PhDs for everyone will not improve academia

Marketisation has devalued doctorates as it has done to every other aspect of academic life . However, it is still possible to encourage and guide doctoral students to take a wide view of their studies. The one thing I most enjoyed about my PhD (obtained in 1977) was the opportunity to study something small enough to be "doable" and connect it to a much wider reality, including great philosophical questions (whether or not I was able to contribute anything to them): to see a world in a grain of sand. We have to fight back against the cheapening of academic life and work.

Excellent article. The PhD in some subjects is in essence a contribution via a research team’s project as a sort of apprenticeship to a precarious decade or more as a post-doc on a succession of fixed-term contracts; in other subjects it is a period of prolonged loneliness hidden in the library/archives but useful to the HE Industry as low-paid zero-hours cheap labour covering the teaching burden in a mass system while the tenured academics crack on with their research. The amazing thing is that the Industry succeeds in luring in so many hopeful innocents year after year!

We are headed for the 'Indian well tragedy' here. There's a story that in India a village all had hand dug wells maybe 10 m deep, and every so often they all ran dry. Then along comes a salesperson who finds the wealthiest 5% of the villagers and says "If you buy my diesel generator and water pump you can take your well down to 50 m and you will have water even ina drought when no-one else does". So they buy them, the water table drops, and pretty soon all the villagers need these generators to get water at all times. And because the water table has dropped 40 m, they all suffer just the same water shortage as before, only there iis NO going back as 10 m wells don;t hack it any more. The same fate has befallen degrees, Masters, PhDs, even book publications and journal articles. None of these carry anything like the weight they did 20-30 years ago because journals, publishers, PhDs etc have proliferated, yet they are still necessary, and there is no way back.

PhDs are now an easy-to-buy commodity, like many degrees at various levels, in an international system that thinks it's a business. Some people are too smart to bother getting them, including the suicidal young woman waiting behind me in a coffee queue at a literary festival. On the front of her T-shirt was "Unique Young Woman". I asked her why. She turned around: "NOT Working on My Dayboo Novel for a Pee Haitch Dee." I suspect she was trampled to death as she walked past the session on Women's Fiction.

Interesting article and though as a scientist not all of what the authors conveys resonates with my experience, the message that there are far too many individuals with doctorates is spot on. This growth in doctorates has devalued the degree, given titles to some who are should not have them and misled some academics who may have no interest in a doctorate and are excellent and highly capable scholars forced to undertake a degree that does not align with their skills, interests or aspirations. Furthermore, a distinction needs to be made between a PhD and a Professional 'doctorate'- these are different and the title should reflect this.

We seem to have lost the idea that there is value and joy in just learning a PhD is a way to do that. Academics should not fall into the commodification trap.

It's been a life-long ambition to have a PhD, ever since I first heard of the beastie. Yet... it never happened. In 1980 with a shiny new undergraduate degree in botany I rolled up to continue studying botany at a different university, driven by the curiousity that had led me to read botany in the first place. Three years later I went home with a pile of research and the intention to write it up. Marriage, the need to work, and an abrupt professional change to computering as a trainee programmer at a software house put paid to that. The departure from this life of my parents some years later left me with enough money to enrol at the local university for a pure interest PhD in the development of uniforms.... nobody knew what to do with me and impending motherhood led to a mutual parting of the ways. I went back to commercial programming, jumping into this new-fangled WWW-thingy, becoming webmaster at the local FE college when its website said "Hey. We're cool. We HAVE a Website... please call this number to find out what we offer" (soon changed that!) and drifted into teaching with an interest in elearning.... time passed, professional qualifications gained (Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, no less) and eventually I slithered into a university which was looking for someone to support online learning. Aha. Maybe I could do a staff PhD... but it was discovered that I'm autistic and could not cope with the rigors of a viva so it was suggested that I drop out for my own health. Yet, guess what? My role changed over the years and now I'm an academic anyway!

I do not understand what specifically the author is arguing against. He never makes that clear.

I think that PhDs should not be taken as full time degrees. Researchers doing PhDs are supposed to be making positive contribution to society in their fields of specialization.

Oh dear. It rather painful to hear that at least 24 students should have suffered a supervisor who so obviously disdains the degree on which they were enrolled and apparently could not be bothered to supervise them properly.

Oh dear. It rather painful to hear that at least 24 students should have suffered a supervisor who so obviously disdains the degree on which they were enrolled and apparently could not be bothered to supervise them properly.