The difficulty of getting a PhD in any subject is inversely proportional to the corruption of the respective university department and the charlatanism and toxicity of the phd supervisor. In many cases the PhD is just a certificate awarded to survivors of abuse.

In many cases the PhD is just a certificate awarded to survivors of abuse. — sime

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

Star Trek Beyond
Commander Spock: [opening his eyes] I am entirely conscious, Doctor. I'm simply contemplating the nature of mortality.

Doctor 'Bones' McCoy: Feeling philosophical, huh? Massive blood loss will do that to you.

It depends where you get it from and who your examiners were. A PhD from a top 100 university and with good examiners - that's something.
An MD is just a plumber

A PhD from a top 100 university and with good examiners - — Bartricks

Exactly. I personally think that holding a PhD on philosophy at Harvard university or Oxford (for example) is so worthy and significant.

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference
of bones from one graveyard to another - J. Frank Dobie (1888-1964)

There's this video on so-called great ideas - its a tirade against politicians who the content creator claims should be required to pass a licensing exam/test just like any other profession, doctors to lawyers to plumbers. This then makes politicians accountable and suable in a court of law. A PhD is simply a license that attests the person who has a PhD is qualified in the field in question i.e. can, sensu amplo, practice, à la physicians, a profession legally. :snicker:

A PhD is simply a license — Agent Smith

True enough. My father and I both earned the degree - in different areas - and he always called it his "union card".

The PhD requires original research, whereas the MD does not. But I've seen the former degree awarded to students whose advisors did most of the "original" stuff for them.

A more or less "real" test is whether, after getting the degree, the person publishes in refereed journals. This is required in big universities, but not necessarily in smaller institutions. Also, are their papers mostly their work or the result of a number of authors.

In mathematics, breakthroughs in new concepts are of greatest value in that one can begin generating one's disciples as PhD students. It's a big game.

There are several doctorates in philosophy here on TPF. They know best about their discipline.

:up:

I did mine in Spain, which likely differs quite a bit in many respects from the US.

Was it hard? If you like the subject - really like it - then the effort very much pays off. There were times in which it can get quite tough, in terms of getting stuck on an idea, or misunderstanding some points and the like, but, you get over these and move on.

But, as stated, the experience in the US may be very different in terms of workload and everything else.

I certainly often wondered what it would be to have a graduate degree. I assume the great cost of getting one is related to the supposed promise of a career in a subject. It would of been nice to study a subject on the cheap with a promise to stay out of related industries. Lol.

I assume the great cost of getting one is related to the supposed promise of a career in a subject. — TiredThinker

I got mine from Colorado's Land Grant University over fifty years ago for the sole purpose of staying in Colorado (I was a dedicated rock climber with a wife and small child) as an academic, a strategy that worked well for me for I was hired into the state system. These days unless you are completely enraptured with and highly competent in the subject I would not recommend a PhD program - at least in math (probably in philosophy as well). An uncomfortable percentage of grad students end up as lowly adjunct "professors" with minimal salaries and no benefits. This coupled with the not unlikely scenario that higher education is going to undergo really significant changes in coming years make academia a crapshoot. The situation is different in the tech industry in math and physics.

I would imagine it is a tremendous challenge to keep your morale up. It takes a long time and the pay is not much above the poverty level. In high cost of living cities, PhD stipends are downright unlivable.

You have to be willing to commit a lot of time to a job that is paying you less than you could make almost anywhere else. The light at the end of the tunnel?

Very grim. Even the top 10 programs in the world have pretty poor placement rates for students 5 years after finishing their PhDs. Philosophy PhDs are not very marketable and the market for jobs that require them is absolutely flooded with candidates. Hence, even at the very top programs many PhD candidates quit.

This is not unique to philosophy. It's possibly worse in English, and as bad in many social science fields. When I toyed around with the idea, looking at political science, my advisor told me to apply to Harvard, Yale, etc., the top 7 schools then, and not to bother otherwise because I would likely not be working as an academic without top end credentials, and would be better of just applying for research jobs with the degree I already had if they interested me.

Pay is also quite bad after you get out. Top schools might only pay adjuncts the equivalent of $18 an hour (it might be up a bit now) for full time work. Getting to put "a big name," on your resume is supposed to be payment enough. Ironically, pay can be a bit better in out of the way places. I teach community college classes for fun outside my regular job and make more hourly then adjuncts at the big name private school I went to. More recently, they've started having PhDs teach classes completely unpaid. It's the "unpaid internship," of the Great Recession era, returned for academics in their thirties who might have families to support. The idea is that you work for free to get valuable experience to add to your resume (something your 7 year advanced degree didn't get you apparently).

This isn't true for all fields. I know people who got their degrees in mathematics who got offered huge salaries at tech companies. You're much better off in areas of applied science. But humanities and most social sciences degrees are massively overproduced relative to the market for them. It's like a worse version of how law schools were 10-15 years ago, which is really saying something.

Philosophy could be a fairly health discipline. There is a lot of work philosophers could do in the sciences. You can see a world where philosophy PhDs could at least grab research positions in the ways people coming out of other disciplines can, but the field seems like it can be pretty backwards looking (from my view on the outside). "Here is the list of great names, philosophy is plowing through them one by one with no topical organization or attempts to relate the material to modern science." That's certainly how all my philosophy classes were in undergrad. And so it's sort of a dead field.

If people focusing on philosophy of mind came out with an equivalent of an MS in cognitive science or neuroscience, people focused on epistemology/philosophy of science did a bunch of practical work on research/experiment design, people focused on logic got the equivalent of a MS in computer science and learned to apply that logic in coding/creating new coding solutions, etc. it seems like the employment picture would be less grim. Some programs seem to do something like this, most do not appear to.

To make things worse, universities are not on a stable financial trajectory, so I imagine things will get worse before they get better.

So, very hard. Easier if you're independently wealthy or have a time machine and can go back to 1960-1990 for the old job market. See: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/philosophy-academia/

Or look at the Daily Nous site. It has a whole section for philosophy PhDs to post jobs outside philosophy they got so that people have an idea of where to look for work.

I'm sure the classes can be hard, but I've found class difficulty has little to do with how high a school is ranked, or even the level of the class. I took a security studies core class for polsci PhDs where I was the only non-PhD student and it was incredibly easy (and not a great class). I had a few other mostly PhD classes and none were particularly hard. Meanwhile I had classes I took at community college that were graded brutally.

I chalk this up to supply and demand too. At the community college, the classes that were hard were prereqs for the nursing program. There was a ton of demand for the nursing program because nurses command high wages, due to lack of supply.

Instructors graded harshly because they knew they had to make tough discussions to allocate a scarce resource. In the PhD classes, admissions to the school was the scarce resource because it was ranked 8th in the US then, but once people met the bar for admissions, the goal was to try to make sure they got jobs, since that determined the program's rankings (weird flip in incentives there).

Even in some brutal quant classes where I'd get half the answers on the test wrong to some degree, and feel lost the whole time as the professors filled 20 feet of white board with proofs, then walk back to where he started his work and begin erasing so he could continue with another 20 feet of proofs, I still got an A- because the curve made 50% good enough.