Doctors = dumb-er versions of PhDs?

[libertyyne]

I think the crux of the issue is captured in this one statement: "Every year, another 10,000 biomedical and clinical PhDs join the ranks of postdoctoral fellows, while funding and faculty positions flatline."

In medicine, the competitive specialties are "gated" at the door. This means that it's competitive in the sense that few people actually get through the "doors" of the specialty and instead have to do something else. In science, the competition is beyond the door. It's gated at the level of getting grant funding.

Now this creates a huge issue. In medicine, while there's intense competition to get through the door of competitive specialties, once you're in, you're in and can be guaranteed to become a doc in that specialty with all its benefits. If you don't get in or are not competitive enough, then you end up doing something else. You still become a doctor in whatever other specialty you go into, with all of its benefits. In other words, you don't end up training for 5+ years in a competitive specialty only to find out that you may never be hired to do that job. The problem with science is that the gating mechanism is at the grant level. So you get your PhD, but that does not guarantee you a job or funding. So now you've spent 5+ years of your life training for something that you may never end up doing. This creates an increasing population of PhD scientists who cannot capitalize on their PhDs. You don't have the same phenomenon with MDs.

So the solution, in my opinion, is to move the gating mechanism in science back. Graduate fewer PhDs who are of higher quality. Now, there are multiple challenges to this, including the fact that science is driven by high-throughput publication. PIs are rewarded for quantity (and to a lesser extent, quality) of their work. So it's to their advantage to hire as many grad students as they can afford to further their own careers.

I would go as far as to say that gating needs to occur even earlier. Higher education at the college level needs to be reformed. The ability of schools to continue granting bachelors and masters degrees of questionable quality and even more questionable career prospects is the problem.

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[libertyyne]

Most of the productivity in the laboratory comes from postdocs, rather than PhD students. Postdocs are actually cheaper (because you don't have to pay for their tuition/fees) and require less training/supervision/guidance, too.

Yes, we are training more PhDs than are necessary to fill all of the faculty positions, but that isn't the only type of job that allows one to use the skills gained from obtaining a PhD.

Yes, but is obtaining a PHD necessary for those additional roles? I dont think so for the majority of people who end up working in unrelated fields. For every science phd in industry there are a tonne of non science phds in unrelated fields doing administrative work.

 

[aldol16]

Most of the productivity in the laboratory comes from postdocs, rather than PhD students. Postdocs are actually cheaper (because you don't have to pay for their tuition/fees) and require less training/supervision/guidance, too.

Uhhh, this probably is field-dependent. Was not true in my field. While post-docs are cheaper, they aren't the workhorses. The workhorses of the lab tend to be PhD students. This will depend on whether your lab is post-doc or grad student-driven. I admit there are many labs that have more post-docs than grad students. Obviously most of the productivity will come from the post-docs in that case. But in chemistry, that's an exception rather than the rule. Not sure about other fields.

Yes, we are training more PhDs than are necessary to fill all of the faculty positions, but that isn't the only type of job that allows one to use the skills gained from obtaining a PhD.

What other jobs other than in academia or industry do you get to use the skills you get from a PhD in the life sciences or even chemistry?

 

[deleted972488]

While post-docs are cheaper, they aren't the workhorses.

What? How not? They are more trained and they don't have to take classes, etc.

What other jobs other than in academia or industry do you get to use the skills you get from a PhD in the life sciences or even chemistry?

I was mostly referring to industry jobs.

 

[libertyyne]

What? How not? They are more trained and they don't have to take classes, etc.



I was mostly referring to industry jobs.

Esentially a coin toss to even getting a postdoc. Seems absurd for 5+ years of additional schooling and lost income. One does not need a PHD to be a school principal or some mid level manager.

 

[aldol16]

What? How not? They are more trained and they don't have to take classes, etc.

Would you call interns/residents or the attending the workhorse of the hospital? The attending is more trained and doesn't have required teaching. Or, would you call interns or residents the workhorses of the hospital? Interns have required teaching and need supervision by the resident. Although interns are less trained and need supervision, they're still the workhorses of the hospital because they do all of the work. Just because they need to be supervised and have required teaching on top of that doesn't mean that they do less of the work.

I was mostly referring to industry jobs.

Yeah there aren't plenty of industry jobs around anymore. They've figured out that they can 1) outsource to academia where they pay a PI a "consulting fee" and the PI then offloads the work onto the grad students/post-docs and 2) they can hire 1 PhD-level scientist to "supervise" a group of bachelor's or master's level scientists to do the actual scutwork. Jobs are drying up everywhere in academia and industry.

 

[deleted972488]

Would you call interns/residents or the attending the workhorse of the hospital? The attending is more trained and doesn't have required teaching. Or, would you call interns or residents the workhorses of the hospital? Interns have required teaching and need supervision by the resident. Although interns are less trained and need supervision, they're still the workhorses of the hospital because they do all of the work. Just because they need to be supervised and have required teaching on top of that doesn't mean that they do less of the work.

I would say a postdoc is more akin to an intern/resident and a PhD student is more akin to a medical student in terms of being the "workhorse." In my field, a PhD student is considered successful if they produce one good paper over the course of their PhD (~6 years). A successful postdoc usually produces 2-3 papers in that amount of time, doing the same type of work.

Yeah there aren't plenty of industry jobs around anymore. They've figured out that they can 1) outsource to academia where they pay a PI a "consulting fee" and the PI then offloads the work onto the grad students/post-docs and 2) they can hire 1 PhD-level scientist to "supervise" a group of bachelor's or master's level scientists to do the actual scutwork. Jobs are drying up everywhere in academia and industry.

I was a moderately successful PhD student at a top institution, so my understanding is perhaps based on an atypical sample, but nobody I know has had much trouble finding a job in industry.

 

[PikminOC]

Many things in life require an incredibly high amount of work ethic. You're working hard, but don't let that blind you to how difficult other tracks are, too. It's not a competition.

While in medicine, you are constantly getting feedback, milestones, and landmarks indicating progress. You are essentially hopping from carrot-to-carrot along a difficult path -- but there's still significant support.

That is not true during a PhD. It's months to years without meaningful feedback (grant application, paper revisions, etc) or an end in sight. You are navigating a problem with no known solution, often working horrible hours on tedious experiments to just take a chance at getting a small part of the answer... assuming no random act of misfortune ruins your months-long experiment (say, an infection being transferred to your mouse colony). It, too, is not for the faint of heart.

While I had a great PhD experience, I love medical school way more. Patient interaction, constant learning, frequent feedback, momentum in progress, and scheduled breaks make it a much easier road to travel.

Exactly right at least the medicine part

 

[radsisrad]

And the person people are talking about when they yell, “Is anyone here a doctor?!”

We may get the "glory", but most advancements in medicine are most directly due to the efforts of the guys in the labs. Pharmacology, imaging, etc.

 

[Thesimplelifeofamyloid]

We may get the "glory", but most advancements in medicine are most directly due to the efforts of the guys in the labs. Pharmacology, imaging, etc.

Or the doctors that happen to be involved in both. Everyone seems to get the varying degrees of research physicians do

 

[sloop]

In truth, temperament will play a much bigger role than intelligence in who becomes a Ph.D. and who becomes an M.D. out of a given cohort. Both inherently have a requisite level of abstract reasoning but the main issue is that both involve a lot of time committed to the pursuit of something, so people are generally careful that the careers align with their interests.

Differences in intelligence between these two fields are going to be byproducts of selections and other incentives. Medicine probably has a higher average practitioner IQ than most academic fields because it’s more lucrative and more selective. Additionally, the selectivity of medicine is based on measures that probably have greater correlation with IQ than does the ability to develop and defend a thesis. The latter is undoubtedly difficult to do, but the task is just not at all a similar to an IQ test, unlike standardized (and, for that matter, unstandardized) tests.

But really, it doesn’t matter. Both doctors and scientists are valuable and both career paths require tremendous work and sacrifice.

Also, as an aside, everyone in this thread who is basing their estimation of the IQ of the two groups on their vague estimation of the “smartness” of their own cohort is being a ridiculous. As someone whose specialty requires them to attempt estimates of patients’ IQs, it is nearly impossible to do this with any real accuracy without rigorous evaluation (which, by the way, we don’t even usually do in psychiatry). From talking to someone in a conversational way, it is pretty obvious when someone is truly limited. I can also probably categorize people as average or above average (by which I mean 1SD or 115+) with okay precision. I don’t think most people would would be very good at ranking a group of people of above average intelligence by IQ based only on talking to them. This whole gestalt evaluation of intelligence thing is such BS.

 

[siliso]

Working on a doctorate in anything is not an investment for job training like a professional degree is, I think. PhD students don’t pay, they get paid (unless they are very unwise indeed). They don’t get paid much beyond what to keep body and soul together but they shouldn’t be taking on debt. It’s a thing you can do for the love, for the philia sophia. If you don’t have the burning love and want to make money you could do better as a McD manager or a car salesman than a grad student, and way better in any skilled trade. Not really comparable pursuits.

 

[aldol16]

I would say a postdoc is more akin to an intern/resident and a PhD student is more akin to a medical student in terms of being the "workhorse." In my field, a PhD student is considered successful if they produce one good paper over the course of their PhD (~6 years). A successful postdoc usually produces 2-3 papers in that amount of time, doing the same type of work.

Yeah, does not fly in chemistry. If a PhD student produces 1 paper in the course of their PhD, they're not getting a good post-doc fellowship unless there's something else going for them. Many successful PhD students will have published 4-5 papers (though not necessarily all first author, probably 2-3 first author) in the course of their studies and the ones that go on to the most sought-after fellowships will have high-impact papers.

Also, if a chemistry post-doc is taking 6 years to finish their post-doc, there is something seriously wrong. Many will take 2 years. The biological chemistry ones run longer than that, in tune with what's happening in the rest of biology as well.

I was a moderately successful PhD student at a top institution, so my understanding is perhaps based on an atypical sample, but nobody I know has had much trouble finding a job in industry.

Then you should know that something more important than where you are is who you're working for. Finding a job in industry, like getting a good post-doc fellowship, will depend on who you're working for. If they have good industry connections and are well known, then obviously you have an in. Just coming from a good program will net you interviews at places but a lot of the behind-the-scenes work depends on who you know, just like in any other field.

Industry jobs are much harder to get nowadays. I'm talking about chemistry, which is where my experience is.

 

[Apastron]

Agree with the above^. I once heard someone say that phd’s are smarter than md’s. Then I heard a physician say “I don’t know what kind of intellect it takes to choose a career that makes 50-70k vs 200+, but I’m glad I don’t have it”.

DSc makes a stupid amount of money also. I have met some very stupid "doctors" with all kinds of degrees. Each is smart in different fields and ways. Not the answer you are looking for? It is not a territorial peeing match.