Great post! Agree generally but I think it's worth pointing out too aspects that don't carry over to the US (maybe also to other places but I wouldn't know).
1. The (relative) financial advantage of doing the PhD. Most people doing a PhD in the US (at least in STEM) could make >2x more working instead (>5x more if they went to a good undergrad) and there aren't really tax advantages. Plus, the resume boost is not very large AFAIK unless you're gunning for really specific jobs and those tend to be selective enough that they won't take you if you just scrape by during your PhD.
2. Not having to move cities for the PhD is very rare in the US. Some people stay in the same school but the vast majority go somewhere else and most schools are far away from each other.
Thanks! Great points. In general my piece is focused on the UK. While much of what I wrote is true across the board, I definitely grant that there are key differences in the states and I would consider the US PhD to be significantly harder.
On (1), I think this is true everywhere. I discuss the better financial compensation in London vs a PhD in the UK in my essay, and how this incentivises the best and brightest not to do a PhD. It’s not that there is a financial advantage of doing a PhD over a harder job, it’s that it’s better than being an undergrad and comfortable enough to imbue laziness or a lack of agency.
On (2), great point. I suppose for someone doing their undergrad at Cambridge, there are only two other places you’d want to do your PhD at in the UK (London or Oxford), so staying put is much more common. It’s definitely frowned upon but the same is true for the PhD-postdoc transition in the UK, with many staying where they are. There are more good choices in the US which is a great thing.
Interesting post. I see some pushback in the comments and I note it comes from US experiences. Which matches the observation I was going to make: that UK and US PhDs are quite different. (I am British, with a British PhD, and have worked at both UK and US institutions.)
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but it is quite UK focused. The US PhD is significantly more demanding, and the modal US PhD graduate is ahead of the modal UK one, in terms of skills, experience, independence, etc.
Yes you’re totally right. Just looking at age gives insight here. Average age of PhD applicants is higher in the US, and US PhDs are longer too, so the age at graduation is *much* higher in the US.
That said, I think this discrepancy might normalise at postdoc, with most UK PhDs probably requiring two postdocs before independence (this is just my hunch, haven’t looked at data).
I still think the case can be made for more rigorous application standards in the US too, and also for better assessment criteria that more closely test “ability to contribute to scientific discovery”.
I think I don't know what it would mean for the discrepancy to normalise, but I do think that a typical new US PhD is roughly similar to a typical UK PhD plus two years of fellowship, by which time there has been important challenges of funding acquisition, a growing publishing arc, teaching experience, and so on.
The qualifications themselves aren't equivalent, despite having the same name. Experienced academics know this and take it into account when e.g. recruiting.
Are you American? I have often said the following: that the standards of US UG degrees are low but PG degrees are very challenging. Which is the same pattern you’re describing but in different words
We lost more than fifty percent of my cohort of PhDs before they reached candidacy. I don’t know how many after that rang the bell. They fried us up and ate us for lunch. They beat us within an inch of our intellectual life and then we watched what they did to each other, which was ten times as harsh. United States, so perhaps that matters.
Hard to disagree with you when you write so eloquently! Might I ask where you were and which department? and, phenomenal rhetoric aside, can you elucidate exactly how "they" did this? A high attrition rate can be due to low resilience as much as it can be due to high difficulty. Any insight into objective difficulty of what you had to do would be really good to know here.
Let's see. I can try to think of all the times we cried, maybe, and that will help, although I suspect you already dont believe me, so I'm not sure why I'm engaging.
So, because this is a text-based discipline I am in, the professors (and "they" is the department's professors, Im not sure who else if could be) ran us through rather quite a lot rhetorically and in terms of workload. In the first couple years, classes had you reading between three and six books a week, or their article-length equivalents, on top of whatever work requirements were needed to fund your tuition. I remember being cold-called in class, which was a prestige-building affair of great stress. You were meant to perform, both for each other and the professor, since these people would be your mentors and colleagues. And we did, sometimes with great theatrical flair and often, eventually, joy. But I would not call the grueling preps for those performances easy. Extremely productive, though.
At presentations of research, I was asked the most difficult of questions and occasionally laughed at for being underprepared. And I WAS underprepared. I learned quickly that I was not alone in my fear. I watched a woman from Yale come to give a talk to a full room there. This woman was up and coming, but damn smart, and she was shaking like a leaf. She admitted that she was worried about getting interrogated by this particular group of professors because of their reputation as utterly intolerant of lacunae in your knowledge or poor reasoning. The professors, to their credit, saw her shaking and went easy for the first few rounds of questions.
Orals exams was one hundred or so books in six months, with expectations about being able to summarize orally arguments, subarguments, sources, reception, and, crucially, how the books spoke to one another within the field of study. When we completed the exams, which were punishing, it was not unusual for us (and I did) to cry for a week. That was a big breaking point for a lot of people, and they would tap out at that point with an MA. And then, of course, there was research and writing: the eternal dissatisfaction with whatever chapter you had produced, the amateurishness of your prose, the failure to include x or y, the way you had missed some corner of the research, the working-classness of your affect. Throw out three chapters, start again. Etc. "Have you thought of maybe doing something else?" they often offered. What most of us produced in the end was very high quality. The majority of my cohort (the ones that were left) are teaching and researching in the Ivy League or adjacent. I am not, because I wasn't good enough.
This helped a lot on the job market, though not enough. I interviewed once at an R1 that had me in meetings with everyone under the sun, teaching classes, doing presentations, and being otherwise on for 16 full hours over two days. I prepped for weeks. There were also two "dinners" that were anything but relaxing and were performance pieces (I failed, not making past being in the final three candidates out of several hundred applicants). That was just one interview. But that interview was what the program I was in was training me for.
For what it's worth, I also did an MA in a related discipline at a state school in the US. We all graduated, and it was not hard.
I hope that is sufficient evidence. I could, I think, write for another while.
That's sort of the thing that is happening at the high levels of PhDness in the USA. Some people may find it easy. I did not.
This is going to sound harsh, but I believe it to be true: your programme sounds appropriately difficult for a PhD. That’s what I want everywhere. You yourself admit to how good it was for you and how ultimately fulfilling it was. I really think this is what the PhD is meant to be. If I were you I’d be pissed off that every department of every university doesn’t uphold the same rigour.
Oh, it was the best, most productive thing I've ever done. Hands down. The orals exams, where I cried for a week, were transformative. When I say I'm carved out of wood, I am delighted, not insulted.
Education in America right now is about making sure no one is every uncomfortable enough to have a transformative experience. We are all the poorer (and dumber) for that. I was lucky.
Phds should not be easy. Mine wasn't. I'm sad that some people have found them so.
an interesting essay. as someone who is completing their phd at oxbridge, i think you are generalising your cambridge undergrad + phd bubble to all of academia (or academia in the uk at least). i agree in that uk degrees should have more facets for assessment — and i think this would make the degree easier!! through regular assessment in taught courses, you learn quite quickly how to improve your work; the lack of guidance and feedback throughout the phd makes the process far more arduous. this lack of structure, assessments and accountability (especially for supervisors) causes great variation in phd experiences and four years of your life is pretty dictated by the lab you sign up to (usually from a standpoint of blind naivety).
another point regarding job security. you empahsise, rightly so, how most people who complete a phd end up have to make the switch from academia to industry / civil service — this is a very insecure career pathway! signing up for a career where you have to apply for funding constantly, or move away from family and friends for positions, etc etc. and during the ‘phd years’ you are being paid below market rate (compared to industry positions), without high chance of a big pay off on the horizon (unless maybe you are a math, comp sci, etc major looking to move into finance/tech/the rest of it).
You raise some interesting points. I think I'd push back on the idea that we need more frequent assessment per se. I like the freedom that a PhD provides and think it's necessary to produce scientific discovery. I agree it would be easier as you would have to exert less agency as you'd be kept within tighter guardrails. I think that's bad for science! I just think the assessment at the end could better reflect how well you have contributed to science a bit better, and I don't think a thesis and viva are particularly good at doing that (and they are easy compared to the actual science).
Totally agree with you on the unpredictability of supervisors/projects and the necessarily naive position you are in when you make the decision. Sadly that's never not a fact of science. Changing tack when a project isn't going anywhere by starting something new (defying the sunken cost fallacy) or using brute force to troubleshoot a project to resurrection are important skills for being a scientist. As are people skills. As is resilience to failure. Ultimately, intelligence, agency, and perseverance trump the stochasticity of science. My final suggestion in the essay, whereby failing the PhD requirements isn't terminal but rolls you over to another year, would allow for people to overcome these setbacks. In that instance, an unlucky project equals a long PhD, but at least all PhDs are held up to the same high standard.
On the career instability, yup you're right in the long run, but this backs my point about low agency. I'd say a PhD is an easy and stable option at the time, and the negative career consequences are suffered later. In this way, choosing to do a PhD is kind of like failing the marshmallow test but with regard to career trajectory.
By the way, I don't want to dissuade you at all from your PhD. It's a completely worthwhile endeavour if you make it so. My totally unsolicited advice would be to focus on discovery, then papers, then thesis (within the allowances of your supervisor of course!...)-- both in terms of where you put your effort and where you seek your reward.
Interesting post. I think the PhD can feel easy if it's something that you're intrinsically motivated to do, but many who are not super passionate/curious about their topic of choice would find it difficult to complete. Did you feel this way about the lab work? And did you enjoy the experience overall?
This also makes me wonder about the differences between lab-based and humanistic PhDs. I remember chatting with college mates who were putting in 60+ hours a week in their lab, while I was in the Politics department in Cambs and was basically in control of my schedule for the whole 3 years (outside of meetings with my supervisor every few months.)
Funny enough, I played a bit with the CURUFC team during the beginning of my PhD (played college rugby for the most part) and definitely understand your point about rugby being part of the appeal of a PhD.
Yup it’s a tough challenge but not an impossible one I don’t think. There must be ways to set absolute requirements that are better/harder and more uniform across PhDs within a field/department and also adjustable between fields/departments. I think achieving a level of citations which are set relative to the field is perhaps one example. Eg 10 citations in life sciences, 2 in politics (I’m making these numbers up but they should be derived via a unifying calculation based on total number of citations within a field). Can be of one’s thesis or journal articles. The degree cannot be awarded until this point. The degree cannot be withheld after this point (by the supervisor, say).
The whole thesis and viva thing is way too wishy washy for my liking, especially given the skewed incentives to pass students and the hand-picked examiners.
Thanks! I really try in the essay to separate the PhD requirements and the PhD experience, but perhaps I could've added another paragraph or two. The PhD requirements are uniform and easy. The PhD experience varies drastically from person to person and can be very difficult. I would certainly say I worked very hard and found mine difficult, but, as you suggest, I found this hard work fulfilling as I was motivated to do it (I certainly wasn't forced to or expected to by either university requirements or my supervisor). In terms of enjoyment, I absolutely loved it. But it was overcoming the difficulties and frustrations that was itself enjoyable in a sense.
In terms of schedules, I was pretty much in control of mine too. In first year I was very lazy. showing up between 10 and 11am. Disappearing by 4pm on a good day, earlier if I could justify "working from home". I switched gears somewhere in my second year (quitting CURUFC actually due to injury and frustration with the club). By third year my basic routine was 9am until 8pm in the lab (eating lunch and dinner at the lab) Mon-Fri and then 4 or 5 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I did more when experiments required it, sometimes less when my social life required it. I was probably around the 60 h/week mark for a good 3 years though (whole thing lasted 4.5 years for me). Other PhD students I know stuck to the 11am to 4pm shift throughout their entire PhD (also lab-based). In fact my lab mate had a friend in the chemistry department who we called "lazy Ben" because he was simply never in the lab and constantly messaged my friend to ask if he wanted to play tennis lol. Lazy Ben will still get a PhD.
I refrain from blaming the lazy Bens of the world though, because they are acting rationally within their incentive structure. The point is that nobody is pushed or motivated by the basic PhD degree requirements. It's always either self-motivated or pushed by a supervisor. I think if universities in general raised the bar of minimum requirements, then it would create less space for nightmarish supervisors and equally less space for lazy free-riders.
Well said about the pleasures/satisfaction of "overcoming the difficulties and frustrations." That experience (and the resilience it instills) is the thing that unites all people who've done a PhD, no matter the subject.
One thing that crossed my mind while reading your response: perhaps the standards for passing are low because it is hard to develop consistent "high" standards when PhDs in different fields are so drastically different. Once at a college bar I met a German zoologist whose PhD was basically about trying to understand the mechanism by which a centipede's feet adhered to the surface the centipede was walking on. It's almost impossible to compare that to my project (in Politics but largely a historical PhD based on extensive archival research) or someone in material sciences, for example. So going with the standards of (a) getting into the program + getting funding (which is highly competitive at Cambs at least) and (b) doing work that the supervisor sees as sufficiently good is an imperfect solution when it's really tough to develop consistent standards across dozens of fields.
"This may sound ridiculous, or ridiculously arrogant, but let me clarify my point: I’m not trying to persuade you of my own intellect, I’m arguing that getting a PhD actually doesn’t require particularly high intellect nor does it require particularly hard work—objectively. Yet the societal perception of a PhD is that of a Herculean or even Sisyphean task (almost the opposite is true, as I will explain)."
Well, I'll give you points for honesty, it DOES sound ridiculous AND arrogant! I am not totally sure of your motives writing this, but I certainly hope it is either tongue-in-cheek, or deliberate rage-bait to go viral and grow your new Substack, because the most charitable thing I can say is your experience is very much *NOT* the norm of STEM PhDs in the United States, and from my professional circle, most of the world.
I am not sure how generalizable your quoted 16% drop-out rate is, because many studies suggest the attrition number in engineering, medicine, and the life sciences is closer to 40-50%. Perhaps half of all doctoral students, who already completed a bachelors +/- masters (a small minority of the population already) are just dummies? IMO, no, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is PhDs are difficult.
"Having been admitted to the PhD programme, what did I have to do to actually get the degree?
I had to attain adequate termly reports from my supervisor
I had to complete a first year report with a viva voce examination
I had to present my work once in four years at an internal departmental seminar
I had to eventually write my thesis, which doesn’t have a minimum word requirement, and then be examined on it in another viva voce."
If every PhD program was like that, I would agree it would be pretty easy. But that is not really the case! For my own PhD in molecular biology at a not-very-prestigious school in the southeastern US, I had to:
Complete 2 full years of additional courses in molecular biology, oncology and statistics (even though I already had another doctorate), some of which was quite rigorous in terms of not only the content, but also the tests and papers required (this was also in the pre-ChatGPT era)
Present my work *annually* at the school, and strongly encouraged at national conferences
Pass preliminary oral AND written exams by committee before beginning dissertation work (I agree that most people pass their prelims, but that is not the rate limiting step of PhDs anywhere, the tough part is the research)
Conduct novel research that would lead to at least two peer-reviewed publications (and ideally more)
I had to write and submit multiple extramural grants. The proposal did not have to be successfully funded, but submission was a requirement
Write up research results in a dissertation (mine was around 200 pages) and defend in front of committee
What makes a PhD difficult, and indeed more challenging than my STEM bachelor's or other doctorate in vetmed, is that nothing is guaranteed. You can end up in a nightmare project that implodes, and your PhD can be over. Some people can eke out a PhD with negative results; most can't. You can have a PI who never stops asking for more experiments, more papers, and other hoops, delaying you endlessly. You can run out of funding. Members of your committee can stonewall you for political or personal reasons (not the most common, but it happens). In contrast, pretty much every other degree out there (including med school!) follows a linear course, and if you check all the boxes and pass the tests, congrats, you get the diploma. Not the case for PhD.
If you want to make the case for more uniformity in graduate training, I'm all for it. But please, don't go shitting on thousands of people's careers just because you had a somewhat easier path. Thanks!
Hi Eric. It seems I have ruffled your feathers, and I apologise for that. It’s also great to get your insight on your experience, thank you for that.
First thing to note is that my experience is representative of the UK, and not the US, which I note in the essay. I think it is absolutely true that US PhDs are harder.
The attrition rate says different things to you and me. To you, a high attrition rate = difficult. To me, a high attrition rate = a lack of resilience. To me, this means the application process could have been more rigorous to prevent these drop outs from wasting years of their lives. I suspect we’ll disagree here and that’s fine.
It seems you do largely agree with me but want to disagree because you found my writing to be offensive to the prestige of your PhD. For example, you agree that I had easy requirements. Would you therefore at least agree with my call for *UK* PhDs to be harder? And if so, then ask yourself if you perceive someone with a PhD from Cambridge or Oxford to be inferior or superior to someone with a PhD from Northeastern Illinois University? And if you perceive Oxford to be superior, then you’ve realised the point of my essay, thank you.
I’m interested in your requirements for degree completion. Was two first author publications a definitive requirement? As in, you fail if you do not achieve this? Writing a grant seems like a great addition and would be welcome in the UK (for my PhD I also had to do this actually to get my Wellcome Trust funding, but I didn’t include it since it’s separate to the PhD itself).
You say “the tough part is the research” and go on to say how what makes a PhD challenging is the uncertainty of scientific research. I totally agree with you!!! I hope I made that clear in the essay (I think I did?!) the toughest part IS the research. NOT the parts that get assessed for the degree (caveat in the differences we’ve discussed for you and me). To boil it down, I’m saying: research is bloody hard and I had a REALLY hard time in my PhD, but I didn’t have to for the degree alone. I chose to because I wanted to make discoveries and contribute to science. All I’m saying is that the ways in which PhDs are assessed are quite unrelated to “contribution to science” and I wish they were more closely aligned especially because “contribution to science” is so difficult, unlike the degree of a PhD.
Hopefully I’ve clarified my position here. I’m not at all shitting on anyone’s career (why would I shit on my own career?!). People who worked really hard during their PhDs (sounds like you did) should find themselves agreeing with my call to make such hard work more appropriately assessed for the degree itself.
Thank you for engaging with my comment instead of reflexive dismissal. You correctly observed that my feathers are ruffled, but your diagnosis is wrong. It is not about "prestige"; I don't even list my PhD in my Substack by-line or bio (and I didn't mention my undergrad institution, but it is prestigious). And I would agree that simply having a PhD does not guarantee one smart.
So why do I consider my PhD one of my proudest accomplishments? Because it took an *ENORMOUS* amount of work over 6 years (while simultaneously doing a medical residency) and contributed to the literature in my tiny field. Then some bloke from the UK who got his degree 5 minutes ago comes along and fires off a post telling the world that PhDs are a joke and barely any work at all. So yeah, color me offended. However, what is most upsetting about this isn't even personal; at a time where public faith in scientists has significantly declined (see reference at the end), the LAST thing we need is misleading media that can justify their prejudice. I don't know if you follow the news much, but in the US we have a hostile new administration that is absolutely gutting what was formerly the crown jewel of biomedical research in the world (the NIH, NSF, and American research university system). Those of us who work in science need to be careful with how our words come across to the public, lest they be coopted and twisted against it.
Side note: You asked about my perception of Cambridge or Oxford. I don't care about "prestige," some of the best research training programs in the US are at public schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison or the University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to this post, I had no strong views on Cambridge either way, but I have to admit after reading your article, my respect decreased quite a bit.
"I’m interested in your requirements for degree completion. Was two first author publications a definitive requirement? As in, you fail if you do not achieve this?"
The specifics of each program are highly dependent on one's PI and committee. My major professor told me that before he would let me defend my dissertation I needed at least two peer-reviewed publications. I don't know if you would consider not meeting that "failing," but indefinite limbo is essentially the same thing on a long enough timeline (see discussion below).
"The attrition rate says different things to you and me. To you, a high attrition rate = difficult. To me, a high attrition rate = a lack of resilience. To me, this means the application process could have been more rigorous to prevent these drop outs from wasting years of their lives. I suspect we’ll disagree here and that’s fine."
Strong disagree. There are so many reasons someone may have to drop out of a PhD program that do not fit with "lack of resilience." In the US, students often take on massive debt to attend university, and graduate students are paid below minimum wage for many, many years. Grad students also have crappy health insurance (some may totally lack it), and we do not have single-payer healthcare to fall back on. Does someone who cannot handle the financial strain of that "lack resilience"? Several of my colleagues in grad school had to quit because they couldn't make ends meet after so many years. Others worked multiple jobs. I myself drove to another state to work ER shifts to make extra $.
What about someone who is working on a cutting edge project that fails? (Incidentally, the severe consequences of losing funding and/or grad students leads to significant risk averse behavior, and is a major reason why so many projects are incremental instead of groundbreaking innovation). What if their hypothesis IS right, but they are scooped by another research group, and their work is no longer publishable or fundable to the same degree?
What about the many female grad students who have to grapple with sexual harassment from superiors? Or who get pregnant during their studies and don't have accommodating labs? Even if they do, it can delay them by years, and you circle back to the financial strain argument, now with an extra mouth to feed and clothe.
Look, I don't know you, so I don't want to be too harsh, but at minimum, a straight white male who casually bragged they went to undergrad at Cambridge and didn't even have to move for their PhD program seems like someone who has lived a fairly privileged life and may not have contemplated a lot of these challenges. I don't have a study backing this up offhand, but in my experience, the vast majority of grad students do their PhD at a different institution than BS/masters, which necessitates moves, expenses, etc.
"You say “the tough part is the research” and go on to say how what makes a PhD challenging is the uncertainty of scientific research. I totally agree with you!!! I hope I made that clear in the essay (I think I did?!) the toughest part IS the research. NOT the parts that get assessed for the degree (caveat in the differences we’ve discussed for you and me). To boil it down, I’m saying: research is bloody hard and I had a REALLY hard time in my PhD, but I didn’t have to for the degree alone. [...] All I’m saying is that the ways in which PhDs are assessed are quite unrelated to “contribution to science” and I wish they were more closely aligned especially because “contribution to science” is so difficult, unlike the degree of a PhD."
It sounds like PhDs in the UK essentially don't even assess the quantity and quality of a grad student's research. If that characterization is accurate, I am shocked, and feel like the degree should almost be called something else than "PhD," since it has such a different connotation in North America, parts of the EU, and other places around the world. This is likely why tenure-track faculty positions (which are becoming rarer by the year!) require multiple post-docs, since you can't rely on the quality of one's doctoral training.
A. Lupia, D.B. Allison, K.H. Jamieson, J. Heimberg, M. Skipper, & S.M. Wolf, Trends in US public confidence in science and opportunities for progress, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (11) e2319488121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2319488121 (2024).
Lots I could respond to here. Lot's of assumptions in your reply about who I am and what I know (and don't know). Let me limit myself to a point of agreement:
You point out how it was your supervisor who imposed the stringent two-paper requirement. Many other commenters point out how a supervisor can dictate the difficulty of a PhD. I literally write about that in the essay and don't deny it. I agree that this isn't good. I would perhaps posit that these faculty members are responding to the fact that university-levied requirements are insufficient to drive scientific discovery. I'm arguing for all PhD-granting institutions to make requirements more stringent such that there is less variability between supervisors and the letters "PhD" better reflect actual contribution to science, which supervisors like yours clearly insisted upon on their own accord.
I think Oxbridge is a bit of an outlier here re: the low-agency thing - there's a high concentration of undergrads who are high-IQ / low agency as you say, and I think a lot are quite institutionalised from their backgrounds and/or credentialism chasers with a bit of a background cushion meaning they don't need to be out there earning. Plus the sheer appeal of both universities qua institutions means lots of people just like the idea of being there just a bit longer (you see this even post-PhD, those who hang around as junior archivist, library roles, hangers on of music/chapel stuff, Blackwell's music etc. - no shade intended these are my people!)
That was basically the structure of my thesis (I have three papers currently in the works), but it wasn’t a requirement at all. Absolutely agree with you that original science in a competitive field is hard!
What are the specific requirements for your degree, if you don’t mind me asking? Did you *have* to have 3 papers or was it, like me, the case that doing the work for your thesis happened to amount to 3 papers worth and you put in the extra work to actually publish them?
It seems many commenters are het up because they worked hard during their PhDs. I did too! I’m just saying that the driving force behind this hard work is not requirements set by the university, but more often self-imposed or supervisor-imposed. The minimum requirements for a PhD are easy, the reality of a PhD in many cases is hard.
You’ve gotten plenty of disagreeing comments from the US, but I’ll add one more anyway.
My PhD program was hard. It was not hard because we were stupid. I say this not to brag, but for context: most of us were near the top of our class as undergraduates in quantitative fields at the world’s top universities (including many from Tsinghua, KAIST, or the upper Indian Institutes of Technology). And yet, doing a PhD in our program routinely beat our asses over and over. Several smart, hard-working students quit or were dismissed every year. The difficulty of some classes made me reconsider my life choices every week, but we were expected to earn As in every class with enough energy left over for 30-40+ hours of theorem/proof-style research every week.
Completing a difficult PhD made me a better person, and I will be forever thankful for the opportunity. I agree with you in that the letters “PhD” don’t automatically guarantee intelligence. But if it was easy, many more people would be walking around with PhDs from rigorous programs.
Thanks for your insight. Yes, some disagreeing. Some agreeing (from the US too). As I acknowledge in the essay, different countries, fields, departments, and supervisors all can make a PhD harder or easier. I’m not denying that any one PhD student can have a hard time during their PhD. I’m calling for the absolutely degree requirements to be equalised across departments/supervisors etc and raised from where they are now. This then creates less room for immense tacit expectations by departments/supervisors since the requirements stand alone as the only thing between student and achieving their PhD. Essentially, I want the gatekeepers of the degree to insist on harder and better criteria for that degree, rather than leaving it up to supervisors who can have wildly different standards, in some cases incredible difficult standards.
As someone who, depending on how you look at it, flunked out of a Mathematics PhD in the US, I think what you're saying is at best only applicable to the UK. Do even begin PhD research in math in the US, you have to pass multiple exams which are absolutely brutal. They're comparable to med school entrance exams, and you have to do them multiple times. I'm actually a big proponent of loosening the requirements, at least in math, to even begin. I dropped to just doing a Masters and not a PhD because the exams were insane AND pointless. Anything I do research in I would learn. Why should I prove my knowledge of the fundamentals of several fields of study through an exam format than through coursework?
My department has an incentive to keep you working on your PhD. Once you're given the go ahead to start your dissertation, if you're a teaching assistant you start teaching an actual section of a class instead of providing extra instruction. The TAs are a lot cheaper than adjunct faculty.
The cheap labour incentive is an important one and it’s not good.
Maths is probably a special discipline in that innate ability is far more important than in other fields. Without wishing to insult, it sounds like you probably weren’t of that genius-level calibre that many maths PhDs are. To be honest, I think that’s probably a good thing. Getting a maths PhD is widely accepted as being very difficult because of this. It’s different gravy.
You should take a moment to consider how arrogant and rude you are coming across as. I suspect you did and wrote that qualifying statement as an attempt to avoid blame.
What you just said to me is that I could never cut it as a Mathematics PhD AND that it's a good thing. Think about how you would feel if I told you that you didn't deserve to get your life science PhD because you're not smart enough.
I decided not to do a PhD because the expectations were frankly unfair and I don't care enough about research to deal with them. I have the intention to return to getting a Mathematics PhD some day, but at a different institution because I want to specialize in college level mathematics education.
I've been thinking about your post since my friend sent it to me. I suspect you may have experienced a phenomenon similar to "big fish in a small pond." Instead of being the best in a world of average, you're amongst the worst in a world of exceptional. That doesn't mean you're not exceptional. So your perspective is entirely twisted into believing things one way. You don't even address your bias about PhDs being STEM fields. Lab work isn't applicable to the majority of possible areas to get PhDs.
I really don’t consider it rude to say to someone “I don’t think you are a super genius”. And there is no arrogance involved since I make zero claims about my own intellect. I would absolutely fail a maths undergrad, let alone a PhD!
It can just be true that the maths PhD is hard and that is a good thing, and that this means many people who are very smart but not the absolute smartest can fail them or drop out. The PhD is an elite degree. It seems like maths may be (one of) the only disciplines where this is still true, and my essay highlights how it is not true for life sciences.
Do you think that you deserved a PhD and were unjustly robbed of one? Or do you agree with the fact that those who got theirs in your cohort were more capable than you? It’s a brutally honest discussion and I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. I really don’t mean any ill-will by it. I trust you’ve done your introspection on the matter though and so hopefully won’t mind too much. If it’s still a sore topic then fair enough, we can draw a line under this.
I'm not calling you read for saying I'm not a genius; I'm calling you rude for implying that my decision to not get the PhD is a good thing and because I was incapable in the first place. Even if that's not what you intended to say, it's how you came across. And rudeness is more about what you say than what you mean.
Those in my cohort are more willing to jump through the hoops and insane requirements. I will say, my university seems to be an outlier even in the US based on discussions with other students. Those who are pursuing their PhDs are more interested in research or already had a masters degree when they started with us. (Note that those with masters still had to meet the same coursework and exam requirements as those without.) My decision to just pursue the masters was also based on what topics of research are available at the department—none of them interested me. I do not see my peers as being "more capable" than me. In fact, most of my peers were struggling as much as I was. I just decided it wasn't worth it to go for the PhD at this university.
When multiple of my undergrad professors referred to the first year or two of a math PhD as "hazing," it should show there's a problem. Talking with those who have started their research, the hardest part is passing the qualifying exams. Once one starts research, things become perhaps slightly anti-sisyphean, but not very much. Have you considered that the dropout rate vs fail rate is so high because departments don't want to fail students? Instead, they choose not to let them finish and eventually cut their funding, forcing them to drop out. I have no evidence for this hypothesis, but I suspect the majority of higher education drop outs didn't leave because it was too challenging, but because they deemed it not worth the time and effort, especially if you ignore those who failed out.
Fair enough. Does sound brutal. In the UK (even for maths), that two-year hazing doesn’t exist. It’s just research only. I considered myself a research more than a student. That fact alone probably explain how we had such different impressions.
In brief defence of the UK, the undergrad and masters at Cambridge are very tough (probably explaining why I did so badly at them 😂). The PhD at Cambridge is a notable deceleration, probably akin to the third year of your PhD programme and onwards.
Great post. I think a few aspects worth mentioning is the demographic cliff most universities are about the experience in the US as each graduating high school class will be smaller than the previous one starting in 2026, the worsening public finances across the globe as populations age and tax bases shrink, and the over-reliance on "free labor" (read taxpayer-funded) that graduate students provide. With AI, perhaps a good chunk of grunt work will be reduced, especially in computing fields. However, life sciences and any research the requires fieldwork or talking to other humans will still require legions of bright-eyed 23 year olds to carry out basic operations for a penny an hour. A more selective process that produces small cohorts of graduate students will have to confront not only funding constraints but also real physical constraints like who is going to unload the beakers or schedule the group meetings.
Great points. The notion of the grunt work is interesting. You don’t need to be doing a PhD to do grunt work. Perhaps 20-something research assistants will take up the brunt of it (and hopefully be paid better).
A lot of life sciences research is skill-based and not knowledge-based. I’d argue you don’t even need an undergrad to start as a research assistant—you need vocational experience more than knowledge of the workings of the electron transport chain, for example. That way more selective PhDs won’t decrease output but will rather make it much more efficient and better-directed (by more elite lab project leaders).
A lot of RAs nowadays are doing it to build up their CV to then apply for a PhD. Perhaps creating an independent career path that is skill-based, starting with RA and ending with head of a core facility, for example, is the way forward (this exists currently in the realm of possibility, but it is by no means common or aspirational within the culture)
The broader demographic shifts you highlight are complicated and potentially very damaging though!
"Anti-Sisyphean" is exactly right. Departments have no incentive to fail their own students and every incentive to promote them, so every year they make failing just a little bit harder. But the meritocratic solutions you propose -- especially those that depend on peer review -- have their own costs. They compel over-specialization and incrementalism and make revolutionary change virtually impossible. They encourage people to maximize not merit but its measure (in this context: publications, conference presentations, teaching evals, etc.). Short of returning to a pre-professional model, there may be no solution.
Yeah it might require taking a page from the Catholic church’s playbook and instituting some kind of “devil’s advocate” program whereby some percentage of academic jobs are reserved exclusively for those who think that everyone else in their field is doing it all wrong.
Having a PhD definitely doesn't make you smart, but many people think it does. You'll hear jokes about a STEM PhD just means that you know a lot about a really specific thing - something only a small group of people would appreciate.
There were definitely people in graduate school who probably should not have been in graduate school (in a STEM field). They got PhDs, though. In fact, you would hear people joke that you just needed to wait long enough. They will eventually just give you the PhD to get you out of there! Sadly, it was true. In hindsight, the process for getting into graduate school was by no means rigorous. You just needed the right Bachelor's degree, decent to good grades, and an application. There were no interviews. You were only screened by the application, transcripts, and recommendation letters (and I have no idea how much weight those letters really carried). Other programs can be different, but it's probably easier to get into a PhD program than many people outside of academia think.
Interesting to know that you’ve experienced the same at a top US university. I’m best acquainted with the UK system but had a hunch the phenomenon is global
My PhD program would not give you a PhD to get you out of there. They were beyond happy to let you hang yourself but they weren’t going to give you a degree if you didn’t pull it off. I think they even have a rule now that if you dont get out in ten years, they throw you out without a degree.
I am amazed at this thread, because everything in it is so far from my experience that I’m wondering if I’m taking crazy pills.
I'm interested in who you mean by "they". I think the key distinction is a PhD supervisors requirements versus a PhD-awarding university's requirements. The former can be massively varied and quite insanely demanding. The latter, which is what I try to argue, falls woefully short of the mark. I actually think that if universities upped their assessment criteria (via some objective metric like those I discuss in the final paragraph), then these nightmarish supervisors would be less prevalent.
At my institution, "they" was the department. The professors, both singularly and in the aggregate. As individual mentors, as dissertation and orals exams committees, and as an a rule-making body that assembles curriculum and requirements.
I think I take a different approach to assessment. Systems of assessment that are school wide at the university in particular give me serious pause. The purpose of the PhD program is not to have a general education, rather to choose a rabbit hole with a particular set of really idiosyncratic rabbits in it and get in there with them. To systemize that is to upend any hope of joining in communion with those particular weirdos in their particular subfield. Specialization is in this way is the opposite of systemizing, I feel like? My point is, specialization IS massively varied, and I think that's what makes it specialization.
Additionally, the "objective" criteria by which students might be assesses is, in my corner of the world currently, usually the purview of administrators because of the generality of the criteria is only of use to the act of administration and very much less useful in the act of teaching. We see this condition in action in the States in the development of "standards" for each class, which are increasingly meaningless as the student gets older and their experience and ability more specialized. Thirty students in my modern world class are not getting the same education even in the same class, by any means, despite my own "objectives" in teaching that class. So, to reiterate, a generalized standard at that level is useful only to administrators and is more-or-less meaningless in the classroom. This is even more the case in grad school, where the classroom consists of two people - you and your mentor. I would argue that in our case at least administration could offer a systematized training but that would likely render it utterly un-specialized and, well, generic. I think that, although a generic system may eliminate the odd tyrant of an adviser, it also eliminates the purpose of the PhD in the first place.
I have a feeling there's a discernment here that we are about to make between science, social science, and humanities PhDs. I was trained in a social sciences/hum department, which may make a difference in perspectives. We were interested in that which is true for some people, not that which is true for all people, and I think it might be reflected in the very structure of our training programs.
Does any of what I say here make sense in the field of chemistry? Or is my perspective purely born of humanities training?
Thanks, very insightful. I agree totally about the need to specialise and how any blanket management of a PhD can cramp academic freedom and ignore differences in departments/fields etc. I definitely don’t want more frequent assessment or test-based assessment. Tell me if you think this would work as a fair way to ensure certain standards are met:
To gain a PhD, a student must have their work (thesis or published papers) cited n number of times, with n being normalised within each field to account for different rates of publication/citation.
Regarding the tyrannical supervisors, with this well-defined criterion in place, universities can then implement better channels of communication directly between students and departments/the university. If the standard is achieved and the student wishes to graduate, they can—regardless of the wishes of the supervisor.
I'm certain that individual programs can vary a bit. So can the field. To be honest, it's kind of amazing how experiences can vary even in the same field. In my experience in chemistry, it was highly dependent on your advisor. If your advisor wanted to just get rid of you, no one else would say anything. Even if you didn't make it to PhD candidate status, they would still let you get a Master's in many cases. I only knew a couple of situations where someone didn't leave the program without something. Duke also had a "5 and a half year" rule. I assume they still do. If you didn't defend by 5.5 years, you could no longer be a teaching assistant. You either needed a fellowship or money from your advisor. The effect in my time was that pretty much everyone graduated by the deadline.
I’m sorry that this was your takeaway. Difficulty is relative. All I’m saying is that the difficulty of science itself is much greater than the difficulty of the degree requirements. I propose they be brought in line with each other. That is all.
Great post! Agree generally but I think it's worth pointing out too aspects that don't carry over to the US (maybe also to other places but I wouldn't know).
1. The (relative) financial advantage of doing the PhD. Most people doing a PhD in the US (at least in STEM) could make >2x more working instead (>5x more if they went to a good undergrad) and there aren't really tax advantages. Plus, the resume boost is not very large AFAIK unless you're gunning for really specific jobs and those tend to be selective enough that they won't take you if you just scrape by during your PhD.
2. Not having to move cities for the PhD is very rare in the US. Some people stay in the same school but the vast majority go somewhere else and most schools are far away from each other.
Thanks! Great points. In general my piece is focused on the UK. While much of what I wrote is true across the board, I definitely grant that there are key differences in the states and I would consider the US PhD to be significantly harder.
On (1), I think this is true everywhere. I discuss the better financial compensation in London vs a PhD in the UK in my essay, and how this incentivises the best and brightest not to do a PhD. It’s not that there is a financial advantage of doing a PhD over a harder job, it’s that it’s better than being an undergrad and comfortable enough to imbue laziness or a lack of agency.
On (2), great point. I suppose for someone doing their undergrad at Cambridge, there are only two other places you’d want to do your PhD at in the UK (London or Oxford), so staying put is much more common. It’s definitely frowned upon but the same is true for the PhD-postdoc transition in the UK, with many staying where they are. There are more good choices in the US which is a great thing.
Interesting post. I see some pushback in the comments and I note it comes from US experiences. Which matches the observation I was going to make: that UK and US PhDs are quite different. (I am British, with a British PhD, and have worked at both UK and US institutions.)
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but it is quite UK focused. The US PhD is significantly more demanding, and the modal US PhD graduate is ahead of the modal UK one, in terms of skills, experience, independence, etc.
Yes you’re totally right. Just looking at age gives insight here. Average age of PhD applicants is higher in the US, and US PhDs are longer too, so the age at graduation is *much* higher in the US.
That said, I think this discrepancy might normalise at postdoc, with most UK PhDs probably requiring two postdocs before independence (this is just my hunch, haven’t looked at data).
I still think the case can be made for more rigorous application standards in the US too, and also for better assessment criteria that more closely test “ability to contribute to scientific discovery”.
I think I don't know what it would mean for the discrepancy to normalise, but I do think that a typical new US PhD is roughly similar to a typical UK PhD plus two years of fellowship, by which time there has been important challenges of funding acquisition, a growing publishing arc, teaching experience, and so on.
The qualifications themselves aren't equivalent, despite having the same name. Experienced academics know this and take it into account when e.g. recruiting.
Yup you’ve explained what I was trying to—the difference in ability/experience equalises after some extra years of postdoc by the UK researcher
This seems to be the case in Europe in general. Undergrad is extremely difficult, grad school is (relatively) easy.
Are you American? I have often said the following: that the standards of US UG degrees are low but PG degrees are very challenging. Which is the same pattern you’re describing but in different words
Yes
We lost more than fifty percent of my cohort of PhDs before they reached candidacy. I don’t know how many after that rang the bell. They fried us up and ate us for lunch. They beat us within an inch of our intellectual life and then we watched what they did to each other, which was ten times as harsh. United States, so perhaps that matters.
I’m carved out of wood because of it.
It was not easy.
Hard to disagree with you when you write so eloquently! Might I ask where you were and which department? and, phenomenal rhetoric aside, can you elucidate exactly how "they" did this? A high attrition rate can be due to low resilience as much as it can be due to high difficulty. Any insight into objective difficulty of what you had to do would be really good to know here.
Let's see. I can try to think of all the times we cried, maybe, and that will help, although I suspect you already dont believe me, so I'm not sure why I'm engaging.
So, because this is a text-based discipline I am in, the professors (and "they" is the department's professors, Im not sure who else if could be) ran us through rather quite a lot rhetorically and in terms of workload. In the first couple years, classes had you reading between three and six books a week, or their article-length equivalents, on top of whatever work requirements were needed to fund your tuition. I remember being cold-called in class, which was a prestige-building affair of great stress. You were meant to perform, both for each other and the professor, since these people would be your mentors and colleagues. And we did, sometimes with great theatrical flair and often, eventually, joy. But I would not call the grueling preps for those performances easy. Extremely productive, though.
At presentations of research, I was asked the most difficult of questions and occasionally laughed at for being underprepared. And I WAS underprepared. I learned quickly that I was not alone in my fear. I watched a woman from Yale come to give a talk to a full room there. This woman was up and coming, but damn smart, and she was shaking like a leaf. She admitted that she was worried about getting interrogated by this particular group of professors because of their reputation as utterly intolerant of lacunae in your knowledge or poor reasoning. The professors, to their credit, saw her shaking and went easy for the first few rounds of questions.
Orals exams was one hundred or so books in six months, with expectations about being able to summarize orally arguments, subarguments, sources, reception, and, crucially, how the books spoke to one another within the field of study. When we completed the exams, which were punishing, it was not unusual for us (and I did) to cry for a week. That was a big breaking point for a lot of people, and they would tap out at that point with an MA. And then, of course, there was research and writing: the eternal dissatisfaction with whatever chapter you had produced, the amateurishness of your prose, the failure to include x or y, the way you had missed some corner of the research, the working-classness of your affect. Throw out three chapters, start again. Etc. "Have you thought of maybe doing something else?" they often offered. What most of us produced in the end was very high quality. The majority of my cohort (the ones that were left) are teaching and researching in the Ivy League or adjacent. I am not, because I wasn't good enough.
This helped a lot on the job market, though not enough. I interviewed once at an R1 that had me in meetings with everyone under the sun, teaching classes, doing presentations, and being otherwise on for 16 full hours over two days. I prepped for weeks. There were also two "dinners" that were anything but relaxing and were performance pieces (I failed, not making past being in the final three candidates out of several hundred applicants). That was just one interview. But that interview was what the program I was in was training me for.
For what it's worth, I also did an MA in a related discipline at a state school in the US. We all graduated, and it was not hard.
I hope that is sufficient evidence. I could, I think, write for another while.
That's sort of the thing that is happening at the high levels of PhDness in the USA. Some people may find it easy. I did not.
This is going to sound harsh, but I believe it to be true: your programme sounds appropriately difficult for a PhD. That’s what I want everywhere. You yourself admit to how good it was for you and how ultimately fulfilling it was. I really think this is what the PhD is meant to be. If I were you I’d be pissed off that every department of every university doesn’t uphold the same rigour.
Oh, it was the best, most productive thing I've ever done. Hands down. The orals exams, where I cried for a week, were transformative. When I say I'm carved out of wood, I am delighted, not insulted.
Education in America right now is about making sure no one is every uncomfortable enough to have a transformative experience. We are all the poorer (and dumber) for that. I was lucky.
Phds should not be easy. Mine wasn't. I'm sad that some people have found them so.
This fires me up. Glad we can agree on this!
an interesting essay. as someone who is completing their phd at oxbridge, i think you are generalising your cambridge undergrad + phd bubble to all of academia (or academia in the uk at least). i agree in that uk degrees should have more facets for assessment — and i think this would make the degree easier!! through regular assessment in taught courses, you learn quite quickly how to improve your work; the lack of guidance and feedback throughout the phd makes the process far more arduous. this lack of structure, assessments and accountability (especially for supervisors) causes great variation in phd experiences and four years of your life is pretty dictated by the lab you sign up to (usually from a standpoint of blind naivety).
another point regarding job security. you empahsise, rightly so, how most people who complete a phd end up have to make the switch from academia to industry / civil service — this is a very insecure career pathway! signing up for a career where you have to apply for funding constantly, or move away from family and friends for positions, etc etc. and during the ‘phd years’ you are being paid below market rate (compared to industry positions), without high chance of a big pay off on the horizon (unless maybe you are a math, comp sci, etc major looking to move into finance/tech/the rest of it).
You raise some interesting points. I think I'd push back on the idea that we need more frequent assessment per se. I like the freedom that a PhD provides and think it's necessary to produce scientific discovery. I agree it would be easier as you would have to exert less agency as you'd be kept within tighter guardrails. I think that's bad for science! I just think the assessment at the end could better reflect how well you have contributed to science a bit better, and I don't think a thesis and viva are particularly good at doing that (and they are easy compared to the actual science).
Totally agree with you on the unpredictability of supervisors/projects and the necessarily naive position you are in when you make the decision. Sadly that's never not a fact of science. Changing tack when a project isn't going anywhere by starting something new (defying the sunken cost fallacy) or using brute force to troubleshoot a project to resurrection are important skills for being a scientist. As are people skills. As is resilience to failure. Ultimately, intelligence, agency, and perseverance trump the stochasticity of science. My final suggestion in the essay, whereby failing the PhD requirements isn't terminal but rolls you over to another year, would allow for people to overcome these setbacks. In that instance, an unlucky project equals a long PhD, but at least all PhDs are held up to the same high standard.
On the career instability, yup you're right in the long run, but this backs my point about low agency. I'd say a PhD is an easy and stable option at the time, and the negative career consequences are suffered later. In this way, choosing to do a PhD is kind of like failing the marshmallow test but with regard to career trajectory.
By the way, I don't want to dissuade you at all from your PhD. It's a completely worthwhile endeavour if you make it so. My totally unsolicited advice would be to focus on discovery, then papers, then thesis (within the allowances of your supervisor of course!...)-- both in terms of where you put your effort and where you seek your reward.
Interesting post. I think the PhD can feel easy if it's something that you're intrinsically motivated to do, but many who are not super passionate/curious about their topic of choice would find it difficult to complete. Did you feel this way about the lab work? And did you enjoy the experience overall?
This also makes me wonder about the differences between lab-based and humanistic PhDs. I remember chatting with college mates who were putting in 60+ hours a week in their lab, while I was in the Politics department in Cambs and was basically in control of my schedule for the whole 3 years (outside of meetings with my supervisor every few months.)
Funny enough, I played a bit with the CURUFC team during the beginning of my PhD (played college rugby for the most part) and definitely understand your point about rugby being part of the appeal of a PhD.
Yup it’s a tough challenge but not an impossible one I don’t think. There must be ways to set absolute requirements that are better/harder and more uniform across PhDs within a field/department and also adjustable between fields/departments. I think achieving a level of citations which are set relative to the field is perhaps one example. Eg 10 citations in life sciences, 2 in politics (I’m making these numbers up but they should be derived via a unifying calculation based on total number of citations within a field). Can be of one’s thesis or journal articles. The degree cannot be awarded until this point. The degree cannot be withheld after this point (by the supervisor, say).
The whole thesis and viva thing is way too wishy washy for my liking, especially given the skewed incentives to pass students and the hand-picked examiners.
Thanks! I really try in the essay to separate the PhD requirements and the PhD experience, but perhaps I could've added another paragraph or two. The PhD requirements are uniform and easy. The PhD experience varies drastically from person to person and can be very difficult. I would certainly say I worked very hard and found mine difficult, but, as you suggest, I found this hard work fulfilling as I was motivated to do it (I certainly wasn't forced to or expected to by either university requirements or my supervisor). In terms of enjoyment, I absolutely loved it. But it was overcoming the difficulties and frustrations that was itself enjoyable in a sense.
In terms of schedules, I was pretty much in control of mine too. In first year I was very lazy. showing up between 10 and 11am. Disappearing by 4pm on a good day, earlier if I could justify "working from home". I switched gears somewhere in my second year (quitting CURUFC actually due to injury and frustration with the club). By third year my basic routine was 9am until 8pm in the lab (eating lunch and dinner at the lab) Mon-Fri and then 4 or 5 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I did more when experiments required it, sometimes less when my social life required it. I was probably around the 60 h/week mark for a good 3 years though (whole thing lasted 4.5 years for me). Other PhD students I know stuck to the 11am to 4pm shift throughout their entire PhD (also lab-based). In fact my lab mate had a friend in the chemistry department who we called "lazy Ben" because he was simply never in the lab and constantly messaged my friend to ask if he wanted to play tennis lol. Lazy Ben will still get a PhD.
I refrain from blaming the lazy Bens of the world though, because they are acting rationally within their incentive structure. The point is that nobody is pushed or motivated by the basic PhD degree requirements. It's always either self-motivated or pushed by a supervisor. I think if universities in general raised the bar of minimum requirements, then it would create less space for nightmarish supervisors and equally less space for lazy free-riders.
Well said about the pleasures/satisfaction of "overcoming the difficulties and frustrations." That experience (and the resilience it instills) is the thing that unites all people who've done a PhD, no matter the subject.
One thing that crossed my mind while reading your response: perhaps the standards for passing are low because it is hard to develop consistent "high" standards when PhDs in different fields are so drastically different. Once at a college bar I met a German zoologist whose PhD was basically about trying to understand the mechanism by which a centipede's feet adhered to the surface the centipede was walking on. It's almost impossible to compare that to my project (in Politics but largely a historical PhD based on extensive archival research) or someone in material sciences, for example. So going with the standards of (a) getting into the program + getting funding (which is highly competitive at Cambs at least) and (b) doing work that the supervisor sees as sufficiently good is an imperfect solution when it's really tough to develop consistent standards across dozens of fields.
"This may sound ridiculous, or ridiculously arrogant, but let me clarify my point: I’m not trying to persuade you of my own intellect, I’m arguing that getting a PhD actually doesn’t require particularly high intellect nor does it require particularly hard work—objectively. Yet the societal perception of a PhD is that of a Herculean or even Sisyphean task (almost the opposite is true, as I will explain)."
Well, I'll give you points for honesty, it DOES sound ridiculous AND arrogant! I am not totally sure of your motives writing this, but I certainly hope it is either tongue-in-cheek, or deliberate rage-bait to go viral and grow your new Substack, because the most charitable thing I can say is your experience is very much *NOT* the norm of STEM PhDs in the United States, and from my professional circle, most of the world.
I am not sure how generalizable your quoted 16% drop-out rate is, because many studies suggest the attrition number in engineering, medicine, and the life sciences is closer to 40-50%. Perhaps half of all doctoral students, who already completed a bachelors +/- masters (a small minority of the population already) are just dummies? IMO, no, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is PhDs are difficult.
"Having been admitted to the PhD programme, what did I have to do to actually get the degree?
I had to attain adequate termly reports from my supervisor
I had to complete a first year report with a viva voce examination
I had to present my work once in four years at an internal departmental seminar
I had to eventually write my thesis, which doesn’t have a minimum word requirement, and then be examined on it in another viva voce."
If every PhD program was like that, I would agree it would be pretty easy. But that is not really the case! For my own PhD in molecular biology at a not-very-prestigious school in the southeastern US, I had to:
Complete 2 full years of additional courses in molecular biology, oncology and statistics (even though I already had another doctorate), some of which was quite rigorous in terms of not only the content, but also the tests and papers required (this was also in the pre-ChatGPT era)
Present my work *annually* at the school, and strongly encouraged at national conferences
Pass preliminary oral AND written exams by committee before beginning dissertation work (I agree that most people pass their prelims, but that is not the rate limiting step of PhDs anywhere, the tough part is the research)
Conduct novel research that would lead to at least two peer-reviewed publications (and ideally more)
I had to write and submit multiple extramural grants. The proposal did not have to be successfully funded, but submission was a requirement
Write up research results in a dissertation (mine was around 200 pages) and defend in front of committee
What makes a PhD difficult, and indeed more challenging than my STEM bachelor's or other doctorate in vetmed, is that nothing is guaranteed. You can end up in a nightmare project that implodes, and your PhD can be over. Some people can eke out a PhD with negative results; most can't. You can have a PI who never stops asking for more experiments, more papers, and other hoops, delaying you endlessly. You can run out of funding. Members of your committee can stonewall you for political or personal reasons (not the most common, but it happens). In contrast, pretty much every other degree out there (including med school!) follows a linear course, and if you check all the boxes and pass the tests, congrats, you get the diploma. Not the case for PhD.
If you want to make the case for more uniformity in graduate training, I'm all for it. But please, don't go shitting on thousands of people's careers just because you had a somewhat easier path. Thanks!
Hi Eric. It seems I have ruffled your feathers, and I apologise for that. It’s also great to get your insight on your experience, thank you for that.
First thing to note is that my experience is representative of the UK, and not the US, which I note in the essay. I think it is absolutely true that US PhDs are harder.
The attrition rate says different things to you and me. To you, a high attrition rate = difficult. To me, a high attrition rate = a lack of resilience. To me, this means the application process could have been more rigorous to prevent these drop outs from wasting years of their lives. I suspect we’ll disagree here and that’s fine.
It seems you do largely agree with me but want to disagree because you found my writing to be offensive to the prestige of your PhD. For example, you agree that I had easy requirements. Would you therefore at least agree with my call for *UK* PhDs to be harder? And if so, then ask yourself if you perceive someone with a PhD from Cambridge or Oxford to be inferior or superior to someone with a PhD from Northeastern Illinois University? And if you perceive Oxford to be superior, then you’ve realised the point of my essay, thank you.
I’m interested in your requirements for degree completion. Was two first author publications a definitive requirement? As in, you fail if you do not achieve this? Writing a grant seems like a great addition and would be welcome in the UK (for my PhD I also had to do this actually to get my Wellcome Trust funding, but I didn’t include it since it’s separate to the PhD itself).
You say “the tough part is the research” and go on to say how what makes a PhD challenging is the uncertainty of scientific research. I totally agree with you!!! I hope I made that clear in the essay (I think I did?!) the toughest part IS the research. NOT the parts that get assessed for the degree (caveat in the differences we’ve discussed for you and me). To boil it down, I’m saying: research is bloody hard and I had a REALLY hard time in my PhD, but I didn’t have to for the degree alone. I chose to because I wanted to make discoveries and contribute to science. All I’m saying is that the ways in which PhDs are assessed are quite unrelated to “contribution to science” and I wish they were more closely aligned especially because “contribution to science” is so difficult, unlike the degree of a PhD.
Hopefully I’ve clarified my position here. I’m not at all shitting on anyone’s career (why would I shit on my own career?!). People who worked really hard during their PhDs (sounds like you did) should find themselves agreeing with my call to make such hard work more appropriately assessed for the degree itself.
Thank you for engaging with my comment instead of reflexive dismissal. You correctly observed that my feathers are ruffled, but your diagnosis is wrong. It is not about "prestige"; I don't even list my PhD in my Substack by-line or bio (and I didn't mention my undergrad institution, but it is prestigious). And I would agree that simply having a PhD does not guarantee one smart.
So why do I consider my PhD one of my proudest accomplishments? Because it took an *ENORMOUS* amount of work over 6 years (while simultaneously doing a medical residency) and contributed to the literature in my tiny field. Then some bloke from the UK who got his degree 5 minutes ago comes along and fires off a post telling the world that PhDs are a joke and barely any work at all. So yeah, color me offended. However, what is most upsetting about this isn't even personal; at a time where public faith in scientists has significantly declined (see reference at the end), the LAST thing we need is misleading media that can justify their prejudice. I don't know if you follow the news much, but in the US we have a hostile new administration that is absolutely gutting what was formerly the crown jewel of biomedical research in the world (the NIH, NSF, and American research university system). Those of us who work in science need to be careful with how our words come across to the public, lest they be coopted and twisted against it.
Side note: You asked about my perception of Cambridge or Oxford. I don't care about "prestige," some of the best research training programs in the US are at public schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison or the University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to this post, I had no strong views on Cambridge either way, but I have to admit after reading your article, my respect decreased quite a bit.
"I’m interested in your requirements for degree completion. Was two first author publications a definitive requirement? As in, you fail if you do not achieve this?"
The specifics of each program are highly dependent on one's PI and committee. My major professor told me that before he would let me defend my dissertation I needed at least two peer-reviewed publications. I don't know if you would consider not meeting that "failing," but indefinite limbo is essentially the same thing on a long enough timeline (see discussion below).
"The attrition rate says different things to you and me. To you, a high attrition rate = difficult. To me, a high attrition rate = a lack of resilience. To me, this means the application process could have been more rigorous to prevent these drop outs from wasting years of their lives. I suspect we’ll disagree here and that’s fine."
Strong disagree. There are so many reasons someone may have to drop out of a PhD program that do not fit with "lack of resilience." In the US, students often take on massive debt to attend university, and graduate students are paid below minimum wage for many, many years. Grad students also have crappy health insurance (some may totally lack it), and we do not have single-payer healthcare to fall back on. Does someone who cannot handle the financial strain of that "lack resilience"? Several of my colleagues in grad school had to quit because they couldn't make ends meet after so many years. Others worked multiple jobs. I myself drove to another state to work ER shifts to make extra $.
What about someone who is working on a cutting edge project that fails? (Incidentally, the severe consequences of losing funding and/or grad students leads to significant risk averse behavior, and is a major reason why so many projects are incremental instead of groundbreaking innovation). What if their hypothesis IS right, but they are scooped by another research group, and their work is no longer publishable or fundable to the same degree?
What about the many female grad students who have to grapple with sexual harassment from superiors? Or who get pregnant during their studies and don't have accommodating labs? Even if they do, it can delay them by years, and you circle back to the financial strain argument, now with an extra mouth to feed and clothe.
Look, I don't know you, so I don't want to be too harsh, but at minimum, a straight white male who casually bragged they went to undergrad at Cambridge and didn't even have to move for their PhD program seems like someone who has lived a fairly privileged life and may not have contemplated a lot of these challenges. I don't have a study backing this up offhand, but in my experience, the vast majority of grad students do their PhD at a different institution than BS/masters, which necessitates moves, expenses, etc.
"You say “the tough part is the research” and go on to say how what makes a PhD challenging is the uncertainty of scientific research. I totally agree with you!!! I hope I made that clear in the essay (I think I did?!) the toughest part IS the research. NOT the parts that get assessed for the degree (caveat in the differences we’ve discussed for you and me). To boil it down, I’m saying: research is bloody hard and I had a REALLY hard time in my PhD, but I didn’t have to for the degree alone. [...] All I’m saying is that the ways in which PhDs are assessed are quite unrelated to “contribution to science” and I wish they were more closely aligned especially because “contribution to science” is so difficult, unlike the degree of a PhD."
It sounds like PhDs in the UK essentially don't even assess the quantity and quality of a grad student's research. If that characterization is accurate, I am shocked, and feel like the degree should almost be called something else than "PhD," since it has such a different connotation in North America, parts of the EU, and other places around the world. This is likely why tenure-track faculty positions (which are becoming rarer by the year!) require multiple post-docs, since you can't rely on the quality of one's doctoral training.
A. Lupia, D.B. Allison, K.H. Jamieson, J. Heimberg, M. Skipper, & S.M. Wolf, Trends in US public confidence in science and opportunities for progress, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (11) e2319488121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2319488121 (2024).
Lots I could respond to here. Lot's of assumptions in your reply about who I am and what I know (and don't know). Let me limit myself to a point of agreement:
You point out how it was your supervisor who imposed the stringent two-paper requirement. Many other commenters point out how a supervisor can dictate the difficulty of a PhD. I literally write about that in the essay and don't deny it. I agree that this isn't good. I would perhaps posit that these faculty members are responding to the fact that university-levied requirements are insufficient to drive scientific discovery. I'm arguing for all PhD-granting institutions to make requirements more stringent such that there is less variability between supervisors and the letters "PhD" better reflect actual contribution to science, which supervisors like yours clearly insisted upon on their own accord.
I think Oxbridge is a bit of an outlier here re: the low-agency thing - there's a high concentration of undergrads who are high-IQ / low agency as you say, and I think a lot are quite institutionalised from their backgrounds and/or credentialism chasers with a bit of a background cushion meaning they don't need to be out there earning. Plus the sheer appeal of both universities qua institutions means lots of people just like the idea of being there just a bit longer (you see this even post-PhD, those who hang around as junior archivist, library roles, hangers on of music/chapel stuff, Blackwell's music etc. - no shade intended these are my people!)
Well put
In my field, my PhD dissertation is doing at least 3 published first author papers and adding a bit of intro and explanation.
So this whole time I was like wait, doing original science in a competitive field as a relative beginner is *hard*!
That was basically the structure of my thesis (I have three papers currently in the works), but it wasn’t a requirement at all. Absolutely agree with you that original science in a competitive field is hard!
What are the specific requirements for your degree, if you don’t mind me asking? Did you *have* to have 3 papers or was it, like me, the case that doing the work for your thesis happened to amount to 3 papers worth and you put in the extra work to actually publish them?
It seems many commenters are het up because they worked hard during their PhDs. I did too! I’m just saying that the driving force behind this hard work is not requirements set by the university, but more often self-imposed or supervisor-imposed. The minimum requirements for a PhD are easy, the reality of a PhD in many cases is hard.
You’ve gotten plenty of disagreeing comments from the US, but I’ll add one more anyway.
My PhD program was hard. It was not hard because we were stupid. I say this not to brag, but for context: most of us were near the top of our class as undergraduates in quantitative fields at the world’s top universities (including many from Tsinghua, KAIST, or the upper Indian Institutes of Technology). And yet, doing a PhD in our program routinely beat our asses over and over. Several smart, hard-working students quit or were dismissed every year. The difficulty of some classes made me reconsider my life choices every week, but we were expected to earn As in every class with enough energy left over for 30-40+ hours of theorem/proof-style research every week.
Completing a difficult PhD made me a better person, and I will be forever thankful for the opportunity. I agree with you in that the letters “PhD” don’t automatically guarantee intelligence. But if it was easy, many more people would be walking around with PhDs from rigorous programs.
Thanks for your insight. Yes, some disagreeing. Some agreeing (from the US too). As I acknowledge in the essay, different countries, fields, departments, and supervisors all can make a PhD harder or easier. I’m not denying that any one PhD student can have a hard time during their PhD. I’m calling for the absolutely degree requirements to be equalised across departments/supervisors etc and raised from where they are now. This then creates less room for immense tacit expectations by departments/supervisors since the requirements stand alone as the only thing between student and achieving their PhD. Essentially, I want the gatekeepers of the degree to insist on harder and better criteria for that degree, rather than leaving it up to supervisors who can have wildly different standards, in some cases incredible difficult standards.
As someone who, depending on how you look at it, flunked out of a Mathematics PhD in the US, I think what you're saying is at best only applicable to the UK. Do even begin PhD research in math in the US, you have to pass multiple exams which are absolutely brutal. They're comparable to med school entrance exams, and you have to do them multiple times. I'm actually a big proponent of loosening the requirements, at least in math, to even begin. I dropped to just doing a Masters and not a PhD because the exams were insane AND pointless. Anything I do research in I would learn. Why should I prove my knowledge of the fundamentals of several fields of study through an exam format than through coursework?
My department has an incentive to keep you working on your PhD. Once you're given the go ahead to start your dissertation, if you're a teaching assistant you start teaching an actual section of a class instead of providing extra instruction. The TAs are a lot cheaper than adjunct faculty.
The cheap labour incentive is an important one and it’s not good.
Maths is probably a special discipline in that innate ability is far more important than in other fields. Without wishing to insult, it sounds like you probably weren’t of that genius-level calibre that many maths PhDs are. To be honest, I think that’s probably a good thing. Getting a maths PhD is widely accepted as being very difficult because of this. It’s different gravy.
"Without wishing to insult"
You should take a moment to consider how arrogant and rude you are coming across as. I suspect you did and wrote that qualifying statement as an attempt to avoid blame.
What you just said to me is that I could never cut it as a Mathematics PhD AND that it's a good thing. Think about how you would feel if I told you that you didn't deserve to get your life science PhD because you're not smart enough.
I decided not to do a PhD because the expectations were frankly unfair and I don't care enough about research to deal with them. I have the intention to return to getting a Mathematics PhD some day, but at a different institution because I want to specialize in college level mathematics education.
I've been thinking about your post since my friend sent it to me. I suspect you may have experienced a phenomenon similar to "big fish in a small pond." Instead of being the best in a world of average, you're amongst the worst in a world of exceptional. That doesn't mean you're not exceptional. So your perspective is entirely twisted into believing things one way. You don't even address your bias about PhDs being STEM fields. Lab work isn't applicable to the majority of possible areas to get PhDs.
I really don’t consider it rude to say to someone “I don’t think you are a super genius”. And there is no arrogance involved since I make zero claims about my own intellect. I would absolutely fail a maths undergrad, let alone a PhD!
It can just be true that the maths PhD is hard and that is a good thing, and that this means many people who are very smart but not the absolute smartest can fail them or drop out. The PhD is an elite degree. It seems like maths may be (one of) the only disciplines where this is still true, and my essay highlights how it is not true for life sciences.
Do you think that you deserved a PhD and were unjustly robbed of one? Or do you agree with the fact that those who got theirs in your cohort were more capable than you? It’s a brutally honest discussion and I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. I really don’t mean any ill-will by it. I trust you’ve done your introspection on the matter though and so hopefully won’t mind too much. If it’s still a sore topic then fair enough, we can draw a line under this.
I'm not calling you read for saying I'm not a genius; I'm calling you rude for implying that my decision to not get the PhD is a good thing and because I was incapable in the first place. Even if that's not what you intended to say, it's how you came across. And rudeness is more about what you say than what you mean.
Those in my cohort are more willing to jump through the hoops and insane requirements. I will say, my university seems to be an outlier even in the US based on discussions with other students. Those who are pursuing their PhDs are more interested in research or already had a masters degree when they started with us. (Note that those with masters still had to meet the same coursework and exam requirements as those without.) My decision to just pursue the masters was also based on what topics of research are available at the department—none of them interested me. I do not see my peers as being "more capable" than me. In fact, most of my peers were struggling as much as I was. I just decided it wasn't worth it to go for the PhD at this university.
When multiple of my undergrad professors referred to the first year or two of a math PhD as "hazing," it should show there's a problem. Talking with those who have started their research, the hardest part is passing the qualifying exams. Once one starts research, things become perhaps slightly anti-sisyphean, but not very much. Have you considered that the dropout rate vs fail rate is so high because departments don't want to fail students? Instead, they choose not to let them finish and eventually cut their funding, forcing them to drop out. I have no evidence for this hypothesis, but I suspect the majority of higher education drop outs didn't leave because it was too challenging, but because they deemed it not worth the time and effort, especially if you ignore those who failed out.
Fair enough. Does sound brutal. In the UK (even for maths), that two-year hazing doesn’t exist. It’s just research only. I considered myself a research more than a student. That fact alone probably explain how we had such different impressions.
In brief defence of the UK, the undergrad and masters at Cambridge are very tough (probably explaining why I did so badly at them 😂). The PhD at Cambridge is a notable deceleration, probably akin to the third year of your PhD programme and onwards.
Great post. I think a few aspects worth mentioning is the demographic cliff most universities are about the experience in the US as each graduating high school class will be smaller than the previous one starting in 2026, the worsening public finances across the globe as populations age and tax bases shrink, and the over-reliance on "free labor" (read taxpayer-funded) that graduate students provide. With AI, perhaps a good chunk of grunt work will be reduced, especially in computing fields. However, life sciences and any research the requires fieldwork or talking to other humans will still require legions of bright-eyed 23 year olds to carry out basic operations for a penny an hour. A more selective process that produces small cohorts of graduate students will have to confront not only funding constraints but also real physical constraints like who is going to unload the beakers or schedule the group meetings.
Great points. The notion of the grunt work is interesting. You don’t need to be doing a PhD to do grunt work. Perhaps 20-something research assistants will take up the brunt of it (and hopefully be paid better).
A lot of life sciences research is skill-based and not knowledge-based. I’d argue you don’t even need an undergrad to start as a research assistant—you need vocational experience more than knowledge of the workings of the electron transport chain, for example. That way more selective PhDs won’t decrease output but will rather make it much more efficient and better-directed (by more elite lab project leaders).
A lot of RAs nowadays are doing it to build up their CV to then apply for a PhD. Perhaps creating an independent career path that is skill-based, starting with RA and ending with head of a core facility, for example, is the way forward (this exists currently in the realm of possibility, but it is by no means common or aspirational within the culture)
The broader demographic shifts you highlight are complicated and potentially very damaging though!
"Anti-Sisyphean" is exactly right. Departments have no incentive to fail their own students and every incentive to promote them, so every year they make failing just a little bit harder. But the meritocratic solutions you propose -- especially those that depend on peer review -- have their own costs. They compel over-specialization and incrementalism and make revolutionary change virtually impossible. They encourage people to maximize not merit but its measure (in this context: publications, conference presentations, teaching evals, etc.). Short of returning to a pre-professional model, there may be no solution.
True, it’s a very difficult problem to tackle. Sowell’s words (as always) apply: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs”
Yeah it might require taking a page from the Catholic church’s playbook and instituting some kind of “devil’s advocate” program whereby some percentage of academic jobs are reserved exclusively for those who think that everyone else in their field is doing it all wrong.
Having a PhD definitely doesn't make you smart, but many people think it does. You'll hear jokes about a STEM PhD just means that you know a lot about a really specific thing - something only a small group of people would appreciate.
There were definitely people in graduate school who probably should not have been in graduate school (in a STEM field). They got PhDs, though. In fact, you would hear people joke that you just needed to wait long enough. They will eventually just give you the PhD to get you out of there! Sadly, it was true. In hindsight, the process for getting into graduate school was by no means rigorous. You just needed the right Bachelor's degree, decent to good grades, and an application. There were no interviews. You were only screened by the application, transcripts, and recommendation letters (and I have no idea how much weight those letters really carried). Other programs can be different, but it's probably easier to get into a PhD program than many people outside of academia think.
Exactly. Out of interest, where did you do your PhD?
I went to Duke University in North Carolina.
Interesting to know that you’ve experienced the same at a top US university. I’m best acquainted with the UK system but had a hunch the phenomenon is global
Yeah...individual programs can vary, and things may have changed some since I was at Duke over 10 years ago. Your advisor makes a big difference, too.
My PhD program would not give you a PhD to get you out of there. They were beyond happy to let you hang yourself but they weren’t going to give you a degree if you didn’t pull it off. I think they even have a rule now that if you dont get out in ten years, they throw you out without a degree.
I am amazed at this thread, because everything in it is so far from my experience that I’m wondering if I’m taking crazy pills.
I'm interested in who you mean by "they". I think the key distinction is a PhD supervisors requirements versus a PhD-awarding university's requirements. The former can be massively varied and quite insanely demanding. The latter, which is what I try to argue, falls woefully short of the mark. I actually think that if universities upped their assessment criteria (via some objective metric like those I discuss in the final paragraph), then these nightmarish supervisors would be less prevalent.
At my institution, "they" was the department. The professors, both singularly and in the aggregate. As individual mentors, as dissertation and orals exams committees, and as an a rule-making body that assembles curriculum and requirements.
I think I take a different approach to assessment. Systems of assessment that are school wide at the university in particular give me serious pause. The purpose of the PhD program is not to have a general education, rather to choose a rabbit hole with a particular set of really idiosyncratic rabbits in it and get in there with them. To systemize that is to upend any hope of joining in communion with those particular weirdos in their particular subfield. Specialization is in this way is the opposite of systemizing, I feel like? My point is, specialization IS massively varied, and I think that's what makes it specialization.
Additionally, the "objective" criteria by which students might be assesses is, in my corner of the world currently, usually the purview of administrators because of the generality of the criteria is only of use to the act of administration and very much less useful in the act of teaching. We see this condition in action in the States in the development of "standards" for each class, which are increasingly meaningless as the student gets older and their experience and ability more specialized. Thirty students in my modern world class are not getting the same education even in the same class, by any means, despite my own "objectives" in teaching that class. So, to reiterate, a generalized standard at that level is useful only to administrators and is more-or-less meaningless in the classroom. This is even more the case in grad school, where the classroom consists of two people - you and your mentor. I would argue that in our case at least administration could offer a systematized training but that would likely render it utterly un-specialized and, well, generic. I think that, although a generic system may eliminate the odd tyrant of an adviser, it also eliminates the purpose of the PhD in the first place.
I have a feeling there's a discernment here that we are about to make between science, social science, and humanities PhDs. I was trained in a social sciences/hum department, which may make a difference in perspectives. We were interested in that which is true for some people, not that which is true for all people, and I think it might be reflected in the very structure of our training programs.
Does any of what I say here make sense in the field of chemistry? Or is my perspective purely born of humanities training?
Thanks, very insightful. I agree totally about the need to specialise and how any blanket management of a PhD can cramp academic freedom and ignore differences in departments/fields etc. I definitely don’t want more frequent assessment or test-based assessment. Tell me if you think this would work as a fair way to ensure certain standards are met:
To gain a PhD, a student must have their work (thesis or published papers) cited n number of times, with n being normalised within each field to account for different rates of publication/citation.
Regarding the tyrannical supervisors, with this well-defined criterion in place, universities can then implement better channels of communication directly between students and departments/the university. If the standard is achieved and the student wishes to graduate, they can—regardless of the wishes of the supervisor.
Do you think that would work in the humanities?
I'm certain that individual programs can vary a bit. So can the field. To be honest, it's kind of amazing how experiences can vary even in the same field. In my experience in chemistry, it was highly dependent on your advisor. If your advisor wanted to just get rid of you, no one else would say anything. Even if you didn't make it to PhD candidate status, they would still let you get a Master's in many cases. I only knew a couple of situations where someone didn't leave the program without something. Duke also had a "5 and a half year" rule. I assume they still do. If you didn't defend by 5.5 years, you could no longer be a teaching assistant. You either needed a fellowship or money from your advisor. The effect in my time was that pretty much everyone graduated by the deadline.
this is very interesting! thank you for sharing :)
Great read, you’ve said the quiet part out loud!
Thanks!
Humblebragging! Top university, top degree but all I did was pick my nose with the other hand tied behind my back.
I’m sorry that this was your takeaway. Difficulty is relative. All I’m saying is that the difficulty of science itself is much greater than the difficulty of the degree requirements. I propose they be brought in line with each other. That is all.