Are PHD's and MD's Worth the Sacrifice?
I have read a number of articles lately about the falling birth rate among educated women in the United States and Europe; many of these lower rates are blamed on sexual diseases, later age of marriage and women waiting too long to have kids. It's great that women are so into their careers but some of these careers take a lifetime to prepare for. I wish someone had told me years ago at 18 that I would be spending another 14 years in school training to be a psychologist. I even made it through undergrad in three years but little did I know that it would be years of work before I finished two masters, a postmasters, a PHD and a post-doc--11 more to be exact. I have almost no regrets about my life, save for one, that I spent my youth in graduate school when it was unnecessary, unfullfilling and not very lucrative.
Lest you think I am just an anomaly who doddered through school, I read recently that the average PHD in psychology takes over 7 years to complete after a BA and many schools have their students take even longer. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, a PHD in School Psych takes a median average of 7.75 years after a master's degree. If you go directly in with a BA, it will take a median average of 8.75 years. And then there is the one year Post-doc that many states require in order to get licensed and the licensing exams themselves (usually written and oral). By this time, a woman is often close to thirty or more--meaning that if she wants kids, there is not much time. I knew several colleagues who had families and kids during one of my PHD programs and some of them dropped out or their marriage ended. I imagine that medical school and other PHD programs also pose hardships on women who want to have children but of course, it is doable.
This post is not to discourage women or men for that matter from going to time-consuming graduate programs, it is simply to remind people that in life there are trade-offs and it is important to remember that while a PHD or MD is quite an accomplishment, it can also be quite a hindrance. Only the person getting the degree can decide if it is worth the sacrifice.
Lest you think I am just an anomaly who doddered through school, I read recently that the average PHD in psychology takes over 7 years to complete after a BA and many schools have their students take even longer. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, a PHD in School Psych takes a median average of 7.75 years after a master's degree. If you go directly in with a BA, it will take a median average of 8.75 years. And then there is the one year Post-doc that many states require in order to get licensed and the licensing exams themselves (usually written and oral). By this time, a woman is often close to thirty or more--meaning that if she wants kids, there is not much time. I knew several colleagues who had families and kids during one of my PHD programs and some of them dropped out or their marriage ended. I imagine that medical school and other PHD programs also pose hardships on women who want to have children but of course, it is doable.
This post is not to discourage women or men for that matter from going to time-consuming graduate programs, it is simply to remind people that in life there are trade-offs and it is important to remember that while a PHD or MD is quite an accomplishment, it can also be quite a hindrance. Only the person getting the degree can decide if it is worth the sacrifice.
posted by Helen at 10:40 AM
41 Comments:
At least wrt PhDs, isn't that partly because nobody goes into a PhD program with his eyes open? Doing a doctorate and a master's are two radically different things, and there's nothing in a master's program that prepares you for what will be expected of you as a PhD student.
Is there anything inherent about the field that requires an average of 8.75 years for an intelligent person to learn? How much of this is make work?
What are the total costs to our economy of excessive and unproductive time spent in educational institutions? I don't know the answer, but suspect it is a very large number.
I can see in highly intensive programs, like medicine or somethin similar, it might take a long time.
But, similar degrees on subjects like Womens Studies or other assorted Marxist retread philosophies are ludicrous and should be abolished by Universities. I know I won't set foot on a campus that has such garbage in its curriculum. I consider it fraud.
I recently read that colleges / universities are the 7th largest industry in the U.S. Ongoing personal experience has shown costs are rising at an increasing rate, outstripping the rising costs of everything else, save perhaps fuel.
The overwhelming majority of people make it through via loans. That's a large debt load to go into the work a day world with.
On a different note,I give training seminars to rooms full of mechanical engineers. I train them on processes and equipment designed to make plants and factories run more efficiently and decrease downtime. I don't have a 4 year degree in mechanical engineering.
I have met many, although a minority, that I wonder who took their exams for them - or wonder at least where in the hell they went to school.
According to available stats, it should pay off to be well educated, as opposed to stopping at say, high school. PhD holders make less than Masters holders over their life time, from this same info. Weird.
My ideal setup for society...
Young adults get married at fifteen, and supported in community. Very little allowance for divorce.
Young couple has three-four kids. Raises them to be God-fearing, patriotic, law-abiding citizens. Helps them set up as do the grandparents.
Wife who wants a PHd then at age 30-33 then goes to college to pursue it. She takes eleven to fifteen years to get it.
With advanced meds, and daily running, and vitamins she then has a productive life up until she is about 85.
She spends from 85-87 rapidly declining. Dies. Goes to Heaven.
Her great-great-great-great-great grandchildren all testify to what a wonderful lady she was.
Now, Thats a Wonderful Life...
Tennwriter
Biological clock: tick tick tick.
My ideal strategy, to suggest to my kids:
(a) find a husband during your 20s so (b) you'll have kids in the mid-20s to mid-30s. (If first pregnancies went well and marriage didn't occur until late end of the strategy, then sibling children are possible into early 40s. 18-24 months between children as minimum target.) There are no guarantees you'll find Mr. Right during that ideal time, but one can try to be emotionally open to the possibility and to make career and time management choices to enable relationship time (versus travel or long hours).
There are too many news stories about older women having babies. News covers the anecdotes and extremes too much, imho.
As a consumer of the medical literature, this is my understanding of the state of the art: Any first-time mother age 35+ is considered high risk.* Hence the above design for a life strategy.
C.
*P.S. Non first time pregnancies are rated based on the individual's history from previous pregnancies. Yet, even those with previous easy pregnancies hit a diminishing returns after 35: increased risk of Down's syndrome and other birth defects for the baby, and increased risk of complications for the mother.
***DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a medical professional. I just read a lot of stuff before and during my pregnancies.
I have a BS in Electrical Engineering. Going to grad school didn't even really cross my mind. It was the height of the .com boom when I graduated, and there was money to be made.
Sometimes I regret not going for a higher degree, but that's probably hindsight. I think I would have felt it a bigger mistake if I had stayed in school, and missed out on the crazy job market for computer folks in the late 90s.
I have a Ph.D. in astronomy, which took me five years to complete. There was no intermediate master's degree. This was fairly typical in the field at that time. I did depart from type by going to work for a national laboratory rather than doing a postdoc.
There are conflicting incentives on length of Ph.D. candidacy. On the one hand, Ph.D. students are cheap laboratory help. They're today's hunchbacks. This gives an incentive to keep them around.
On the other hand, a professor can manage only so many students, and he gets prestige from those he advises. This creates an incentive to push the students along.
In my experience, these conflicting incentives balance out fairly well.
Did I need to study that long? You bet. You can't learn a field like this except by grinding at it for a long time.
But the real bottom line is that no one really has any business getting a Ph.D. for any reason other than that they love the field.
Having earned a PhD in one of the sciences, I often wonder about the efforts made to encourage more women to earn PhDs. The training is long, and faculty jobs are hard to come by. Nobody really explains this when they're telling you about the great job with flexible hours. It's not uncommon to be in your late 30s (with years of long-hour postdoc work behind you) before you get a 'real job'.
Of course, my decision to 'opt out' and do some part-time teaching while primarily staying home with a baby means I'm typically thought of as one who, despite winning awards as a student, 'couldn't hack it'. It's really a shame that those of us who will have employment gaps on our resume wouldn't be considered for many jobs because we 'aren't serious about the science'. I think that if this were better known, fewer people would pursue PhDs and those who do would be much more realistic about likely career outcomes.
"If you go directly in with a BA, it will take a median average of 8.75 years."
Ah but just think, for 8.75 years you can say "I'm working on my PhD!" and everyone will be quite impressed. At least in your family, if they haven't done it themselves.
As someone who wasted a few years herself getting a law degree, or I mean "her" law degree, I suspect there's not a little hubris in all this. And we pay for it too.
This is part of a bigger problem that we have discussed before here. We are genetically set up to start breeding in our mid-teens, from a time when our life expectancy was maybe double that. But techology, etc. is accelerating, and to be successful today requires a lot of education, running through a woman's most fertile time of her life.
I suspect as the great boomer retirement begins, there'll be less and less concern for employment gaps if the worker is truly skilled and needed. Women today seem to be happier with their choices, and run the gamut. They know what they're getting into, or not. The ticking clock is no surprise anymore, and I would quibble that at 30, most women would consider the following decade as not much time left. Looking back perhaps. Looking ahead, no. If your culture stresses early birth, you may feel you're a late bloomer post 30. But it really is a myth that all past generations started earlier for women, for whatever reason -- jobs or higher ed. Many families start breeding at 25+ for a few generations, so over 30 is not necessarily that far a push back. (Some of you early reproducers are lapping us in fact, not that there's anything wrong with that. Older families are different perhaps, but not so riddled with illness or problems as you might think. Perhaps to the contrary actually; some of society's problems might be lessened by holding back a bit on concentrating on pairing off and reproducing in the 20s.
I like the line about pursuing education at later and later ages: "And if you don't go back to school, how old will you be in 14 years?" Time off between hs and college, yes. Between undergrad and grad also. Then you don't believe you are "missing out" and don't squander the education apprising your marital and familial prospects. You also have time to reproduce, and then return to school, as many women do.
The shortage of skilled workers in years to come probably will lessen the problem you describe.
Why does it take so long to get a PHD is psycology? As a layperson, practically everything I've ever learned about in school has apparently been discredited. (Skinner's boxes, Freud's mom, Stanford's prison experiment)
Isn't all that psycologists do is listen to people's problems in a fairly structured environment?
I got a PhD in economics. Took me 5 years.
And I can confirm Dr. Helen's observations about married people trying to get a PhD. Most of the men and women I have seen who tried to do a PhD while married either got divorced, or dropped out, or both.
Please see my blog at:
http://provocateurjim.blogspot.com/
The tenor of 'female liberation' in the U.S. has been on doing those serious things that men do, that 'daddy,' sometimes real and sometimes borrowed, prohibited. Delacroix in,Liberty Leading the People, gave a different Enlightenment and French ideal for a woman, that of one, in the picture bare breasted, who could initiate by her sexuality and not merely be responsive or guide by traditional passive aggressive means, that is by the man failing until he did what the woman wanted. This feminine liberty may include having 4 children without being officially married as the recent French woman Socialist presidential candidate Royal. It also included the intellectual aggresion of Mme Curie and the first Frau Einstein.
Well I can't speak to Dr. Helen's motivations for pursuing a Phd., but for many of the postgrads that I interact with, it's basically a lifestyle choice.
These tend to be people who recognize that they won't be satisfied with 'a real job' and aren't enterprising enough to develop other options. So they stay in school through their late twenties, come to the realization that their skills aren't worth what they've invested in them, and enter a Phd. program to buy some more time. Frankly many seem immature - it's as though they stopped growing emotionally in their mid twenties.
I have to go along with rightwingprof's comment -- surprisingly, a lot of times people don't know what they are getting into when they enter a PhD program. I was very heavily recruited to join an Ivy League PhD program in the sciences. During the process, several faculty members insisted that there was no reason that I couldn't finish the program in four or four and a half years. I took them at their word and never bothered to find out that no one had ever finished their degree in that department in less than six and a half years, and that the average was approaching eight. It turns out that the faculty used the same line on most students who interviewed. Unfortunately, many young, successful, bright, and yes, arrogant, people buy it hook, line and sinker, and then three or four years go by, and they feel stuck. ("Oh, you can't quit now! You will have wasted all those years!") I left after seven years without the PhD, and I started a very successful business, but I know many students whose lives became train wrecks going through the PhD process.
I had to laugh at another anonymous comment: "Frankly many seem immature - it's as though they stopped growing emotionally in their mid twenties." From first hand experience, I can say that graduate school can do that to you, even if that's not what you want. Now try to get a date in year six of a PhD program when you are pushing thirty and are emotionally stuck at twenty four or even going backwards! ;-)
"PhD holders make less than Masters holders over their life time, from this same info. Weird."
Actually, it's not so weird. Masters holders go into industry while PhD types tend to stay in academia. I could be making much more money if I'd taken my electrical engineering B.S. into industry, rather than getting a PhD in Astronomy and staying in academia. On the flip side, I has tremendous flexibility in my professional life with respect to choosing my hours, my projects, and my professional trajectory. I'll take the salary hit to stay out of the Dilbert cubicle farm.
Anon 9:10. I have enormous respect for academicians, but you've just uncovered a logical fallacy that leads to the dilemma Dr H is talking about: that is, the presumption that working in "industry" involves a cubicle farm. It can involve that, but more often doesn't IMHO. That logical fallacy brainwashes the students who, when incorrectly given that set of options, kill themselves for PhDs when they might be happier in "industry". Where are the university courses that take students out and show them what jobs are actually like in "industry"? Business does it but how about the humanities or the sciences?
Nick and anon 9:10:
After running a private practice for most of my career, with no benefits and low pay, I would be glad at this point to work at a "Dilbert cubicle farm." Unfortunately, my personality probably precludes it.
Having a couple of degrees and very much enjoying the university student lifestyle I fully plan to do a PhD...in retirement whenever that happens.
As compared to childrearing or building a family - for either a woman or a man - a PhD may very well be a luxury that the society as a whole cannot afford for all that many people. However, after a productive life the notion of pursuing knowledge for its own sake in retirement makes sense. (A good example of this is Steve McIntyre over at ClimateAudit.ca who is a retired accountant who became interested in the statistics and metrics involved in claims about global warming. He now runs a world class site and has been invited to appear before Congress on these questions.)
As well, after, say, sixty years of living in the world, most elderly PhD candidates are not going to be easily fooled by the claims of Women's Studies profs or deconstructionist lit professors.
An article by Suzanne Fields titled "Universities work too well as 'contraceptives' for German families" appeared back in March...The statistics seemed so startling to me, I clipped and saved the article.
To give some perspective, it pointed out that before the decade of the 1990s, almost 60% of German women between the ages of 25 - 29 had had a baby. That figure is closer to 30% now.
In Germany last year, 42 % of women between 34 and 40 in academic careers were childless. This is double the rate in France.
German women produce 1.2 children each, on average. The French rate is 1.9, the British rate is 1.74. A fertility rate of 2.1 births is minimal replacement level in developed countries.
Not only does the individual feel the consequences of the choice of career/academia over child rearing, but a ripple affect occurs throughout the fabric of society.
(a) find a husband during your 20s
Yeah, I should have just picked one up at the mall or something. Maybe it really is that easy for everyone else...unfortunately, I went to engineering school--never had time to meet a husband during school. Post-school, well, let's just say if I never want to see a man I'm having dinner with ever again, I tell him what I do for a living. (It was funny for the first ten years. It sucks now.)
Radish's comments seem to hold for some of us men, too. In a conversation with one of my graduate student friends (we were Ph.D. students in physics and chemistry, respectively), we observed that we were apparently invisible to women. (No patent on that discovery, though). I did eventually marry a fellow chemistry graduate student (M.S.), in part perhaps because we had a mutual understanding of why it was that we had to be working late and odd hours in the lab, and no, there is no "other woman" taking up my time. While at one time, I thought that there probably ought to be a law against two such scientific types intermarrying, we were fortunate and have been married 30 years. I have seen the stress and conflicts that graduate school places on couples. At least I did not have to give my final oral defense while pregnant.
Lab Guy
Thank you for your post. I have a MA and completed about 3/4 of my PhD before I dropped out of the program. There were women professors in the department that had children, but many of them had babysitters on rotation because the pressure to research and publish kept them in the office. Others were older and without children. Although these women were brilliant researchers and teachers, they struck me as cold or lacking understanding for some of us younger gals who wanted work/life balance.
From time to time I regret not finishing up the PhD (especially when I google my grad school pals and see their publication list). But I'm now married and have a fabulous job and am hoping to get pregnant next year.
The grass is greener where you water it.
I've discovered I do better in the cubicle farm. As a quiet science type, the comments heard over the cubicle walls resulted in me interacting with teammates more. The informal peer reviews improve each others' work products, and the chance for friendships.
Anonymous 12:17:
I worked for several years for the state in NYC as a psychologist and was out in the field during the week and on Fridays spent the day in a cubicle in an office with scores of other workers. It was actually my favorite day for the very reasons you gave, there were some interesting co-workers to shoot ideas with and it gave me a chance to get ideas about where to go in patient treatment.
I planted two acres of Dilbert cubicles, but not one seed sprouted. The farm was a total failure.
I wonder what interesting fact Radish left out of her engineering school story. As it is, Radish's story seems as improbable to me as a man whose major is early child education claiming that he can't find a wife from among his classmates. In my E-school experience, the ratio was almost 20 men to one woman. I hear it's only around 5 to 1 these days and the young 'un of the house says his pre-Calculus class had a 4 to 1 ratio the day after the no-petition drop date.
Lab Guy (Anonymous of 10:23 PM), thanks for offering your testimony. Shows there's hope. Congrats to you and Lab Gal for your 30-year anniversary.
Finally, 8.75 years?! Ouch. St. Helen, pray for us.
Well, one of my daughters is entering a PhD program come August.
Anyone here want to offer a "Go for it" or "Run! Now! Before it's too late!" ?
She is a lab rat, though. Loves doing research. But that's now.
I am fretting that she has been encouraged by her professors at the four year school (and, alas, me)to pursue this degree. I have promised my support as always.
Then I read that article stating colleges / universities are the 7th largest industry in the U.S. As such, they must self perpetuate, eh? So, if holding a PhD, and in academia, is it now not but a cubicle by another name, perhaps?
I'm asking, not being a smart ass. I love my daughter, and want her to be happy. But I want her to be able to eat well.
What would any of you do differently, if anything? Would you still pursue a PhD?
br549,
Many other degrees outside of psychology can take a shorter period of time. We have a full time one year internship that adds another year and a full time one year post-doc in most states prior to getting licensed so it is a bit longer. I do know people who get out in 5 years and perhaps even four in other programs and who enjoyed them. I lived in NYC and supported myself there and paid for school--perhaps this is what led to taking a bit longer than was necessary. If you are helping your daughter and she can study full-time, she is probably going to have a fine experience. If I could have done something differently, I would have chosen a less expensive area to live and researched how many grad students made it out of the program I was thinking of enrolling in within four years.
I regret getting a PhD in English literature. I entered the program rather late, already had three young children (thank goodness). When I finished, they were three teen-agers.
That's when I realized that my only option for pursuing the career would be to uproot my entire family so that I could take a low-paid assistant professorship in a different state, with no guarantee of getting tenure or moving ahead or making money - if I could even land one of those scarce jobs!
Getting the doctorate such a dumb thing for me to do, and I have no one to blame but myself. Years of lost income and therefore lost retirement income. Dumb, dumb, dumb. How ironic.
Radish/Michael --
As an alum of Georgia Tech, where the ratio of men to women typically hovers around 2.5 to 1, I was amused during my time there to discover that the coeds have a little saying: "the odds are good, but the goods are odd."
Fortunately, one of the coeds apparently found me sufficiently less odd than the median to put up with me as a husband for the last 27 years. ;)
br549 - I, too, was a lab rat when I finished my undergrad, hence grad school. I definitely would not tell her to run, but tell her to pay attention during her time in grad school to what she enjoys. Most scientists discourage 'wasting time' teaching and training undergrads, for instance, but encourage her to get varied experience. I'm always amazed that folks who spend years avoiding the 'distraction' of working with undergrads get hired for faculty jobs and then find that they hate 1/3 of their workload.
Likewise, tell her to pay attention to the lifestyle of the faculty - does she want to make the time investment of getting a faculty job at a R1 university, does she like teaching and want to run a small lab at a liberal arts college, or would research without the management/teaching role of a professor be a better choice, leading her to industry or a maybe a research hospital, etc.
I guess that could be summed up in encouraging her not to buy in to the idea that there is only one appropriate career for a scientist - it may be best not to let her adviser in on alternative plans too soon (some are less than supportive), but she should get the experience to help her figure out what she wants to do with the degree.
Thank you, dana-lu and Dr. Helen.
I know she has the drive and the raw intelligence to do great things - for all of us. She wants to make things better for everyone. One of the many things that makes me worship the ground she walks on, just like my other kids.
She needs (I believe) to place herself in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific for a while, stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, stare at the vastness of space. But hell, we all need to do that.
By the way, to any and all of you who have pursued your degrees to the point of being world class experts in your chosen field, my hat is off to you. I admire you all greatly.
My wife and I are working towards a PhD, we will be finished in 1 year. She is pregnant and still working and I am right there for anything she may need. We are really happy and have no problems. We have time to go out, watch movies and all of that.
I think that there are two approaches to get a PhD. One is to work 100% to finish as soon as possible; another is to give 50% towards your degree and 50% towards your family. The latter is what we are doing, it is taking us a little more time, but it is better (for us) than the other choice. I think we are doing well; we have a couple of papers published in peer-reviewed journals and we enjoy our life together.
Dr. Helen-
This post terrifies me! I'm 24 and on my way to pursue a PhD in psychology. I've been considering getting my MD in psychiatry instead (not because of family desires but because I want that darn white coat!). Honestly though, I want to start a family after I am 30, but I won't even be done with the degree by then. I'm a very family oriented person, but wouldn't want to raise a child while I attained a degree. Besides, no one has considered that some people want the degree in order to be personally satisfied. If I don't achieve my degree first, I cannot be assured of my personal happiness or even the lack of resentment for a child. A higher degree is incredibly important to me considering my own wishes and that I will be the first person in my family to achieve graduate schooling of any kind. Thing is, I don't want to get a PhD and realize I wanted my MD instead because, as you've pointed out, they take quite some time.
I wonder, as opposed to getting a PhD, do you ever wish you'd achieved your MD instead? I'm still learning about the differences, and aside from the fact that I'm absolutely horrendous at math, I'm not certain if there is that great of a gap. Of course MDs prescribe medicine, but PhDs have leant themselves to the resarch necessary for such medications.
I'm just confused about the whole thing to be honest. Family vs degree type vs sanity vs making myself happy.
How did you balance all of that?
Jennet,
I just saw your post, so it may be too late unless you are checking back on this thread. Yes, the MD would be worth more than the PHD as you can do both therapy and prescribe meds with an MD and psychiatrists have a much higher income than psychologists. Remember, you can always go to school but you can't always have children. People will try to tell you otherwise but it is not true. One of my family members just got his MD--at 40 or so and is doing a residency, so it is possible. You will have to weigh what is more important to you. Don't be terrified though, be excited that you have such terrific opportunities!
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