deviationblue

My question is simple: why are we robbing academics and research of PhDs? There is a thread that's actively encouraging that people should get PhDs (which is fine), but then the take-away for most commenters is that you're going to get a PhD and go into industry, not research or academics.

Maybe I am an old fool, and like to romanticize things, but I cannot believe that we encourage people to become masters in a field or subfield, and then go and write marketing algorithms for Google.

Having a PhD should not be a requirement for MOST jobs in AI or ML or whatever. Most jobs are bordering on CRUD, and those that need some kind of thinking can be done by someone who has a 'lowly' masters degree.

I see this trend happening for three reasons:

1) To reduce competition in job applications; employers are inundated with thousands of resumes for one job.

2) Most employers are copying FAANG, pretending that their business problems require PhDs to solve them.

3) We have lost our understanding of what having a PhD means, i.e. for a college student who wants to decide between two paths, industry or academics, there is no difference anymore. That seems like a very dangerous trend to me because 1) we're wasting workers who could be productive and have no intention of being academics or teachers on PhDs, and 2) we're wasting PhDs on people who have no intention of staying in academics, research or teaching. Not saying that PhDs have a limited supply, but PhD programs certainly have limited slots.

Industry cannot be like academia because most employers do not have the time or resources to indulge years and years on research, and making sure that the problems that solved are truly sound, and not just sound enough to ship it. This kind of lazy academics in industry almost seems damaging and counterproductive to any field it touches.

Maybe I am wrong about this whole deal, and so I ask.