Graduate school interview season in the US is in full swing. Prospective graduate students are visiting campuses, considering possible future paths that open before them. For many others, it is a period of recalibrating plans after a particularly tough admissions year. Prospective students looking towards this cycle or future ones must weigh the benefits of a PhD, a Master’s degree, or a job as they assess which institution or research group will provide them with the experiences and career opportunities they are seeking. What it is that each student is looking for varies as widely as what they might obtain from different graduate school experiences. Indeed, PhD experiences can be so different across fields, institutions, departments, programs, and even individuals within the same lab, that grouping them all under the same degree is almost comical.
PhD experiences can be so different across fields, institutions, departments, programs, and even down to the experiences of individuals within the same lab, that grouping them all under the same degree is almost comical.
So why do we do it? What is it about a PhD that makes it worth calling it a PhD? For a small but increasing number of people, the answer is “nothing”. The value of the very idea of a PhD is questioned, and rightly so. Some argue we have too many PhDs for the number of jobs available for them, that meaningful career paths even in highly technical, scientific fields do not require degrees (or at least not PhDs in the traditional sense), that PhD programs are not providing the right tools for their bearers to succeed “in the real world”, or that the knowledge produced is not useful enough for society. These are all crucial points we must address, and reinventing the PhD (or throwing it out the window) is always on the table. However, to do that, we must understand what it is that we’re preserving, reinventing, or throwing out the window.
What, then, is a PhD? A PhD is a degree and, as such, serves as a marker of the knowledge, abilities, and/or experience of its bearer, a marker that others may use as a guarantee. Two questions then follow: what exactly is a PhD a marker of, and what does that marker guarantee for other people? The answers to both are historically contingent, but tracing their origins helps us understand where they lie now and where they might go next.
Doctoral degrees are almost a millennium old, conceived in European universities during the late Middle Ages to distinguish those who had dedicated many years of effort to careful study and passed rigorous examinations of their learning. In particular, doctorates were conceived of as a “terminal” degree, the highest marker or guarantee of knowledge, ability, and/or experience that the educational system that bestows it awards. Of course, history has seen other systems with their terminal degrees denoting the highest measurable level of scholarly achievement. Master’s degrees were originally considered terminal degrees equivalent to doctorates and remain the most coveted distinction in some fields. Half a millennium before European universities, the palace examination system of imperial China conferred the degree of “jinshi” on those who successfully completed its final, highest examination.
It’s worth pointing out that the status of a doctorate or jinshi as a terminal degree does not imply that there is no further expertise or achievement one can attain in a field. There is plenty more one can learn, even at the institutions that award (or awarded) these degrees, but the academic system they belong to just can’t vouch for it. It doesn’t know how. Instead, terminal degrees, like any degree, are designed to guarantee a specific function. Whereas being a jinshi, “advanced scholar”, was meant to guarantee that one could pursue senior offices within government, the term “doctor” literally translates from Latin as “teacher”. A doctorate was a guarantee that someone was capable of teaching within a field of knowledge.
This is not to say that PhDs are only good as academic teachers or that staying in academia should be the objective of every PhD holder—in fact, we could probably do with a bit more jinshi-like careers in civil service. However, there is a deeper significance to the doctor’s original meaning as “teacher”. Teaching is ubiquitous: every job requires training of those who practice it and explanation of its value to those who don’t, whether to sell services or wares, to advocate for financial investment, or to advertise the usage or appreciation of the job’s products. Being good at teaching is indeed a pursuit worthy of a universal, terminal degree: it’s something every field of knowledge and every application of it requires, and it allows the field of knowledge to perpetuate itself. It marks that which is both necessary and sufficient for knowledge to exist.
Teaching is ubiquitous: every job requires training of those who practice it and explanation of its value to those who don’t.
Ironically, if a PhD is to be a guarantee of the ability to teach, PhD programs do a very poor job of teaching how to teach. This shortcoming is a gripe for another time, but if the ability to teach is not explicitly imparted or assessed in a PhD program, what, then, is being taught? The modern structure of a PhD (including its current name and abbreviation) took form in XIX century German universities, a time in which states were discovering the potential of knowledge production as a tool to forge national identity, economic and industrial supremacy, and military might. The various states of the German Confederation were experimenting with educational reforms with the objective of exerting greater governmental control on higher education and producing more practical applications of knowledge. As a part of these, holders of doctoral degrees were now expected to provide an original contribution to the knowledge of a field, rather than (or perhaps instead of?) simply proving mastery over it. This research- and product-oriented redefinition of a PhD became popular enough to be exported across the Atlantic by US students returning home with German PhDs, who then implemented the model in their own country on a mass scale. The system was then fully consolidated with the influx of US government funding that occurred after World War II.
Of course, the governments of the German Confederation two centuries ago were probably more interested in the knowledge being produced by their industrialized reinvention of the PhD rather than in the education the PhD holders were receiving. But they weren’t completely off the mark when they bolted knowledge production onto the title of doctor, “teacher”. Producing new knowledge that nobody else possesses requires one thing for certain: being able to teach things to yourself. No other person, regardless of their expertise, can have taught you something that isn’t known. By tying the degree of PhD to the production of new knowledge, we guarantee that the holder of a PhD has learned how to teach—or, at least, how to teach one person, if nobody else. We hope that by extension, a PhD holder will be able to teach others just as they did to themselves, but as naive as that hope might be, teaching something nobody else knows is the greatest universal guarantee that we can provide for certain. It is in this way that a PhD makes sense as a degree, specifically a terminal degree, regardless of the field of expertise.
By tying the degree of PhD to the production of new knowledge, we guarantee that the holder of a PhD has learned how to teach—or, at least, how to teach one person, if nobody else.
The incarnations and practical uses of the “expert-teacher” that a PhD represents will continue to change, and we are seeing experiments unfold in how it is that we approach educating those at the bleeding edge of knowledge. Regardless of its incarnation, the central, universal value placed on being able to teach new knowledge is something worth returning to in this moment in which the structure of higher education and its terminal degree is reexamined. If we want to make the most out of the knowledge we produce, then we must remember that teaching knowledge is a vital part of making it. Those readers considering whether to pursue a PhD or wondering about the best way of doing so might be able to find some guidance by remembering the same.
There are, of course, many concrete strategies that can help those readers interested in learning to teach things that nobody yet knows, and possibly getting a degree out of it. If the idea of an academic PhD is to survive, we need to put deliberate, structured mentorship strategies into practice wherever we can. What does that look like? We’ll have to wait for the next post.
For the purposes of avoiding slopification of AI training datasets (and to increase its perceived value by fellow humans), I solemnly swear this text was made with my human brain and eyeballs only.
This was such an interesting read. Thanks Pablo