• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Our PhD Surplus

Without education, jobs consist of hunting and gathering.

Regardless, welcome to debatepolitics.com!

A guy with a PhD that can't get a job, is just as good as a guy with no PhD at all.
 
Instead of hiring a PhD I prefer to hire someone with a MBWA (managemment by walking about)
 
A guy with a PhD that can't get a job, is just as good as a guy with no PhD at all.

That's not true at all. The guy with the PhD will be much better at conducting research, thinking critically, analysing, evaluating, teamwork and presentation - as all of those things are focused upon during the process. This is like saying that a guy who is not currently in the active military is the same as someone who never served, as if he carries no qualities and has accomplished nothing.

Given a choice between a PhD and some loser job, I'll take the PhD; you can go hang out with the fry cook.
 
A guy with a PhD that can't get a job, is just as good as a guy with no PhD at all.

Can you tell me what the unemployment rate is for people with PhD's and people with no education? I'am pretty confident that the unemployment rate for our most highly educated folk is quite a bit lower than our least educated folk.
 
Can you tell me what the unemployment rate is for people with PhD's and people with no education? I'am pretty confident that the unemployment rate for our most highly educated folk is quite a bit lower than our least educated folk.

That's true, there is probably less unemployment for PhD's.

But, the problem is that the government have tried to convince the average american that education is the key to fixing the economy, when that's simply not the case. Thats just a way for the government to shirk responsibility for implementing insane trade agreements that ship our jobs overseas while at the same time making americans believe that the reason their plant shut down is because they don't have five PhD's.

A strong middle class is the key to any economy, and thats where the pain in our current economy is, and the answer is jobs, not sitting in a classroom.
 
That's not true at all. The guy with the PhD will be much better at conducting research, thinking critically, analysing, evaluating, teamwork and presentation - as all of those things are focused upon during the process. This is like saying that a guy who is not currently in the active military is the same as someone who never served, as if he carries no qualities and has accomplished nothing.

Given a choice between a PhD and some loser job, I'll take the PhD; you can go hang out with the fry cook.

I'm saying they are both making the same amount of money if they are both unemployed. Of course the PhD is probably a little smarter, but if he ain't got a job and a trashman don't have a job, then at that point they are both for all intents and purposes equal, until they are employed.
 
I'm saying they are both making the same amount of money if they are both unemployed. Of course the PhD is probably a little smarter, but if he ain't got a job and a trashman don't have a job, then at that point they are both for all intents and purposes equal, until they are employed.

Forget smarter, he's more trained in critical thinking and rational analysis. That's important, to every job and everything. You seem to value school as a means to an end while ignoring the importance of the journey.
 
That's not true at all. The guy with the PhD will be much better at conducting research, thinking critically, analysing, evaluating, teamwork and presentation - as all of those things are focused upon during the process. This is like saying that a guy who is not currently in the active military is the same as someone who never served, as if he carries no qualities and has accomplished nothing.

Given a choice between a PhD and some loser job, I'll take the PhD; you can go hang out with the fry cook.

You'd actually be the minority in many jobs. PhDs are great to hire - for jobs that require a PhD. Otherwise, they're even worse in the "overqualified and unemployable" department.

Most hiring bodies will not employ people who are overqualified due to education. They tend to be hard to manage, are always tryng to "buck the system", and generally think that the position is "beneath" them...and they'd be right. If I was a fast food manager and could hire a 17 year old senior in high school or someone with a 4 year degree, I'll take the teen every damn day. He won't think he's too good for the job, he won't think he's smarter than I am, he's probably not looking for a better job to leave for in 2 weeks, and he won't act like he doesn't belong there.

So yeah, Snake Oil is correct to a point - a PhD is only as good as the job he can get. If he can't get a PhD-worthy position, he's more trouble than he's worth.
 
It is definitely a problem that our economy is so focused on using people for repetitive, mindless work to feed a money making machine instead of fostering creative endeavor to improve our country. It's getting to the point where the population is simply too smart and too knowledgeable to allow oligarchical, profiteering capitalism much longer. If our economics can't keep up with our knowledge, it's the economics that need to change, not the knowledge.

Yes yes. They are so darn smart in Mayan culture and 15th century music theory that we just don't know what to do with them.
 
i'd be happy to live in a country where everyone had gone through the intellectual rigor that it takes to get a PhD. in hindsight, i probably should have gotten one after my masters.

once again, education is an investment in our national intellectual resource, not just job training. we need that resource to be as large and diverse as possible, as we will have to tackle novel new national problems.

Rigor in useless studies is still useless.
 
Without education, jobs consist of hunting and gathering.

Regardless, welcome to debatepolitics.com!

Shakes head..... Someone had to discover it before it could be taught in a class room. And plenty of those who did the discovering were self taught.
 
That's not true at all. The guy with the PhD will be much better at conducting research, thinking critically, analysing, evaluating, teamwork and presentation - as all of those things are focused upon during the process. This is like saying that a guy who is not currently in the active military is the same as someone who never served, as if he carries no qualities and has accomplished nothing.

Given a choice between a PhD and some loser job, I'll take the PhD; you can go hang out with the fry cook.

Obviously yes. But I think it definitely depends on what that PhD is in. There is a huge difference between someone with a PhD in some cultural study and someone with it in something more applicable. Not to say that PhDs are worthless, but there are definitely some studies that offer a marginal value of close to zero.
 
i suppose that depends on one's definition of useless.

Where the degree gets one in the non-academia world is an adequate measure of usefulness without my passing of judgement.
 
Where the degree gets one in the non-academia world is an adequate measure of usefulness without my passing of judgement.

education =/= job training, necessarily. a football player never picks up large pieces of metal on the playing field, but if he doesn't do so in training, his play will suffer.
 
More and more people are turning to college and advanced degrees not as a means of preparing for a career but rather 1-to put off having to become a grownup and then 2-to put off paying for the student loans they have amassed. Education is a wonderful thing...but taking out 120k in student loans and end up with a useless and non-marketable degree is just plain stupid.
 
Where the degree gets one in the non-academia world is an adequate measure of usefulness without my passing of judgement.

That statement assumes that if a degree gets one a position in academia, that is not evidence of usefulness. Yet, if one stretched the argument to its limit, namely that academia has no utility and represented a waste of resources, the country would be far worse off. Given the enormous resources expended by the federal government and state and local governments, it is extremely unlikely that private companies would be able to make up for the disappearance of academia through training. Instead, the companies would take the far more cost effective route of outsourcing or shifting operations to where the knowledge is.
 
Education is a wonderful thing...but taking out 120k in student loans and end up with a useless and non-marketable degree is just plain stupid.

This issue about the loans is a big one. Policy makers, Higher Education, parents, and students really need to do a better job to ensure that the cost of a given degree is justified by the value added once they graduate. Value added includes but is not limited to career opportunities and incomes.
 
education =/= job training, necessarily. a football player never picks up large pieces of metal on the playing field, but if he doesn't do so in training, his play will suffer.

Did you play football? Lifting weights (picking up large pieces of metal) has direct application to being able to move large human beings. That said, its a good analogy because the person who was the strongest in the weight room wasn't always the same person who performed the best in the weight room. And not to mention, there were plenty of exercises that were quite useless to football and different exercises had different levels of applicability to the football field.

Same thing in the academia, some PhDs have very little application to the real world while others might have varying levels of application. Also just the level of degree does not automatically make someone better or worse for a job. If I were a company, (any kind really) I'd take someone with a BA in finance over someone with a PhD in sociology (unless it was criminology, they definitely get the nod here) any day of the week.
 
That statement assumes that if a degree gets one a position in academia, that is not evidence of usefulness. Yet, if one stretched the argument to its limit, namely that academia has no utility and represented a waste of resources, the country would be far worse off. Given the enormous resources expended by the federal government and state and local governments, it is extremely unlikely that private companies would be able to make up for the disappearance of academia through training. Instead, the companies would take the far more cost effective route of outsourcing or shifting operations to where the knowledge is.

.........
If studying an academic subject can only get one a job in academia, then there is no reason for the private sector to replace it. It is just a self perpetuating cycle where certain studies of academia is only producing academics and nothing else.

Lets say there was a PhD in scientology. Considering getting a PhD in scientology is useless to just about anything except for teaching other students the useless study of scientology, I consider that degree worthless.
 
I would enjoy someone with a PhD in philosophy to work at the local subway. Could hear them rambling on about their existential dreams while simultaneously constructing a mediocre sandwich that a GED would've sufficed to produce.
 
Could hear them rambling on about their existential dreams

This is what you think philosophy is? Statements like this make a pretty good case that we haven't got enough liberal arts education.
 
Too many grads with too much education for the current job market,.....what to do, what to do?
I know, let's hire more math and science teachers so more of our students can be over educated for the jobs that currently exist.

Technological progress is happening at a rate that is far quicker than we mere mortals can keep up with.
Where is this going? wish I knew.....
 
Back
Top Bottom