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Demand curves slope downward, even in the humanities
A series of new policies in the humanities and the social sciences at Harvard University are premised on the idea that professors need the ticking clock, too. For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student. The results were immediate: In numerous departments that had for years had large clusters of Ph.D. students taking eight or more years to finish, professors reached out to students and doctorates were completed.
No exceptions were made, and Harvard officials believe that their shift shows that there is no reason for a decade-long humanities Ph.D.
Here is more, I would say only that they did not go far enough. You might think that this causes a lowering of standards, but I'll predict that the people who leave sooner are no less smart (do some of you wish I had written "stupider"?) or accomplished than if they had stayed longer.
Elsewhere from InsideHigherEd.com, here is a study of economists and plagiarism.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 17, 2007 at 10:48 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
What is the rate of return on spending 10 years in a PhD program?
Could it be that once you actually get the PhD, your standard of living goes down?
Posted by: TomHynes at Dec 17, 2007 11:39:18 AM
What is the rate of return on spending 10 years in a PhD program?
Could it be that once you actually get the PhD, your standard of living goes down?
Posted by: TomHynes at Dec 17, 2007 11:39:35 AM
Well I don't know if people who leave earlier are stupider, but it is one of the cherished articles of faith in the Linux community that if Torvald had not been able to stay in grad school more or less indefinitely there would not have been a Linux.
Also on a personal note, my brother took about 2 decade in physics grad school to work his way to the elite fencing ranks and recently was ranked #1 in the country in his age class....
Posted by: RobbL at Dec 17, 2007 11:47:04 AM
8+ years? When I entered my doctoral program I was told, from day 1, that there would be 4 years of funding, and no more. As it was, I could have had a 5th year covering classes for a guy on sabbatical, but economics being what it is these days, I already had a job lined up when that offer came along.
The school where I did my Masters, in Canada, tried to put a 6-year ceiling on doctorate time-to-complete, and the Dean (an engineer) was shocked to discover that the mean time in some of the humanities was 7years, with 6 seeming like a floor, not a ceiling.
With proper supervision (admittedly, often missing), nobody should take more than 5 years, even with a year of fieldwork.
Posted by: bartman at Dec 17, 2007 11:51:50 AM
In my experience, the people who finish sooner are almost without exception better than the people that take longer. People who complete programs in 4 years walk out with a bunch of publications and good jobs. The people that take 10 years might get a job, but have crappy CVs in comparison. The reason people finish sooner is usually because they are better, more motivated, and have a stronger work ethic. These people would be even better, I suppose, if they took an extra six years, but it's better for them to spend that 6 years earning tenure rather than earning a Ph.D. (N.b.: I'm discussing philosophy Ph.D.s here.)
Posted by: J. at Dec 17, 2007 2:04:09 PM
If you are in grad school a long time it can get too comfortable. You're making a living (albeit a poor one) on soft money or part-time teaching, you're in a nice academic community, etc.
Then it dawns on you that time is passing you by.
Or, it dawned on me. I left after 5.5 years to go into applied work because I thought if I didn't bring things to a head I might be like some of my office mates who were smart and motivated, but working as research associates instead of being principal investigators. Plus, the really good job interviews were going to the people who were finishing "on time".
Working full time and building a career was distracting, but I finally finished up (12 years after starting).
Posted by: ZBicyclist at Dec 17, 2007 2:30:29 PM
It is the same in my field (Epidemiology) -- people who take a very long time to earn a degree don't usually seem to benefit much from the extra time. Once you have the basic skill set, the costs of being a student really do seem to outweigh the benefits.
Posted by: Joseph Delaney at Dec 17, 2007 2:59:25 PM
I seriously doubt that doctoral candidates want to be ABD's for such long periods of time. Plus, most programs may provide backing up to four years, right? That is also an incentive for most candidates to want to move faster. But the support of advisers is key to a candidate's academic closure.
Posted by: Bri at Dec 17, 2007 4:09:46 PM
I am sure the advisers felt little incentive to part with a well trained and cheap lab technician who can teach undergrads while they themselves do their consulting gig.
Posted by: z at Dec 17, 2007 4:33:30 PM
It took me 10 years to get my PhD. When I finally got it my dissertation was hailed as one of the best ones ever. Up to the point where I actually published it most all my profs, save one or two supporters, were saying I ought to be kicked out of the program. So it's a complicated thing and I don't think there should be any hard and fast rules globally enforced. That said, profs could work a little harder to help students who are struggling, but that's part of the hazing ritual. It can work either against you or for you, depending on circumstances.
Posted by: defib at Dec 17, 2007 4:55:41 PM
A PhD is one of the most ill-defined projects a sane human being will
undertake. When is one done? The adviser must, by definition, have a
conflict of interest here. Esp. in the sciences. An eight year track
leaves the adviser with a student who has acquired the complete
skillset, takes no courses, and is most productive with minimum marginal
investment. Obviously they keep them in longer!
The cardinal principal of separation of duties has been grossly ignored:
The typical adviser performs many, mutually conflicting, duties: source
of funding, technical guidance, call the shots about "when a PhD is
finished". Far too autocratic and one-sided power distribution. Besides
the innate problem that the adviser and the student are typically
pandering to two disparate lobbies. The adviser to the academic
community of his peers and his funding agencies. The student to
potential employers. It might be quixotic to assume they are the same
but they aren't.
But, I'll still concede that the smart guys do get out earlier; but only coz' they learn to game the system earlier and better! lol
Posted by: anon at Dec 17, 2007 5:23:05 PM
I think a key factor in lengthy humanities PhDs is the relative scarcity of academic jobs in humanities fields. I suspect this is a factor in the increasing length of dissertations in the humanities. I have also heard of people staying in school longer while waiting to find a job, and also staying in school longer while coming to terms with the likelihood that they would not get a good job in their field or a related one.
In economics, at least at top schools, everyone basically gets a good job, either related to their work in academia or in industry at an even higher salary.
Posted by: DLC at Dec 17, 2007 7:49:47 PM
Tyler,
Thanks for couching this post in terms of the law of demand; in the "Concise
Encyclopedia of Economics," one can find a great quote from Stigler
indicating that should anyone find an exception to the law of demand he
would achieve "immortality" in the econ profession, and would be "rapidly
promoted." This jives with the matter-of-fact tone of your post, of
course. What is odd then, is that despite the demonstrated explanatory
power of this hypothesis to explain observable phenomena over the past
century, some of the top journals in economics have found it fashionable
in the past 15 years or so to feature publications that posit upward sloping
constructs called "demand curves" sans evidence.
Posted by: indiana jim at Dec 17, 2007 8:13:02 PM
Would you not be willing to say that those willing to leave sooner were in fact on the margin brighter or at least better researchers?
They'd done more work, more quickly, with less hand holding. Good advisors with reputations to maintain don't let students leave without them getting well placed on leaving. Those who leave quickly must have good places to go, no?
I don't actually think it means these quicker folks are more motivated, but being motivated isn't enough. You need direction, and most profs dont' teach you how to find direction any more. Those finishing quickly may have better advisors, better questions to answer, or more luck, but certainly in a world that isn't interested in teaching "how to ask and answer a good research question" to its grad students, those who figured it out more quickly are by defn, better.
But it's obvious that there were no incentives to graduate the phds. More grad students didn't demand more effort on the part of the profs. More grad students did mean more TAs to cover classes. More grad students who were old meant less mentoring of the young. Where was the incentive to graduate them?
Posted by: mouse at Dec 17, 2007 10:28:36 PM
indiana jim,
The truly upward-sloping demand curve has indeed finally been found.
Rice in parts of rural China, although the paper is still not published.
Ghost of a skeptical Stigler holding it back, I guess.
For the humanities, it is not just that the job prospects are not good,
but what jobs there are will likely be in much less interesting academic
environments and communities than the grad schools. So, as long as one
does not have children or other pressing financial needs, hanging on in
grad school can have a lot of year to year appeal. All the discussion of
exploitation of lab technicians and so forth is clearly relevant to the
lab sciences and not the humanities.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 17, 2007 11:40:55 PM
I agree with DLC. I graduated from Harvard last year (2006) with my PhD. I took exactly as long as I possibly could get away with (ten years, and not a day more). I delayed my graduation so that I could get articles ready for publication. Now that I have graduated, I am pushing out the articles. The job market is brutal (I'm in the humanities) and once you get your PhD, the clock starts ticking. You basically get three or four years on the job market after your graduation date--if you haven't got a job by then, you are past your sell-by date. My sense is that the stigma of being four years post-PhD without a tenure-track job is much greater than the stigma of being someone who took ten years to get their PhD.
I probably would have graduated earlier if I saw a great job advertised that I wanted to apply for, but there weren't any really good jobs advertised in my subfield in the last three years of my PhD program. If the job market was better, people would get their PhDs more quickly. Harvard is making this move because the time to PhD is a metric that a lot of people pay attention to. But placement in academic jobs is not a metric that anyone keeps track of (at least not in the humanities). So if they can improve the time to PhD, then they will do that, even if it makes placement rates suffer.
Of course it's also the case that life as a Harvard graduate student is pretty cozy, but I don't think that's the primary reason why people have been staying so long here. It's a localized problem that affects only the fields with terrible job markets. This is my third time on the market and I have two first-round interviews coming up--so I guess we'll see how my strategy works out.
Posted by: Jobseeker at Dec 18, 2007 12:10:59 AM
"Of course it's also the case that life as a Harvard graduate student is pretty cozy, but I don't think that's the primary reason why people have been staying so long here. It's a localized problem that affects only the fields with terrible job markets."
I can see why the job market has a lot do with this.
Being at Harvard, your at the center of academia with interesting students/professors. Also a nice city.
And then when you look for jobs in a tough field like the humanities, you have to come to terms with the fact that you might end up at a small school in North Dakota.
Posted by: thehova at Dec 18, 2007 3:28:09 AM
Barkley Rosser,
Is it a Giffen case that is in the forthcoming article you speak of? Rice certainly doesn't sound like a conspicuous consumption good; it is such "fashion" and "status" goods and those involving positive consumption externalities that several top econ journals have, again, allocated space in which to print upward sloping "demand" curves sans evidence (Stigler's ghost notwithstanding).
Past Giffen cases, of course, have been subjected to critical commentary that have caused prominent intermediate micro textbook authors (e.g. Browning and Zupan) to doubt that there has EVER been an empirically verified case of and actual Giffen good.
And if the forthcoming article you speak of comes out in one of top 4 or 5 general interest econ journals it is less likely to be criticized therein because the publication of comments, replies and rejoinders has imploded there over the past 30 years or so. Fortunately, there are some editors (like you and Dan Klein for example) at alternative journals who are willing to entertain intellectual investigations that can question and even challenge the "conventional wisdom" at the top of the discipline.
Posted by: indiana jim at Dec 18, 2007 10:28:12 AM
This tells me a PhD should not take long to get.
http://www.princeton.edu/~eweyl/cv
Posted by: Dave Barnes at Dec 18, 2007 11:11:30 AM
indiana jim,
The Chinese rice case may yet prove to contain holes, but the latest version
I saw looked pretty good (no, it is not at my journal, although I would
certainly consider it seriously if it were sent to me, do not know where
it is or what is happening to it, and sorry, but forget names of authors,
although a quick google will find them, pretty recent). It is indeed a Giffen
good case, if it holds, not just one of these "demand curve shifting because
of preferences or expectations changing" cases such as with Veblen goods or
speculative bubbles.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 18, 2007 12:33:15 PM
That is interesting Barkley, I'll see if I can track it down and give it a look-see; thanks for the heads up.
Posted by: indiana jim at Dec 18, 2007 1:24:34 PM
indiana jim,
You're welcome.
The paper is actually from earlier this year
and is "Giffen Behavior: Theory and Evidence,"
Robert T. Jensen and Nolan H. Miller, available at
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-030.
It is Working Paper 07-030 from the Kennedy School at
Harvard.
Needless to say, Stigler showed that the original
Giffen example, which was suggested in the 4th edition
of Marshall's Principles in 1893 with respect to wheat
("corn") in late 19th century Britain (not Irish potatoes,
as textbooks since the 5th edition of Samuelson's in 1964
have averred) was not a true Giffen good, although it was
certainly an inferior good. More recent papers have also
shown that Irish potatoes were not a Giffen good either.
Indeed, if they had been a true Giffen good, the decline
in their supply during the famine would have lowered their
price, which most definitely did not happen.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 18, 2007 4:59:50 PM
Barkley,
I've started reading the paper by Jensen & Miller that you recommended.
Thanks again,
Jim
Posted by: indiana jim at Dec 19, 2007 10:26:23 AM
Barkley,
I've started reading the paper by Jensen & Miller that you recommended.
Thanks again,
Jim
Posted by: indiana jim at Dec 19, 2007 10:26:37 AM
i.j.,
You're welcome, :-).
Is this exchange why Tyler is telling Robin Hanson about our
inability to disprove that demand curves never slope downwards,
or is he being more generally methodological, the latter more
appropriate for dealing with Robin?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 19, 2007 1:03:20 PM
