Are PhDs a scam?

Contributor | I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I understand what you are driving at.

For universities, doctoral candidates are a brilliant source of cheap (sometimes unpaid) but highly skilled labour. Hence, for obvious reasons they quite like having them. This is good for the universities, but perhaps not always in the best interests of the doctoral candidate.

However, using the words “a scam” in an unqualified fashion suggests that you think it could never be a good idea, and nobody ever got value from doing a PhD. That clearly is not true. Whether or not everyone who does a PhD really gets value out of it is a more nuanced question. But there are clearly a lot of people who don’t.

But PhD students can’t complain too much. They are adults. They are theoretically intelligent. They can read the data for themselves and decide if this is something that they want to undertake. Nobody is concealing anything from them – quite the opposite in fact – most universities are pretty upfront about the challenges. So it is quite hard to say that they have been ‘scammed’ just because many people make a decision that they subsequently regret.