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I'd love figures on how many PhDs are issued broken down by school in timeseries format. JDs don't count. Would be helpful to know who is debasing the currency. Caltech definitely isn't. One of the few actually elite institutions left. No fake subjects either.

I'm guessing places like Harvard, UCB and MIT each issued close to 1000 last year. Lower ranked schools, maybe 500 each; probably cumsum to significantly higher than CalTech even with short histories.



What currency? Are PhDs fungible? I doubt it.

Disclosure: Physics PhD, working in industry for 25 years.


Yeah, whatever: I have one too; only 16 years out.

PhD is definitely a currency, and no they're not fungible: I'm trying to figure out which ones are actually worth something. In my experience it's a fairly lousy signal. Every Caltech PhD I've met has been sharp as a tack though.


It's a horrible signal. Signal-to-noise ratio: Zero. Two reasons. The first is the huge variety among people with the degree. It's supposed to give you a chance to create your own thing, but this also means it's not a signal.

The other is the hate. Especially in some industries, people are widely aware that higher education is desperately in need of reform, have had genuinely bad experiences in school, or are just plain anti-academic. In fact, the notion of "signaling" is a symptom of these problems.


> Especially in some industries, people are widely aware that higher education is desperately in need of reform, have had genuinely bad experiences in school, or are just plain anti-academic. In fact, the notion of "signaling" is a symptom of these problems.

Can you speak a bit more to this, and what your experience with this has been like?


Graduate education is quite risky. You spend many years, at the mercy of one advisor, many things can knock you off your horse, and the process has minimal oversight. There is very high attrition, and unlike a regular job, you're left with little or nothing to show for your time if you drop out. There are a lot of horror stories. This is the bit about needing reform. A lot has been written about this -- I'm barely scratching the surface, but giving you some flavor.

It's almost like a business incubator, where they provide you with basic infrastructure, and perhaps some training, but you end up with a growing business or you don't. And in fact a lot of PhDs, at least in my field, end up becoming entrepreneurs.

You're supposed to be able to turn yourself into an independent researcher, but this is far from guaranteed. While you assume these risks, there's also the risk of getting the degree and regretting it, if the expectations (being in a leadership role, possibly directing other people) don't match with what you actually want to do, and the people skills needed for those things. And then, in some fields, you're competing with people who went straight to work after college, and have developed their careers on the job while also putting away some nice money.

Okay, enough of that. The other thing is, you can pick it up after a few months of HN, that a lot of people are really down on academia and academics. Again, this varies by field. In my field, physics, the PhD is almost the default -- there are relatively few people with masters or even bachelors degrees to be compared with, and we're also rare enough that many people have just not formed an opinion about us. ;-) Plus we do the work that most people hate, such as math intensive stuff, and we don't demand as much money. ;-)

I suggest this is an issue worth just observing for a while. There are debates among my friends about whether HN is really representative of the hive mind of the tech industry, or computer programmers, or whatever,


Does CalTech have some institutional advantage driving better quality? I would normally guess that more 'local' factors have bigger effects: personal characteristics, then advisor effects, then department effects, and finally some vanishingly small institutional effect.

(or, more pessimistically, larger universities tend to have disadvantages that individual profs and departments might or might not overcome...)


Admission is fairly selective and focuses on interest, ability, and accomplishment in math and science.

There certainly are significant differences between individuals, but nearly everyone is smart and scientifically motivated.


[1] Purely merit-based admissions [2] Very selective, with a total enrollment under 3000 [3] They focus much more on the hard sciences. They are primarily a technical institution.


I didn't notice any legacy admissions when I was there, and only a very small number of students who couldn't hack it and quickly washed out.

(Many students left before graduating, maybe half, but it was only rarely because they couldn't do the work. My good friend had to leave for medical reasons, it was very sad. Another left as a sophomore. 10 years later, he asked if he could come back, and the Institute said "sure", and he graduated with straight A's. I asked him if he'd gotten smarter in the preceding decade, he laughed and said no, it just took him 10 years to get ready to work hard.)


Being one of, if not the most prestigious technical university in the world tends to be one of those self-fulfilling things. Since you're known as top of the line, you get your choice of top tier applicants, who in turn propagate the institution's reputation for prestige.


They have a merit-based admissions reputation at least, and their small numbers keeps it exclusive.

On the other hand, most Stanford guys I've met have also been sharp, and they graduate 700 PhDs a year according to someone below.


> *JDs don't count

CalTech doesn't have a law school.

https://www.gradoffice.caltech.edu/academics/degrees


GP meant "by university" by writing "by school"


AFAIK, JDs are awarded only by law schools. (But I take your point.)


MIT issues around 600. A little lower in 2020 perhaps due to covid slowdown.


What is a fake subject?


The manager of the Starbucks next door has a PhD in Caribbean Studies.

He’s a really smart dude, total waste.


I find the attitude that only STEM is worth studying (which is not coincidentally believed most fervently by STEM grads) really pernicious.

Let me restate the common argument--there's this feeling that it's useful to measure people by the good they're doing for society, and that getting a PhD doing postmodern feminist readings of Christopher Marlowe is less useful to society than getting one doing Alzheimer's research or whatever.

I'll just say that it's worth considering whether an academic discipline's contributions may be difficult to notice but in fact substantial. Some academic disciplines like history or cultural anthropology must operate more qualitatively simply because the phenomena they aim to account for admit of no other approach, with the result that their intellectual products (especially when considered from the perspective of general society) will not often be as concrete as, say, a vaccine. But it'd be premature, of course, to dismiss a discipline just because its methods do not reach our desired level of formalization and its output is intangible.

If the issue you're raising is more narrowly one of your belief that within the scope of an _individual_'s wellbeing studying some subjects will leave them worse off than others, that's obviously true in at least financial dimensions, but that doesn't make a discipline a "fake subject".


I'm not in that camp as I am a History/CS major. My dad had a PhD in English. My CS education was much less relevant to me than the History side. Love liberal arts. ;)

It's bullshit in the sense that if you're going to be a PhD, you generally want to move to industry, enter a career path where the rigor of the PhD process pays off or tenure track academia. If the academic prospects are so poor that you get a raise managing a Starbucks rather than being a contract visiting professor for 18-36 month stints, that's bullshit in my book.


I assume you do draw the line at some point, below which you would consider a discipline a fake subject. Where do you draw that line?


Problem people have with non STEM is that they almost always have so low quality, not the subjects itself.


I think a first rank classics PhD is probably worth more than an average PhD in physics. The problem is, exactly as you say: the majority of "classical scholars" these days don't even read Greek or Latin; something the average high school graduate could do in the 1800s.


The social justice disciplines which are pseudo-sciences, as illustrated in the Sokal hoax.




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