University Affairs

PhDs can get lost in stereotypes

I was reading Sabine Hikels’s excellent blog Leaving Academia the other day, and noticed her July 15th post entitled ‘The MA versus the PhD’. It’s worth a read – in fact, the whole blog is worth subscribing to. In this post, the pros and cons of a terminal MA are discussed. She quotes a 2002 StatCan report that found that MAs earned an average of 33 per cent more than BAs, but PhDs earned only eight per cent more than MAs. Keep in mind that these are stats, and refer only to the elusive ‘norm’. I’m sure that once these numbers gets broken down into professional fields and academic disciplines, the picture gets much murkier.

But it does point to an interesting paradox in our knowledge-addicted society. We strongly believe innovation and creativity are intrinsic to our future well being. That’s why we admire smart people – after all, really smart people are kinda hard to overlook. We will spend ridiculous amounts of time and money ‘upgrading’ our kids’ education to give them a competitive edge in whatever opportunities we hope lie ahead. We think spending tax dollars on ensuring equal access to university is a good thing. We brag about our kids’ academic achievements. As employers, we hold a BA as a rite of passage into most decent entry-level positions. An MA is increasingly taking the place of a BA in terms of the job market in some fields like business and social work. But once we get to the PhD, everything changes.

A PhD in the non-academic job market is often viewed at the same level as a refugee – someone who needed to escape or was forced out of their homeland and now needs to start over. There can be a little bit of suspicion about why they didn’t or couldn’t make it as a professor. There is also that old stereotype about smart people – that they are socially maladaptive or do anything useful in the real world.

Unfortunately, it’s that last one that does the most damage to PhDs. Not because it is so common anymore – it’s not really. It’s that ultimately, we tend believe that it is true – that we can’t really do anything well if we haven’t accrued years of experience. This is one of the unpleasant side effects of spending so long in an environment where our expertise is so often and deeply questioned and tested.

I think we are less than a generation away from a radical reduction in the tendency to question the value of a PhD in our society, not just our universities, especially in Canada where such a large proportion of our society now earns a university degree at some level. But until then, any graduating PhD would probably benefit from some career support around re-articulating their academic experiences in non-academic terms.

It is undoubtedly true that expertise requires time to develop, both inside and outside academic workplaces. But in the non-academic world, the individual characteristics and demonstrated abilities of a person are usually much more significant than what they happen to know at the moment of hiring. Ultimately, this is true in academe as well, but rarely acknowledged. The difference between a lengthy CV and a succinct resume illustrates this well.

Both PhDs and employers need to stop and reconsider which stereotypes are influencing their reluctance to understand each other better. Why do so few employers have specialized fast-track career paths for PhDs entering their fields? Why do so few PhDs believe that non-academic careers can be just as stimulating and in many cases more lucrative than academic jobs? Why are we still reading articles wondering about the relevancy of a PhD in a knowledge-based economy?

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