberate policy I mostly agree with you. As a temporising measure e.g. in a recession I think there’s something to be said for it. It’s a lot more functional than having people hang around on the streets and handing out just enough money that they don’t starve.

It was also said that a 2.1 was a thinking man’s degree, while a 2.2 (also known as a ‘Desmond’) was a drinking man’s degree.

I got a 2.2 :-/

Slight correction on the UK scale for Bachelor’s degrees, it is:

1 – (a ‘first’) – degree with first-class honours
2.1 (a ‘two-one’, an ‘upper second’) – degree with second-class honours division 1
2.2 (a ‘two-two’, a ‘lower second’) – degree with second-class honours division 2
3 (a ‘third’) – degree with third-class honours

Below a 3rd is a ‘pass’ – you get the degree but without honours. Below that you fail and get nothing.

I wouldn’t go as far as @Silvaire and say I hated it, but I had no particular fondness for it and was certainly there to get the qualification rather than for its own sake. I had quite a good time socially, but one can do that in most places.

I did like the professor who anonymously (although I did figure it out) recommended me for the Engineering Honor Society despite my very average grades in some subjects. He drove a Lotus Elan to work, and I think I got him by knowing with precise hands-on and theoretical detail what that was, and why

The environment of aimless self-gratification created by a significant fraction of people at the university, plus the silly politics, did not compel me to stay any longer than necessary before getting a job.