The purpose for doing a Ph.D. is to produce original research.

Motivation can vary: intellectual curiosity, desire for employment (academic or otherwise), because their parents demand it, because "Dr." sounds impressive when hitting on strangers at bars... I'm fine with any of the above, as long as the student is willing to do the work.

The students might love research, or perhaps they feel as if they are being made to jump through hoops --- but, unless the students are getting their information from people who aren't actually familiar with academia, there's no misalignment and our students are indeed getting what they came here for.

I dropped out of my PhD when I realised my strongest motivation - my actual strongest motivation, no jokes - was to be a "Dr." who dressed downmarket. This is not a reason to choose a career path. I'd fallen into the PhD program by accident and it had never been a particular ambition of mine...

People in my program take Spanish. I knew one person who did creative writing. We actually have a class on consulting in a closely related department that you could manage to sell as an elective. I took some only faintly related classes in another department.

It's not easy, and it will add time (that's the true problem with a PhD, balancing 'Things I want To Do' and 'I want to finish') but it's doable. PhDs are also often much less "locked in" to coursework than undergraduates, especially after their first few years.

"The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented."

I can't think of a single person in my program who wasn't fully aware that a PhD is about producing original research. They might struggle with doing that, but it's a known and understood requirement.

There's a career-oriented degree. It's a Masters.

The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career.

The problem is that there are a lot of people paying the quid, and barely anyone getting the quo. Unless you are a student of independent wealth, you are not producing this research out of the goodness of your heart with no greater, more important objective. To the vast, vast majority of people doing their Ph.D's, a Ph.D. is a career maneuver.

PhD students generally just love research. We sign up for this because it's what we enjoy doing. Companies try hard to recruit us away, but we stay in spite of that, because why would we want to do anything other than work on the one problem we've always wanted to solve?

Maybe it's different in the humanities, but every STEM PhD student I've ever met has low expectations, with the exception of one-- and she has a first authorship on a Nature paper and is working on a Science submission, so I still think she's pretty well-grounded.

Honestly, at this point, finding out that the job market is grim takes only a shred of research, and absolutely the kind of research you should do before applying.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do when I'm done.

Granted, not everyone thinks like me. But certainly not everyone thinks as you do.

Anecdotal rebuttal: The first conversation I had with my research advisor concerned the difficulty of getting a tenure track position at a research university straight out of Ph. D. school. In her words, "that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anymore in this field (Computer Science)."

There are no delusions of academic grandeur, at least in my neck of the woods. I agree that the Ph.D. may be pursued as a career maneuver, but if your end game is a teaching position at a research university your approach to the program has to be very different (and extremely more ambitious) than someone pursuing industry or other goals. And if you're pursuing a prestigious academic position, you are quickly educated on the slim possibility of attaining it, even if you're willing to post doc.

</bitter>

I work in academia here in Spain. The Masters is usually a prerequisite for doing a PhD here.

There appears to be a dramatic misalignment between what you think a PhD is for (seemingly, to secure a job) and its actual purpose (to advance human knowledge in some area).

Next you'll be telling me that people get degrees for education rather than as a signal to employers...

That would be a perfectly sensible position if not for the fact that they kick you out of PhD school after you finish instead of promoting you.

A PhD is an apprenticeship in doing original research. It is not your first job. It does not pay well, or have any job security or benefits. Your first job is the one you get after your PhD, because they punished you by accepting your thesis, printing your degree, and kicking you out of graduate school, thus forcing you to find an actual position.

Which means that if the job prospects after PhD school are "nothing permanent involving research", then the system is indeed broken. It's broken because thousands of people spend years of our young adulthood working incredibly hard on a single project, only to be told at the end that we haven't really ever held a job, that we are not qualified for a job, and that figuring out what to do after five years of experience in the world's most difficult intellectual endeavors is our problem.

If grad school is not going to lead to, well, anything afterward, then we should stop considering it to be school at all, and just all go on strike to demand that our first real job out of undergrad pay a whole lot better for the hours it makes us work.

Promote you? Why would you expect that? A PhD is not a meal-ticket. It's just an endorsement that says you are very good at undertaking novel and independent research. There is no promise made any point that an academic position or related industry position will be waiting for you at the end. As you say, it's just an apprenticeship. Nothing more. It's up to you to figure out what, if anything, you will do with that education once you receive it.

Because that's what happens when you spend five years in one job and spearhead a large project independently.

You've successfully proven my point: it's an apprenticeship. The problem is, apprenticeships are supposed to be followed by a career as a master practitioner of the craft you apprenticed in. If there are thousands of apprenticeships in science each year, and no permanent jobs as scientists, then the guild structure is unbalanced and the guild is responsible.

So go be a master. Make your own way. A PhD is not a promise of a salaried future at an academic institution.

People who were planning to make their own way got bachelors degrees, people who planned to teach got Masters degrees, and people who planned to research got PhDs.

Now, you can of course keep repeating "make your own way, you dumb ignoramus who doesn't understand market imperatives!" until the cows come home, but all that means is that you consider market imperatives to override guild structure.

Which they have! But a descriptive statement about how the system has come to work is not a normative statement about how it should be made to function. Certainly I would say the guild structure is malfunctioning when job qualifications have gone from "produce one masterpiece (a PhD) over a few years and you can get a job" to "produce two to three masterpieces (a PhD and one or two post-docs) over a dozen years, and then you're considered just about qualified to apply for a permanent job".

By the way, we're certainly not talking about my personal plans, since at this point I simply don't anticipate any currently-known career structure actually lasting. Even if nothing revolutionary actually happens on the political, economic, or environmental fronts, the continued subjugation of all institutions and enterprises to short-term market imperatives (the ones you support ;-)) means that job tenures longer than a few years probably just won't ever be available to me. I'm living in a world built by people who think Thomas Friedman has the right idea.

EDIT: It's important to note that if we really believed in fully and entirely replacing the Guild of Science with a scientific labor market subject only to market imperatives, it would mean taking a lot of funding from the university/lab administrators and tenured PI's, and using it to create a less-strictly-pyramidal career structure more like the tech sector has: bachelor's degree, junior-level researcher for a number of years at full pay and benefits, senior researcher at full pay and benefits with real job security, management and leadership.

In a real market system, you don't get to work people to the bone for years at a time for hourly wages less than those at Wal-Mart solely on the promise that they will someday have the opportunity to gain a 1/3 chance at a real job in their field. In a real market system, that is called an unpaid internship, it's illegal, and it ends in your workers unionizing and suing you.

Why shouldn't someone be allowed to enroll in a PhD program if they want to conduct research in the field they are interested in?

At the same time as dramatically expanding the number of higher-level positions, yes. The pyramid must be made into an ordinary tower.

Too bad, so sad.