It's expensive. It often leaves you, on net, worse off financially than you would have been without the degree. And it makes you stupid.
The stupidity, thankfully, is only temporary. But while it lasts, it sure is painful to watch.
This post grows out of a conversation I had recently with someone who deals regularly with graduate students. I was relating an exchange I'd had with an interviewer, a PhD economist, who'd asked me about my MBA. "Well, while I was getting it, I thought I knew everything," I told him. "Sadly, that turned out not to be the case."
The interviewer laughed. "Everyone thinks they know everything when they're in graduate school." He paused. "You're lucky you got over it. A lot of people never do."
To judge from the number of people who think that their PhD makes them an expert in, well, everything, he's absolutely right.
Anyway, this led my friend, also a PhD, to diagram the predictible course of a graduate student in a social science program. The first few years are a heady experience, particularly in a PhD program--as a lowly MBA, I had sort of the cowpox version of the deadly disease.
For the first time in their lives, the students are treated like adults. They are in the outer circle of an intellectual elite, treated slightly more like members of the club than time-consuming nuisances. Their classes are smaller, and offer actual conversation with some big name professors. Instead of textbooks, they start reading academic books written for academics, delving deep into the insider language of their craft. They start to feel like members of a special elite, privy to secret knowledge, cleverer than the normal run of people. They get not merely the feeling that they have learned things others haven't mastered, but that they are the possessors of knowledge that others can't master unless they, too, are initiates. They develop an amused contempt for anyone who is not in a PhD program. Oddly, they are more easily convinced of the competence of people with advanced degrees in entirely unrelated fields than, say, policy professionals.
There's an additional effect in a lot of social sciences; graduate students tend to drift towards schools and professors whom they find ideologically sympathetic. They read some books that agree with them, and listen to their professors confidently smiting the arguments of people they didn't like in the first place. After a year or so of coursework, they feel like able masters of a difficult body of material which proves, scientifically, that they were right all along.
Meanwhile, those professors are constantly challenging them--forcing them to jump a series of ever-higher hurdles, exposing their logical mistakes, breaking them down and building them up again in the mold of their school. At the end of this process, they are like movie Marines coming out of boot camp--they feel ten feet tall, tough as nails, and hungry for some action. This is generally when they start making total, and all-too-often extremely public, asses of themselves.
The new graduate student's lack of humility is a stunning thing, perfect, seamless, and unbreakable. They begin issuing their opinions to anyone who will hold still on the assumption that the benighted masses have just been waiting patiently for a clever graduate student to explain How Things Really Work. This is humiliating enough to watch when they are boring people who agree with them. But when they start getting into arguments, other people begin shuffling uncomfortably in empathetic shame--particularly those of us who have weathered this delayed adolescence ourselves.
The new graduate student, bolstered by the opinions of their professors, tends to become extraordinarily indignant at the notion that anyone would challenge them. Since no one without a graduate degree could possibly have mastered the requisite knowledge, disagreement becomes a sign of willful malice. They stride forth confidently into arguments with professionals armed with the three books they have read on the topic, the opinions of their professors, and enough arrogance to power a high speed monorail between Moscow and Vladivostok. That's when they get their asses handed to them. Even worse, they are often too dumb to recognize this has happened; at the nadir of the disease, they are simply constitutionally incapable of recognizing that a slot at a good school is not the same thing as omniscience.
The problem is that the professors whose ideas they are parroting, the authors of the books they have read, have honed their beliefs against the harsh grindstone of academic and political debate. Their professors thoroughly understand the canonical works of the other side, and can defend, at length, the subtle judgements that led them to reject their conclusions. The graduate student can usually only walk through one or two rounds of a lengthy rehash of these arguments before they are forced to fall back upon "My professor says that Mr. A is right and Mr. B is wrong."
Unfortunately, there are few topics of great interest in which all the authorities are on one side. In economics, the subject with which I'm most familiar, trade and asset price controls are among the very few topics of which this could actually be said. So even if Professor Z is extremely eminent and smart, the odds are very good that at least one Nobel laureate holds exactly the opposite view. If the graduate student is unfortunate to be talking to someone who has read the views of that Nobel Laureate, the precipice of humiliation yawns before them. Watching someone go through this, even if they agree with you--perhaps especially if they agree with you--is the emotional equivalent of fingernails on the world's largest chalkboard.
The question we debated is: is it worth talking to graduate students in this stage? Can one take the ones who share one's ideological convictions quietly aside and advise them to wait a few more years before unleashing their newfound brilliance upon a waiting word? Can one, through gentle and respectful argument, convince the less ideologically congenial ones to behave like adults? Can one save them from the usual course of disillusionment, which is repeated humiliation at the hands of people who are not quite as dumb as they had assumed?
We were unsure. So I am throwing the question to my readers, many of whom have either been graduate students, trained same, or worked with them in the immediate aftermath. Is there hope? Or must everyone suffer as I did when I discovered, with brutal shock, that there were still a surprising number of people in the world who knew more than I did?
I'm a grad student in Physics, hopefully in my final year. We learn pretty early on that there are a lot of people out there who know more than we do -- our advisors, for one, are usually in that set. I've been an arrogant bastard from time to time, and made a fool of myself in the field of economics more than once, but I usually had other Ph.D students to set me straight. I think the grad school process in the hard sciences is rather different from that in the social sciences, though, and my understanding is that either of those is worlds away from an MBA or law school. I guess the biggest thing for me is that grad school was the first time I wasn't constantly being told how smart I was -- it was put up or shut up time, and I felt like a fraud for my first year or so, until I realized that I could actually handle this.
If you want an actual answer to your question, I suspect that everyone is a little surprised when they find out that they're not experts on everything. Some of us are even shocked. I don't feel badly about that, though; I feel badly for the people who never quite get the picture.
It's good you talked about this as a phenomenon in the social sciences, Megan. PhDs trained in an actual science (like physics, chemistry, biology) do not generally have such an experience, or go through the same developmental steps. They spend their time largely failing, and so come to learn just how hard it is to actually know something, to actually advance a field of knowledge a small bit. Grad school becomes an object lesson in how the real world works. For liberal arts types, it can be just the opposite - as you said, Megan, read a few books, find like-thinking professors and students, and voila! Ossified, dogmatic thinking, and reinforcement all around you that is designed to encourage dismissal of threatening information or ideas.
I had a poli sci girlfriend for a while who sat around with her friends talking about some book about someone else's version of an answer to some big question, like "What is government?" or "What is a state?" After years of this, they wrote their own book. Meanwhile, math grad students I played cards with racked their brains for years trying to come up with something thesis-worthy, often giving up and taking less-coveted MS degrees and retaining their sanity. While we in chemistry spent years having things mostly not work so that a few thousand or a few dozen people could one day read about a tiny advance in an area of interest only to them. These latter experiences tend to open minds, rather than close them. They teach people to think, not to rationalize. Most importantly, they involve actually accomplishing something.
I didn't mean to get all polemical (too late, sorry). But. Knowledge is hard. Thinking you know something is easy. Without some feedback mechanism, some rigorous set of checks, any group of people will slide toward that second mode of behavior rather than the first. Besides, it's much more fun to make pronouncements on some big question than to spend years answering some tiny, insignificant one. It's not really about just grad school. It's also about the social sciences themselves.
So after 5 years of encouraging (nagging) my husband to go back for his PhD in economics he has finally relented and is readying himself for the GREs. And now you tell me that for my trouble I'll have to live (like a pauper) with an insufferable know-it-all for the next however-many-years it takes for him to get it. Geez, way to rain on my parade.
A multi-year hiatus between undergraduate school and graduate school can have a very beneficial influence on this issue, both for students and professors. It can help make the professors more interesting (no guarantee here) and the students more discriminating (none here either).
I took my MBA in a night-only, must-be-working-full-time program from which the average graduate was ~35 years old. Most of the professors were employed full time in industry, or were running their own businesses. Most class time was spent discussing material which was not in the assigned textbooks. Most of the student questions were tempered by work experience.
I would choose this approach again, given the choice. My employer also paid most of my tuition, which avoids those pesky student loans.
Eriver,
Interesting comment and, for the most part, probably true, especially "Knowledge is hard."
However, I think it is useful to point out that there are basic differences, especially in their object of study and the relationship of the scholar to them, between the "hard sciences" and the social science/humanities that probably account for the different stages of graduate education, different approaches, and so on.
Hmm, this problem didn't crop up for us in law school (UVA). We knew early on that we didn't know anything in depth, and that never changed. All we learned from the coursework was the background in a particular subject area, which could be applied very generally to a legal issue, but we also knew that a lot of legal research would go into answering almost any legal question.
What we really learned was how to learn.
Lawyers who practice a particular specialty in a particular state gradually learn the pertinent cases and laws that apply to their practice--but it takes several years (at least) after law school to get to that point. And all the law students I ever talked to knew that.
I think the social sciences graduate students are susceptible to the worst variant of this disease, if for no other reason than their schools are often echo chambers of ideological esoterica. The contempt toward non-initiates is really strong here. And often, that contempt only hardens once they realize, upon graduation, that their knowledge has little or no practical use to society (gender studies, peace studies, Old English Literature, etc.) Basically unemployable, they end up trying to get on the tenure track. They never leave school.
Business school students are the second worst. For some reason, many of these newly minted graduates have the assumption that people who have been in a line of work for 40 years can't possibly be doing things right because, well, they didn't go to Harvard, Wharton or Kellogg. Lots of these types end up in consulting firms, charging high fees to tell seasoned professionals things they already know (or would never do anyway).
The hard sciences and law school students sometimes contract the disease, but they get cured fast because they quickly run into people who know more than they do, and the subject matter is clear and not nearly as open to interpretation as, say, diversity studies.
Yep, I will second some of the commenters, law students find out pretty quickly that they don't know what the hell they are talking about, oftentimes in front of 60-100 of their peers (the dreaded Socratic Method). I speak from experience.
Like some others have said, natural sciences are different. I entered physics grad school cocky and arrogant, but failure, and more failure, and retreating into ever-more-narrowly-defined aspects of the project (a necessity for progress, although a bad basis for a research program) ground me down. I came out feeling like a small fry.
As a postdoc I got more confidence back. (Maybe too much confidence...) I realized that what I had learned in grad school was how to identify new problems and solve them, rather than working on problems assigned to me. A lot of the problems that I initially identified and solved on my own were not terribly significant, but they were 100% mine, and that was important. The big questions I had as a postdoc were "Can I do it again? And can I do it for more significant problems?"
As a postdoc I identified a few more problems, problems a bit more significant than my grad school problems (even if not TEH MOST EARTHSHATTERING EVAR!1!!11) and solved them and persuaded myself that grad school wasn't just a coincidence, that I can do this. Then I got a faculty job.
Rex,
UVA law 2006 grad here, and I'd say I had observed this phenomenon, but among a particular subset of both law students and lawyers: the crusading activists.
These are the people who are deeply confused between "is" and "ought" and answer every hypo with what their particular ideology says the answer should be. A little education, for them, means a patina of legalese for arguments unmoored from legal reality. They are a real disaster in the courtroom for that reason: no judge is interested in what you think the law should say; the question is, what will the appeals court say?
Fortunately, all of my law professors were skilled at deflating this sort of thing even when they agreed with the underlying motivation.
I'm not going to get into the content here, because your commenters are rabidly academic-hating and I don't see much point. But this is why I hate it when you say "the plural of anecdotes is not data"; you don't hold your own arguments to that same rule. And I'd say that's probably the biggest failing of your blog in general. You have entirely differing standards of evidence between your own arguments and arguments that don't fit your own ideology.
"For liberal arts types, it can be just the opposite - as you said, Megan, read a few books, find like-thinking professors and students, and voila! Ossified, dogmatic thinking, and reinforcement all around you that is designed to encourage dismissal of threatening information or ideas."
You haven't spent much time in higher education, have you?
Freddie's right.
This post is so silly, so misguided, I'm actually shocked.
Graduate students develop "an amused contempt for anyone who is not in a PhD program." Whaaaaa?
If there's one thing graduate school does, it makes you humble and appreciative of other's knowledge, because everyone has a specialty. A graduate student is an expert--an expert in their narrow field of research. They are taught that if they want to go outside that narrow field, they better be humble and profit off the expertise of others. Moreover, the humility is rammed down your throat because you're mentored by people who have spent decades studying and researching a subject, and their skills will invariably outshine yours.
But whatever, continue to make crap up if it feels good.
I disagree completely. You are simply trying to cover your lack of knowledge by belittling those who have it.
As an astrophysics graduate student, I am pretty confident that I can say that I know more about galactic dynamics than almost anyone on earth who doesn't have, or is studying for, a PhD. That said, I have a healthy understanding of the fact that almost no one else on earth cares about galactic dynamics and that most people, after finding out what I do for a living, are not interested in having a debate about topics astrophysical, but are instead praying that I don't try to explain it to them. The sad, obnoxious, pitiable people in the sciences are the ones who never figure out that other people don't find our work fascinating.
In mathematics the argument isn't over what is right, but over what is important. This works to a grad student/fresh Ph.D.'s great advantage. They are foolish enough to believe that their little niche of mathematics is the most important and beautiful idea in human history. Work like dogs. Get lots done.
I generally agree with your assessment.
However, most people who fall into this sophmoric trap never realize it. And they don't care. In fact, very few people do care. You and I do, but do our opinions count?
The best way to build a strong argument is iterative:
1. First, build a coherent worldview that fits all the facts.
2. Learn more facts, develop a worldview, apply it to specific issues, study arguments on all sides, then take the best position, and bone up on your side's arguments.
3. Engage in a reasoned debate bound by the rules of logic. (Note: Most people never do this. Many grad students are merely going through the motions for the first time in their lives.)
4. Win or lose, use the experience to learn new facts, update your worldview, reaffirm or change your view on the relevant issue, and build up new & improved arguments in favor.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
At the end of the day, who cares whether grad students are rational? Who cares if they are merely the intellectual equivalent of monkeys with machine guns?
At the end of the day, Policy is made with bumper stickers, not think tanks.
Grad students infect the world with half-baked opinions backed up with smug arrogance and a weak command of a superficial set of facts, figures, theories, and endorsements by intellectual celebrities.
How is this any worse than the average Joe Six Pack voting based on what he heard about the candidate's religion, age, or gaffe?
I submit that even your analysis of Obama's policies has been colored by emotion. You give him a pass on his positions on NAFTA, free rade, tax rates & complexity, regulation, unions, energy, healthcare...
You are definitely among the fairest and most thorough MBA's (myself included)in the way you take political positions and support them.
But for all your analysis, you and I are still just as human as the grad students that have more confidence than brains. You just learned more discipline. But we'll never reach the Vulcan ideal of pure logic.
As Brilliant as he is, Krugman is a hack. Most geniuses are still subject to bias and poor argumentation when there's some passion about the subject at hand.
I feel like I should make it clear that Stephen W. Stanton is not myself or one of my cohorts masquerading as a anti-intellectual conservative.
I'm a political science grad student, and I've noted some of that phenomenon. Personally when people ask me what I've learned in grad school my answer is always "How little I'm certain of." My big takeaway has been that there are intelligent arguments on all sides of almost any position. I seem to be alone in that, though - one of my peers, a far more accomplished student than I and one whom I have no doubt will be very famous and quite powerful in the near future - once described me as a "chameleon" and said (probably correctly) that I'd never get anywhere in politics because I was unable to "pick a side." In the four years I've known her, I've never heard her express the slightest doubt or uncertainty on any issue. The syndrome that Megan describes is certainly widely-commented upon among 1st-year MBAs and 2nd-year med students as well.
But one part of it may be that I have noticed when talking about politics with my family that after four years of grad school it's often really hard to talk to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time immersed in this stuff. They tend to state as unquestionable certainties things that I know are hotly debated in the field, and my own opinions are usually based on several layers of literature, so to justify them I have to keep going backwards through argument building upon argument - and who other than another political scientist is interested in that? I think one natural tendency in response to this problem is to resort to the argument from authority quite quickly (I know I still try to fight against it!) just as a way of simplifying incredibly complex arguments.
As for the particular problem of dealing with practitioners - one of the central reasons for my dissertation is that I think we political scientists don't pay nearly enough attention to practitioners, so I hope I take them seriously. But sometimes practitioners believe things that huge amounts of research argue is really, really wrong (like the old-school baseball people who think hitters who walk a lot just aren't aggressive enough). Those same practitioners often have little or no respect for the research done in academia. They're often right but...not always. Faced with that attitude, it's perhaps not surprising (although not right) that grad students are dismissive of people who, after all, have only spent 20 years in uniform or in embassies, not done something really impressive like passed general exams! (note for the humor impaired - this was meant ironically)
Freddie,
Inferring from the comments above that the commenters are "rabidly academic-hating" suggests a strange set of "standards of evidence". The plural of emotional reactions is not comprehensive analysis either.
I have to disagree slightly with commenters Rex and GU regarding law students. During the first year of law school, students acquire a definite arrogance and contempt for non-lawyers. But that arrogance quickly fades. Second- and third-year law students are much more humble about their Awesome Knowledge Of The Law because they realize that, as Rex says, "a lot of legal research would go into answering almost any legal question." 1Ls learn how to "think like a lawyer" (as law schools annoying say), so they think anyone who doesn't think like a lawyer is an intellectual simpleton. 2Ls quickly realize that thinking like a lawyer isn't the same thing as knowing a lot about the law.
Having been to both law school and grad school for econ, though, I can say with confidence that econ grad students take intellectual arrogance to a whole new level. It's not even close.
In the interest of holding your feet to the fire, Megan, ask yourself: "how much do I actually know about academics? How similar is an MBA to a Ph.D?" (suggesting they're different isn't meant to be a value judgment, I might add).
If you're ruling out talking to an entire class of people, you should really stop and reconsider your position.
There are in fact many graduate students who think they know everything. There are many physicists who think that they are doing the only real science. There are many economists who think that they have insight into every subject (think Tyler Cowen except without the unusual thoughtfulness and open-mindedness he displays). Various bloggers, in virtue of lacking editorial control, feel free to opine on any subject under the sun. My own field, Philosophy, lends to ignore any empirical evidence in favor of a priori speculation.
All of those trends are very stupid. Using them to discredit entire groups of thinkers is worse.
Yes just respond to Kathy G.
Then never again, please.
Ed Reid-
Freddie gleaned that knowledge from spending a lot of time in these comments section--not from a single thread. Rapid contempt for academics and 'liberal arts types' is the norm around here.
Frankly, your post couldn't be more wrong.
I happen to have read several books on exactly this subject in the course of pursuing my phd, and I also had as a professor an accomplished eminence who told me exactly what's wrong with your point, so I'd be happy to take you through your mistakes in great detail...
I guess I'm frustrated because the first half of the post reads like a list of potential pitfalls for graduate students that are worth keeping in mind. The implicit advice of making sure you keep being challenged as opposed to seeking out ideological conformity and experiences that confirm your self-image as a brilliant thinker are really important!
But it seemed like you took those pitfalls and used them to write off people's opinions. That seems a little difficult to square with the start of the post.
(Please forgive the double comment--I felt like writing something a little less angry).
Rapid contempt for academics and 'liberal arts types' is the norm around here.
Without denying that, there's also a certain amount of rabid contempt from academics around here, which, viewed through the correct prism, tends to support the post's argument...
With all due respect, I've found that the haranguing nature of many of their arguments displays a contempt on the part of 'liberal arts types' that invites an equally contemptuous response.
1) The number of people with graduate education posting in this thread calls into question whether this blog is really such a hostile place for academics.
Then again, one could argue that those of us who have been in the belly of the beast have grievances against the system that would never even occur to anybody else.... :)
2) As to "liberal arts types", as a professor at a primarily undergraduate institution I find that I have a lot of the same concerns and interests (in regard to education) as my colleagues in social sciences and humanities.
Having recently finished my Bf.D., I think I pretty much agree with the post's overarching point, as much as I can with any generalization. In my case, though, I like to think that I never believed I knew everything -- but I certainly discovered that my advisor knew a lot less than he claimed.
While I agree that law school graduates know very little about how to practice law, it does teach you how to think, which is an invaluable skill that most undergraduates never learn in their memorize and regurgitate classes.
I suppose this is further evidence that I should stop hooking up with grad students.
I'm a PhD candidate in a LaTeX-using discipline, and I would say that my experience is similar to the physics grad students above. If anything, graduate school has been a humbling experience that has reminded me of the limits of my knowledge.
At the same time, graduate school has made me value more the opinion of experts--I have less patience for people who take contrarian or unorthodox viewpoints without having much knowledge about the subject (e.g. the anti-vaccination folks who ignore what science knows about herd immunity). That's not to say that I am against unorthodox opinions, or think the only views of value come from people who have advanced degrees. But I am more willing to dismiss arguments when it's clear the person expressing them hasn't thoroughly considered the issue.
Nah. Just hand us our asses. ;)
You learn to ride a horse by falling off.
I suspect that we have seen two parts of the overall cause. As Megan notes, graduate school is, for many, the first time that they have been treated like adults. (At least, for those who did not spend some time working before going back for a graduate degree.) And the sciences (and engineering) differ from the social sciences in that everything is tied back eventually to actual experiments and real data, not just opinions.
Think it's not so? I observed that, among my fellow Anthropology graduate students (long ago), the Physical Anthropologists (i.e. the folks who worked with bones or with monkeys) were much more like my fellow Engineering graduate students than like the graduate students in the rest of Anthropology.
I suggest that it all comes down to this: has the student previously had to deal with reality? Does their major require testing hypotheses against real worled data? Or have they held a job somewhere? Or have they even been in a situation outside academia where they got treated like an adult -- even if, as occasionally happens, they were still legally a child? If so, no problem. But if not, then opinion is all they can cling to -- and the opinions of those around them are the only ones they can parrot without getting trashed. So they do.
Echoing what others have said: Megan's description might be applicable to the Social or Business 'Sciences' but certainly not in the Physical Sciences.
I got a PhD in Physics many years ago, and for me, Grad school was a very sobering experience. For the first time in my life, I really had to work my tail off after having coasted through my undergraduate years doing very little work and yet maintaining a 4.0 average.
I damn near flunked out, and I certainly did *NOT* come away with the impression that I knew everything.
Rob-
I can assure you I'm an ass in spite of my graduate education, not because of.
From personal experience, I'll argue that failing to achieve your PhD is a near certain way of assuring that you don't end up as a know-it-all.
On the other hand, I got a BA in Math/CompSci and pursued my PhD in Religious Studies, of all things. So maybe I brought the knowing-is-hard perspective into the program with me. Maybe I failed to get my PhD _because_ I had such a hard time being a know-it-all. God knows there were enough of them about.
The more I think about it, the less certain I am.
Freddie, you're confusing my objection to a style of argumentation with a belief that graduate students are wrong. My point is rather that there are usually good arguments on both sides, but many graduate students reach a point in their studies where their modicum of knowledge gives them an unfounded arrogance about the merits of their position. There are few issues in the world where a decent argument cannot be made for at least two sides.
Grad students in the sciences often arrive cocky, then become humbled, but oftentimes become cocky again as the actually receive their doctorates, especially at prestigious universities.
It's one reason a good thorough grilling at the Ph.D. oral exam is so important. The grad student has researched the topic for (usually) five years, whereas his committee probably read his dissertation quickly a few days earlier, but nevertheless can easily make a monkey out of the grad student for a couple of hours.
It brings the point home like nothing: getting a Ph.D. isn't the end of the erstwhile grad student's learning. It's the beginning. A Ph.D. is a learner's permit to do research, nothing more.
To judge from the number of people who think that their PhD makes them an expert in, well, everything
I find this most improbable. One of the things you learn in doing your PhD is that you are a specialist, you almost certainly know a hell of a lot about something, by which very fact you recognize how little you know about many other things. In the oral part of my generals, and I expect many other people as well, I remember being pushed and pushed and pushed some more by the three torturers grilling me, and finally at some point I just gave up and said "I don't know, and I don't know enough about it to formulate any reasonable hypotheses." At which point they just looked at me and said, "OK, we just wanted to know how much you knew and where the limit was" and moved on.
And of course the underlying message was, "you are about to embark on a dissertation where you have to create new knowledge and where you will be an expert. That's wonderful but don't forget the limitations of that knowledge."
Maybe I just got lucky with my examiners and advisers, butg my experience in academics is that most people who are real experts know pretty damn well what they don't know. Now as to social graces and working well with other people, on the other hand .....
Gene, exactly.
I typed this slowly, so as not to express unhurried rather than rapid contempt for academics and liberal arts types, but such contempt is fully justified regardless of its velocity.
Btw, academic scientists generally regard liberal arts types with bemused condescension, although they’re usually too polite (and too leery of wasting time in arguments) to say so.
Just before a liberal arts type came before a graduate scholarship committee on which I served, the liberal arts faculty were gushing about the brilliance and diabolical ingenuity of this candidate’s approach, and how it reflected the candidate’s earlier scientific training. Intrigued my physics colleague on the committee and I looked forward to the candidate’s presentation as a welcome break from 17th century Italian poets. Turns out the candidate was using trigonometry to estimate the sizes of some objects.
My colleague and I exchanged sidelong glances and then had to feign coughing fits.
Well, I frequently talk with colleagues in the English department about improving the way that I teach and grade classes with writing assignments (e.g. lab reports). I find many of them to be smart and useful colleagues with whom I can work on important educational issues.
So, you know, here's one "hard sciences" person who admires teh librul artz.
Er, sorry, make that "so as to" rather than "so as not to."
I'm a newly minted stats PhD, and while I certainly don't think I know everything, I'm quite convinced that social science PhDs know nothing.
Thoreau, no one is saying they're stupid, just that their intellectual standards need cheering up. Of course one would expect those in the liberal arts to exhibit writing ability: it's an entry-level skill for them.
The question is: what do they write? Deconstructionism strikes me, as a layman, as merely a vehicle for expressing one's own views by way of a nominal exegesis of someone else's work. A well-written but fundamentally mendacious exegesis would provide support for both our points.
Actually Occam, I think that my field would typically be described as within the broad area of "social sciences" though I don't like or use the term. But this quote from Richard Caves, one of the absolute premier industrial organization economists of the past 50 years (i.e., one of the founders of the field), captures much about appropriate academic modesty: "The intellectual traveller must pass from the fertile valleys of his scholarly specialty into the featurelss plains of general scholarly acquaintance, and thence to the forbidding wilderness of Not My Subject."
Horatius wrote:
But one part of it may be that I have noticed when talking about politics with my family that after four years of grad school it's often really hard to talk to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time immersed in this stuff. They tend to state as unquestionable certainties things that I know are hotly debated in the field, ....
Speaking as someone who spent a long, long time in grad school (in two fields, one less technical, the other---in which I work as a faculty member---more technical) I feel this comment pretty strongly because I recall being "that" person at one point. Not necessarily as bad as some people I've known, but many a grad student picks it up, for a variety of reasons.
People learn argumentation and have a hard time turning it off when Mom or Uncle Fred spouts "unquestionable certainties." Chance are very good you are much, much better at argument than Uncle Fred and end up laying into him, which is... socially inappropriate. Eventually you learn to hold your tongue around them, which sometimes actually makes them mad because they often *want* to hear the Truth you learned in grad school, when in fact you often found there usually was no Truth that could be put on a shelf like cousin Sally's trophies from volleyball or Uncle Joe's medal from the Army. In the middle of grad school you often fool yourself to think that such a thing exists, though. See below.
Second, is, of course, that kind of arrogance is cover for the deep insecurity that most third or fourth year students have about ever being able to "make it." A friend of mine who was a military officer before grad school thought OCS was easier mentally. The comparison to military induction training is apt. In fact first year courses are often made intentionally difficult for the same reasons OCS is difficult: The faculty want the uncommitted to drop before spending a huge amount of time and effort on them. (Most boots make it through but the washout rate in OCS is substantial.)
Third, I think the student from the "real" sciences states a credible case about social science fields, where argumentation are much more normal and expected at the "junior" level, but overstates it, because there are technical fields such as computer science where incredible arrogance is common. Jackass intellectual colonists from physics showing up in other fields are also common. Anyway, I think it tends to be a "norms of the discipline" kind of thing. Economics is notorious. Other fields not so much.
I think it's really important for faculty to teach students not to be bullies, but also not doormats for the bullies out there, and not shrinking violets who fold up under criticism. It's a long, tough road and things don't always go smoothly.
There can be a very unhealthy, unrealistic binary view of advanced education from people without it: Excessive awe on one hand and incredible disappointment on the other when the feet of clay inevitably emerge. IMO, few people are worse for this than people who bomb out of grad school, many of whom picked up the argumentation skill but never actually managed a dissertation themselves and are often walking around with a chip the size of a family size pizza on their shoulders over it.
As said by countless hard-science PhDs before me (are all scientists Megan-reading libertarians?) - this seems to be a phenomena mostly restricted to the social sciences. (The phrase "social science" itself is telling.)
Particularly in the experimental hard-sciences, where the frontiers of human knowledge are advanced one frustrating and bloody inch at a time, it's hard to believe your own brilliance, when physical reality constantly contradicts your predictions.
But social sciences or no, arrogance is a problem for all over-educated people. Fortunately, the remedy is easy - never mention your degree unless specifically asked. Never steer the conversation towards your research specialty.
Megan, the funniest thing about this post is that the syndrome you describe seeing in grad students - acting like they know everything about everything, and getting indignant when challenged - is the exact behavior you exhibit every single day on this blog. My God, I don't think I have ever met a person with less self-awareness than you have.
I think Crimfan expressed it very well above. In many fields academics are trained to evaluate and investigate in terms of contingenies, and it can be difficult to rework the thought process into more casual conversation.
But I totally disagree with the devaluation of liberal arts and humanities: why is the investigation of string theory more "scholarly" than, say, an examination of how women in the workplace are depicted in 19th century French vs. german vs. English literature? It's like saying I like hamburgers more than the movies.
Gene, I think string theory is not a good choice, because (as I dimly understand it), it has more in common with the liberal arts than it does with science: namely, lack of falsfiability.
Experimental physical scientists are constantly wrong-footed by nature (and I'm talking about, e.g., predicting the properties, nature, and behavior of pure low molecular weight compounds under controlled conditions).
Consequently, skepticism is in order regarding any field that either a) seems rarely, if ever, to be discomfited by the data (e.g., sociology), b) claims to be able to be able to predict highly complex phenomena after wild extrapolations (climatology), or c) cannot be subjected to falsfication at all (humanities).
Bottom line: if you're not proven wrong at least half of the time, you're probably doing anything worthwhile.
And let's distinguish "scholarship" from "research." The former entails learning about what has been done before, and thus is retrospective; the latter, about adding to it, and hence prospective. Quite a different beast.
What on earth makes you think this is limited to post-graduate education? I work in Hollywood. Very few of my colleagues have anything more than a B.A., if that, and the vast majority of them think they know EVERYTHING. And whatever they don't know can certainly be farmed out to some more highly educated, lower paid dork with a PhD. And of course we're all looked down upon by the blue collar joes who think we're all a bunch of elitists who'll be dependent on them for food and shelter when society collapses.
By the way, Zuckerman would agree with you completely when he encounters Kliman in Roth's EXIT GHOST.
Sarah wrote:
I'm a newly minted stats PhD, and while I certainly don't think I know everything, I'm quite convinced that social science PhDs know nothing.
Think again.
Many don't know a lot about technical issues (believe me, I know, being a statistician who works with such people myself) but you or I couldn't do informed community studies, build good tests that cover a content domain and have solid psychometric properties, study the cognitive ability of three year olds, read archive information from the Nineteenth Century, etc. In other words, much of the things you need to be able to do to have high quality data depends on people who know a lot less statistics than you.
One of the intellectual blinders of statisticians is to presume that "data" just appears to be analyzed. It doesn't. In a very real sense the field of statistics is a service discipline to other areas of science, mostly social, behavioral and biological. They could get by without us (with difficulty), but we wouldn't exist without them at all.
The answer is fairly simple: Don't go to grad school until you've spent at least 4 or 5 years working in jobs outside of academia. go out and discover first what you don't know, and then return to school to prepare for a lifetime of trying to learn it. To go straight from undergrad to grad is to so thoroughly insulate yourself from the world you plan to study that it makes less than zero sense.
Alex-
There are days when I wish that I had done what you suggest, and gotten a job in the private sector for a few years before going to grad school and then into a teaching career. However, there are 2 very good reasons why some people should not follow that advice:
1) (Most important) If you have a passion for something (e.g. your academic pursuits), and you want to try making a career of it, then go do it. Don't take a detour, don't stop, just go for it--unless you are confident that taking the detour will be enjoyable and perhaps contribute to your later success (in which case it isn't really a detour) and that you'll be able to return to your pursuits.
Too many people don't know what they want to do. For those who do know (or at least think they know) I say go for it.
2) (More practical) The training cycle for faculty involves 4 years of college, several years of graduate study, and typically a few years in some sort of postdoctoral research position and/or temporary (i.e. not tenure-track) teaching position. It's almost impossible to get your first "real job" in this field before the age of 30. Adding a few years with a stint outside academia can be valuable, but given the duration of the training cycle I would only recommend doing it if you think you'll genuinely enjoy it and that it will contribute to (or at least not detract from) your success in your academic endeavor. Otherwise, you're just further delaying a lot of things.
Mind you, I think real world experience is a great thing to have, and I wish I had more of it. At the same time, I think that if you are determined to pursue something then you should pursue it, and anything else is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
FWIW, I'd say the same to people who want a career in the private sector. I'd say that if they know what they want to do then they should view their education as a means to that end and only pursue education that they think will get them there. This is heresy to some of my colleagues, and I certainly value learning for its own sake, and I think others can benefit from it too. However, I also think that if you know what you want to do then you should do it and not let anybody or anything slow you down. That's a basic rule of success in all endeavors, commercial as well as academic.
What an entertaining gloss by Megan and enjoyable set of comments. Wish I had more time to lurk around here.
It's fun having a go at grad students and what the Germans call some certain academics: Fachidioten -- those so educated in specialty subsets of academic arcana to be incapable of operating a toaster without consulting the manual. In Germany they're know-it-alls, too.
My romp in grad studies somehow ended in a degree, supposedly, but the field of linguistics (SocSci/humanities, wherever you wanna put it) to me seemed more bizarre, and frankly, useless. And the more I questioned the lack of falsifiability, the more I was encouraged to cash in early rather than sticking around for the PhD.
That certainly was useful advice, no question. The MA itself did nearly nothing for my earning potential, and the PhD would have locked me into a field I found superfluous on most accounts.
That said, I do respect those who slog all the way through to the doctorate. That takes a kind of single-mindedness and goal-driven manner of thinking that is foreign to me. It can be a pitfall for individuals with certain neuroses, as any undergraduate can recount from experience with instructors. But these freaks are not the majority, I think, and their chosen course presents them with the challenges and conflicts they thrive under. So good on 'em.
Beyond academia, I've often had the pleasure of meeting and working with craftsmen in different manual trade, no matter how sublime, whose lifetimes' worth of skills and knowledge about working with their hands in fashioning various materials is breathtaking. I often think these folks have knowledge equal to that of many successful academics, but the craftsmen are much more humble about their own limitations in working with the world around them. They think in hard-learned abstractions expressed less in words, because things that you can drop on your foot are less forgiving than lengthy arguments making the case for a favored theory.
Good post, Megan. Based on some of the posts, looks like the grad students you're describing already read your blog, which is pretty funny. Please stir this hornet's nest up in the future; they're funnier than the atheists.
By the way, real Marines are like that, not just movie Marines. OORAH.
My my, you must have been (even more) obnoxious when you were younger, if you actually thought you were more qualified than others. I would say being in a social "science" Ph.D program actually makes you less qualified to comment on the topic you are studying.
I think you have really hit the (G) spot with this one Megan. And beautifully written too.
I do think there is a way to mitigate this syndrome, though, and that is to make these grad students read their Oakeshotte. They should learn early on to think of intellectual endeavour as a means of joining a civilised conversation, rather then as a means of unearthing any Holy Grails.
Heh, I'm reminded of that timeless observation from Samuel Clemens: When I was 18, my dad didn't know anything. When I was 22, I was amazed by how much he'd learned in 4 years!
How did I miss this post?...
1) In my field (city planning, though this may apply to some subfields of public policy as well) there is a very useful corrective for the I-know-it-all syndrome: the concept of wicked problems. To summarize, you can't get to the bottom of a wicked problem, you can't solve it, and you can't even know if you did the right thing.
1a) I also have the advantage (I say that seriously) of being in a field that is not really all that far removed from the practical. You have to get a master's in planning before you can emerge with a PhD, which means you have to be, at least for a little while, studying as if you will be running zoning hearings and doing traffic counts. The discipline is getting more academified (for lack of a better word) and theoretical, but it's still much less centered on theory than, say, sociology or English literature.
2) My experience is that the job-getting process is not conducive to humility. A grad student who publishes has a leg up; a junior faculty member who publishes is just saving his/her job. This implies that as a grad student or a junior faculty member, you have something publishable to say, which implies that you can write something worth reading. If you don't believe you're ready for that, no hiring committee will either.
3) Megan, how much of your analysis do you think is applicable only to American graduate students? Of the 15 or so active grad students in my program, one is from India, one is from China, and six are from South Korea; we're getting at least one more from China this fall. I would imagine that, first, we're not atypical in this, and second, graduate school is considerably more frustrating and humbling, and the bolstering from professors considerably less, for a student learning in English as his/her second language, in a foreign country.
I should repeat again that I think that this is a phase, not a permanent condition; not all graduate students go through it, and they normally have it hammered out of them by reality fairly quickly. By the time they're into their dissertation, they've usually left it behind . . .
I have to agree with above comments regarding 'hard' science PhD's. I don't have much interaction with non-science PhD's but your description of grad students could not be more wrong among science grad students. Perhaps because we actually carry out experiments in the real world testing out hypotheses. For most science grad students, grad school is an immensely humbling experience that gives the grad student a complex and nuanced appreciation of how little we actually do know about the physical world. Now if only such wisdom could be channeled into better job oppurtunities we'd all be set. But science PhD's on the whole are definitely not an arrogant bunch.
But we do drink a lot.
Now, let's not get too cocky about being humbled in grad school because we scientists are in the better fields. "My field is teh bestest evar because we're so humble!" is an oxymoron.
Or, as Weird Al said in Amish Paradise: "Think you're really righteous? Think you're pure of heart? Well I know I'm a million times as humble as thou art!"
Grad school humbles us because nature provides us with immediate evidence that we're getting nowhere. Yes, that's a good thing, but lording that fact over the humanities folks sort of defeats the purpose of that humbling experience.
'"Well, while I was getting it, I thought I knew everything," I told him. "Sadly, that turned out not to be the case." '
This is desireable. For the 999 fresh PhDs who know it all and get whacked down by eminences, there's one who is right, or at least worthy of challenging eminence. Nobody tells a Nobel Laureate they're wrong very easily, but sometimes, they are. Faced with disagreement from a renowned authority, people doubt their own ideas excessively. Intelligent people are actually more prone to this than less intelligent people because they more readily recognize the value of authority. Building up the confidence of people who have had their mettle genuinely tested is a good thing. It is a harmless process to bring them back down to Earth, and extraordinarily beneficial when one doesn't need to be.
This is what Niels Bohr said of Richard Feynmann as a grad student"
“Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.”
I'm a cognitive neuroscience PhD student ("bridging the hard/soft sciences since 1996"), but I worked in industry for a few years before grad school, so I think I've avoided this. Also, in interdisciplinary fields like mine, even your advisor cannot know all of the information on which our research depends. I don't know enough physics to improve on fMRI techniques. I don't know enough math to improve on our interpolation of EEG data sources. Specialization is necessary and your knowledge outside of any sub-field is limited. It would be pretty hard to get arrogant that quickly.
Hey John Meredith! when I was in grad school I took a whole course on Oakeshott. And I'm still arrogant!
Man, I didn't realize that folks with "real" PhD's were so self-righteous and humble.
I guess those “real” PhDs make you so self-aware.
I think one of the issues here is that educational extablishments behave like a "closed shop" and the secrecy that surrounds knowledge and learning. Even the most precocious (and impatient) graduate student most know that they are at least a decade away from sounding like their lecturers. At the same time some of the more established professors are less than generous with passing on the years of learning they have built up. And it seems there is definite resistance in joining the academic club (usually financial), as one obstacle after another is encountered.
By the way it never ceases to amaze me the amount of chemists who turn every pedagogic discussion into a arts vs sciences debate. Until they have found the meaning of life once and for all perhaps they should tone it down a little. (Eriver) The levels of self-righteousness go through the roof (sorry about the non scientific analogy) with chemists.
"1. First, build a coherent worldview that fits all the facts."
Oh boy.
There are no "facts" in the absence of a worldview.
Hm. Thanks for this post. I'm about to go get my PhD, and should like to avoid this phenomenon if at all possible. I think I shall print this out and tack it to my wall.
Having known a large number of people in the academic arena of social sciences (political science mainly) I'd have to say this attitude does persist, particularly in the early graduate phase. But I would say certain fields of the social sciences tend to be more prone to it than others because of their nature.
For example, the area of legal studies and law tend NOT to be this way because of the sheer body of knowledge that needs to be processed and the number of variables that influence the theories/problems that are being bandied about. Likewise, I would say things like electoral politics, policy analysis and others that rely primarily on going through a great deal of hard numbers and a boatload of variables are going to be more humble (or at least less likely to fall into this trap.)
Economics seems to be a bit of a blindspot as despite the number of variables, ideological or theoretical identity seems to come before data or at least selective data. This then gets progressively worse as you go to fields where there's less and less that you can falsify and you wind up with things like political theory which for better or for worse have problems falsifying theories however wrong.
I would also say though, not simply based on just the posts here, but also on personal experience that the dismissive "know it all" stance in terms of knowledge also often comes from natural sciences grad students towards liberal arts types. Certainly there's a tendency to dismiss it all as ideologically biased or academically dishonest. There's plenty of good social sciences who take a hard look at difficult to collect data (let's face it, lab conditions in the social sciences are rare, so your samples will necessarily be hard to collect) and do so with the intention of solving real social problems. Just as there are plenty of natural sciences hacks who falsify data and go around selling out their souls and research for ideological highest bidders.