The Poison of the PhD By James Reed

     I have only an Arts degree (English), which at the time enabled me to do teaching (after the teaching qualification). I never wanted to do higher study, but I know Chris and Brian toyed with the idea. But, is the PhD worth it? By some miracle I get emails from the interesting site Quora.com, and here is a really good debunking of the academic research illusion (I have made minor grammar corrections):
“Is doing a PhD worth it these days?

Alex Butkus, PhD student in Stochastic Control Theory. B.S. in Aeronautics
Answered 12d ago

I hate to say it, but I don’t think so. I left my job working for a defense contractor to start my PhD, and in some ways it was a mistake. I’ll elaborate on my opinion below:

The academic system requires one to “publish or perish.” This means you need to have a certain number of publications to be relevant in a field and to get grant money. To get grant money, you need publications, and you need publications to get grant money. If this sounds like a rat-race to you, you are 100% correct. I was under the impression that a PhD would allow me intellectual freedom that industry does not. Ha! I was wrong! This “rat-race” requires one to do whatever research it takes to get a result, not necessarily a good result, or a relevant result, or a quality result, or an interesting result; just a result that is good enough to publish. This is quite depressing and I have found absolutely kills intellectual creativity and risk-taking.

Don’t kid yourself - advances aren’t made without risks. A low risk tolerance means a low failure tolerance, which in turn results in many uninteresting publications. I think it was Elon Musk who said most academic papers are useless - I’d agree with him. Being a PhD student is stressful in a way that needlessly hurts productivity. It is expected that the work is extremely intellectually challenging, and one will have to put in long hours, however this is not necessarily a problem if you love what you’re doing. After all, it isn’t “work” if it makes you happy. I completely do not understand, however, why PhD students are paid so poorly and are expected to work (in some labs) an absurd number of hours per week:

First, not having money leads to numerous stressors: one must worry about rent, food, or even doing simple things like going down town one night, taking your girlfriend on a nice date, or taking a weekend vacation. One of the most depressing and stressful things about getting your PhD is the lack of money. It is completely stupid and unnecessary. In short, I believe many PhD students are being taken advantage of for their work ethic, passion, and intelligence. Second, working long hours fries your brain. There are significant losses of return on investment (in terms of productivity) the more hours your work. Anyone who tells you they are working 12 hours a day are only probably productive 6 of those hours.

Real concentrated work cannot be sustained regularly for more than 6 hours a day, and maybe in an emergency you can pull an all-nighter. I have found that certain demands have made my brain like pudding. I was so overworked that I stopped caring about my work, I was completely uncreative, and I was too tired to enjoy anything. For the above reasons I’ve described I believe academia is a toxic culture, one that I have found I do not want to be a part of and where cannot do my best work. With that said, if I was a millionaire who could work at my own pace and study topics that are directly personal and meaningful to me, I think I would have enjoyed my experience more.”

     Overall this shows the utter futility of “scholarship” at the university level, even in STEM subjects, and perhaps especially in STEM. To my mind it is but one more nail in the rotten coffin of the university.