PhD students in biology are cheap, exploited labor & sold a false promise

Universities call someone a student or apprentice or intern and use that as license to abuse them

This schematic is roughly accurate about the fate of biology PhDs

Only a tiny fraction of people who go down the path of biology PhD end up in professorial roles. 37% drop out of the PhD. Of course, these statistics are not inherently bad, if the degree is the best use of one’s time for future careers, but the short answer is: it is not. The pipeline is large initially just because laboratories are fueled on cheap, obedient, dedicated labor.

A few thoughts on why a PhD in biology is a Ponze scheme and constitutes exploited labor, and why I would advise anyone I care about to avoid it. Note: in what follows I am talking about biology Phds where the work is wet lab based.

1. Biology PhDs don’t have a guaranteed end date. The PI (principal investigator) and university can hold you hostage for 5, 6, 7, or even 8, or 9 years.

2. It is an interesting commodity where your ‘educational achievement’ depends on your ‘result’ rather than your effort or comprehension or skills, etc. Psychologically a lack of guaranteed end date is anxiety provoking, and tying the degree to results is deeply problematic (see 4).

3. The pay for biology PhD students is abysmal. This is Harvard. And it is on the highest end. Some schools are in the 30k range.

4. A culture where you don’t get a degree till you get results encourages fraud. If you run an experiment 3 times, you will submit to the boss the most favorable result, and not the most representative. See Stanford president.

5. After the initial 1-3 years with classes, there is no further didactic instruction. So folks who argue they are getting free tuition— what precisely is that tuition for?

6. PhD students work 50-60 hours on average, and those who want to succeed the most often work 80. That’s 10 dollars an hour, an insulting and exploitative wage.

7. The day to day work is mind numbing— carrying out often repetitive, mechanical tasks where nearly no higher knowledge is needed. Years are spent pipetting.

8. If this wasn’t about exploitation, then ask your PI to pay you $20-30 for every hour worked in lab over 40. If they won’t, then tell them to kindly stfu.

The medical field in America does something that PhD does not. It limits the supply of doctors so that you are assured a job. We can debate if that is good for society, but it is good for those who complete the degree. Instead, the country trains way too many PhDs because labs enjoy their cheap, and sturdy labor. Cutting PhD slots would be a boon to the poor folks tricked into doing them.

Now what about “my PhD helped me in my career even though I went into… <industry, finance, etc.”?

This argument is made in part because it is human psychology to rationalize our life choices. But the truth is: most of the people who succeed in these latter careers draw upon intrinsic curiosity and problem solving skills not derived through PhD. Even those who think the PhD taught them critical thinking might have learned these skills far more easily, and in far fewer years, with a different didactic study (including on the job training) or it might have merely been the passage of time (and aging that fostered it).

The truth is we lack high quality natural experiments to test this hypothesis. Those could be done in situations where a person is or is not admitted randomly based on funding perturbations, across cycles. Compare the 5th student admitted to the 6th (who in some years gets in, and other years doesn’t).

If we close PhD slots will be ‘lose a generation of young scientists’. Already, from the figure, you can see this is a bullshit argument. The vast majority are lost in the current system because they drop out and because we don’t have jobs for them to run their own ideas in their own lab. You could cut PhD slots tremendously and still have the same number of young start up labs. Moreover, there are thousands who finished just a year or two ago and waiting in the wings.

For the time being, I believe this is the truth about PhDs in wet lab biology, and tell it to any young person I meet. I feel that is my duty. Cutting a few PhD positions is probably good for the poor people, on the margin, who would have been conned into signing up. It is bad for labs who need to find cheap labor, but the good news is with indirects being cut, there will be more money for directs so they can hire at market rates.

PS: I confine my remarks to PhDs in wet labs in biomedicine and not computation or other computer based work b/c some of the calculus shifts, and the concern really is over the wet lab market (not the one in Wuhan— b/c there it was lab leak ;) )