A little evening tidbit: Dan Drezner is a professor of international political economy and a longtime foreign policy blogger. He's been involved in an interesting debate about whether or not a Ph.D. is required for going into policy in the Washington, D.C. area. He is pushing back strongly against any encouragement of a doctorate as a terminal degree. Here is a tibdit from his latest long post about it that I found stunning:
Furthermore, not finishing a Ph.D. is not exactly uncommon. Click on this slide show about Ph.D. attrition rates from the Council of Graduate Schools, and note the following three facts:
1) Only 46% of all entrants finish their Ph.D. after seven years in a program.From that report (written in 2008, collected from data before then) the 10-year completion rate was 62% for a doctoral degree in chemistry. (I wonder what that number is now? To SESTAT!)
2) For social science Ph.D.s, that figure is even lower -- 41%
3) If you extend it out to ten years, the lowest completion rate among the social sciences is political science -- only 44% complete a doctorate after a decade. In other words, entering a Ph.D. program and then not finishing is the modal outcome.
I bet it is lower than that now. Started my Ph.D. in 2001 and the attrition rate was >50%.
ReplyDeleteSome fun math:
ReplyDelete62% chance of graduation x 19.2% chance of becoming a research chemist = 12% chance of continuing a research career after entering graduate school.
And yes I realize that 19.2% is a narrow pick, but the number does not become much better even if we took the broader career choices into account!
Graduation rate for medical students 94.1% x 95% residency placement = 89% chance of continuing a career in medicine after entering medical school.
A big mystery is why are graduate schools still able to recruit any American students who will work 6-7 days/week for nearly seven years and then do it again in a post-doc, all while vying for something that has little chance of happening at all. Not to mention the pay is probably not too great these days even for that 12% that still works directly in research! Maybe medical school is actually worth the debt when considering the odds and opportunity costs.
Sources:
https://www.aamc.org/download/102346/data/aibvol7no2.pdf
https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/newsreleases/276900/120316.html
Now that you mention SESTAT, lets look at what SESTAT had to say about the lifetime earnings of a PhD scientist:
ReplyDelete"Regets's Ph.D. scientist earned $1.4 million over the course of a 35-year career, whereas the biologist with a bachelor's degree earned $1.3 million. His model is based on 2006 survey data in NSF's Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT)."
From UC Davis:
"Medical oncologists, for instance, earn up to $7,127,543 during a 35-year career, while family medicine practitioners earn as low as $2,838,637."
Remember, $2.8M is the low end for an MD and $1.4M is the AVERAGE for a PhD scientist! The PhD study was conducted in 2008 with old data and the MD study is more recent, so the disparity is probably much greater.
For anyone on the fence about PhD vs MD, definitely think about the career outcomes + financial outcomes, that might make the decision a lot easier.
Source:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2008_04_11/caredit.a0800055
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/publish/news/newsroom/6969
In grad school we referred to those people that mastered out as "the smart ones."
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot more incentive to START grad school than there is incentive to FINISH grad school. The NSF awards undergrads and 1st years with 4.0 GPAs and cheery essays on how they're going to save the world with 3 years of funding. That's long enough to get through candidacy and then some, w/o the PI needing to fire you for being incompetent. Then you're a fourth or fifth year, having to teach while trying to finish up... a great recipe for giving up.
ReplyDeleteI attended a large Midwestern university that needed lots of teaching assistants for all of the freshman engineering students taking chemistry. In orientation, they said look to the person on your left, and the person on your right. Only one of you will leave with a PhD. They were right.
ReplyDelete