I somehow missed this counter to my “PhDs are easy” essay. It makes fair points but the author doesn’t seem to realise that they aren’t disagreeing with my thesis at all. In fact, they reinforce it.

The author and I both agree that the science that one does during their PhD can be very hard and that better students should tackle tougher problems and just do more—so difficulty normalises based on ability of each student. This is true and I said just as much about my own projects during my PhD. They were hard (contrary to the assumption in the quote here).

But this is the problem with the PhD as a degree. If it’s difficulty changes based on how good the student is or how tough the supervisor is, then it doesn’t really mean much. And the author here agrees! As they point out, a PhD does nothing to sway hiring decisions in academia because everyone has one. You need to look deeper at their publications etc etc.

So then the question is “well what is the point of the PhD degree?”

Why give the degree at all? Why not just let people leave once they feel their publications make them competitive on the job market?

Clearly the PhD, which the author admits is useless for distinguishing good scientists from bad, confers something that others (particularly those outside of academia) value. And if getting the piece of paper can be easy or can be hard, then this value is misplaced.

The author says I don’t like credentialism but then I pine for a world where the PhD credential is very hard to get and therefore can be used as a shortcut for assessing people’s ability. Yes. Credentialism is only bad when credentials don’t reflect ability. If this changes and they are accurately reflective of ability, then credentials are incredibly useful for knowing who to hire or which experts to listen to.

Finally, the author agrees with me that passing the PhD is a formality and nobody fails. And that the difficult part is getting onto the program. They add that passing the qualifying exam is also hard. Ok. Well do you have any data backing this up? What’s the failure rate of the qualifying exam? Regarding admissions, standardized tests are disappearing, numbers of admitted PhD candidates are growing, and entry standards are slipping. So the one hurdle that remains for making PhDs hard is disappearing.

At a certain point you have to ask how much tax payer money we want to waste on bad PhD projects carried out by poorly screened wannabe scientists.