Why PhDs aren't easy

At least from my experience....

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( A not uncommon sight for a PhD student)

PhDs are currently getting quite a lot of hate in our now perpetually online discourse. They are derided as useless, irrelevant, or now, even easy. But this discourse is not only wrong, it is also positively toxic. In the age of virality, the more confidently you assert your position and the more outlandish it is, the more likely you are to succeed. Lost is nuance, careful thought, or generosity. This is what leads us to pieces such as this one, which I am responding to.

Once you read the article in question, you’ll find it is built almost entirely from supposition. It is vague, personalistic, narrow, and uncommonly unknowledgeable about the sector itself. It largely ignores experiences outside the writer’s own and pursues criteria which shift between acknowledging true and valuable expertise that are thoroughly gate-kept, with democratising the process by way of an ‘online viva’. In the comments, the author even suggests universities could merely ‘delay’ unsuccessful PhDs until they reach an undefined quality of ‘research excellence’, creating artificial scarcity in the system, something which universities for years have been attempting to reverse. In essence, the piece not only fails to defend its own premises robustly but cannot even give us an adequate solution to the self-defined problem.

“I’m arguing that getting a PhD actually doesn’t require particularly high intellect nor does it require particularly hard work—objectively.”

(an intuitive assessment masquerading as an objective claim)

But there is one part of the piece that I do agree with: PhDs do not inherently require a genius intellect. I do not, unlike the author, rely upon one very old datapoint and a second, much narrower dataset to make this claim. I simply have known too many idiotic and naive PhDs to buy into the idea that we are all geniuses. I do not consider myself amongst ‘the gifted’, but, like many, I like to think my passion and diligence make up for what is probably a reasonable but relatively mediocre intelligence. Not only this, but PhDs are not fundamentally about intellect. They cannot be solved in six weeks by a dazzling eureka moment only Einstein could have thought of. They are, despite the claims of the author, about persistence, which, yes, requires hard work. In the humanities, PhDs are about focusing on a singular problem for between 3-4 years, requiring a ‘stickability’ to the task, which is simply not found in other areas of learning or career.

This is an important message to get across. Too often, the academy is shrouded in mystery and presumptions of absolute genius. This is another point on which I agree with the author of the article. Academia needs to be seen as an accessible place for those with no experience of it; otherwise, there will continue to be too many entering its halls with little idea as to what to do. When I was younger, I knew precisely 0 people with a PhD. My mum performed the Herculean feat of finishing her BA in social work while maintaining a job and raising me and my sister, an achievement that I firmly believe still surpasses my own, but until I attended university, I still thought of them as the oak-panelled institutions depicted on television. To call it intimidating would be understating how I felt.

This is an issue which the author does not even begin to cover. He writes meagerly about cold-calling professors to join their team or just ‘getting some funding’ in the first place. Yet, the competition for funding has become ever fiercer as budget constraints have tightened and more students seek what is available to fund their own studies. I have seen around half a dozen of my own students fall at the funding hurdle, all of whom had interesting ideas for research and who would have made for credible researchers if given the time and effort to mould them.

Many of my former students and I, when I first started, did not even know where to begin when applying for PhD funding or supervision. In the humanities, most often students have to imagine their own project, not simply join their supervisors. They have to carefully research who is well-established in their field, which universities have research groups which suit them, and does the culture fit? All too often, prospective students also have to carefully ask around if their potential supervisor is an asshole who will derail their career before it even starts. It turns out, a PhD requires work and dedication before you even begin your formal study.

I did not even apply for funding for my PhD. My personal life was such a mess that I simply buried myself in the applications. Grieving for the loss of my father and grandfather within literal days of each other, an MA double whammy, did not leave me in a position to pitch effectively for grants. Like many, I decided to take the postgraduate loan, some monthly help from my mum, and part-time jobs to see me through. While my friends were either in steady employment or defining the early stages of their successful careers, I was gambling on an outside shot that a PhD would be worth it. I still remember calling up Portland Communications, explaining that I could not make the interview as part of the final selection process, as I had decided to embark on a PhD at the University of Leeds instead.

(The funding challenges are spelt out in graph form)

Doing the PhD was not easy. It required long hours for pay, which was effectively below minimum wage. I combined my learning with tutoring both at the university and privately, so I could afford my rent and afford the odd night out or trip to the cinema. The thesis, therefore, was not my only job. It was one of three jobs that I had acquired at any given time, which also had to fit into conference presentations, tutorials, training, and networking…. The thesis was not easy, and certainly not short, but it was just one of a dozen things that I had to do to make it all work.

When the lecturers went out on strike, I could not join them. I simply could not afford to miss out on my pay at the end of the month for Christmas. I still remember a student angrily waiting for me after one class, demanding to know why I was ‘scabbing my faculty’. I used to tell my students at the beginning of the class why I was still teaching, so they could understand my decision, but she had not attended out of solidarity. I had to lay out the brutal reality of PhD life- either you can give me £1500 for my teaching this month, with a £300 Christmas bonus, or I’ll just keep going, thank you very much.

The available studies do not paint the idyllic picture that the author does of PhD life. Instead, what they show is an underpaid cohort of emerging scholars being paid a pittance when they could earn more in McDonald’s. This is also not a new problem- when I was an undergraduate in 2012, my TA did the maths and worked out he could earn more at Tesco than teaching us, grading papers, and writing his thesis.

Yet the work requirement is so low, the student lifestyle so easy, the job security so valuable, the UK income and council tax exemption so advantageous, the guaranteed CV boost at the end so tempting, that sticking it out is the best thing to do. I absolutely agree with the actions of these friends.

(an odd assertion to make given what we know)

‘The student lifestyle’ is also an over-rehearsed point. Yes, it’s fun to share with 6 people in dank and grimy houses when you’re 20 and 21. It is much less fun when you are 26 and want to bring your long-term partner back with you for a romantic weekend. My mould-covered basement room, which I could barely afford, was aggravating my asthma to the point that I could not sleep there in summer… what a life it was! It was hand-to-mouth, I saved no money, and more often than not was working 60 hours plus per week to keep it all going. This was not the typical student lifestyle where I could get away with a little bit of reading and a rushed essay at the end of the semester if I chose, while spending most of my time partying and having casual sex.

Indeed, I lived in a new city and found it very difficult to make friends. Like many PhDs, I often felt lonely, isolated, and misunderstood. My project was going well (I ended up being one of the first to finish in my cohort), but outside of my work, I cultivated little life. I was too old to go clubbing and was always aware that the next day I’d have something to do, even at the weekends. But I do not want to paint a false picture. Plenty of PhDs have a positive work-life balance, which, although not easy, is not as intensive as my own personal experience was.

All of this is operating in an environment of immense competition, which for some subjects may even be considered borderline existential. Latest research suggests 2/3rds of those doing a PhD will not work in a university environment, and for my own cohort, the stats look even worse than this. We are entering a period of mass cuts to institutions, where some will inevitably die, while more people are considering a career in academia. So, even if you do spend only 40 hours a week on the PhD, much of your other time, at least mentally, is focused on what on earth you’ll do once you’re finished.

Contrary to the perception of the Sisyphean task promulgated by those who benefit from such a perception, doing a PhD is an anti-Sisyphean task—like rolling a boulder down a hill and trying not to get in your own way. You’d have to do something very weird to stop the boulder getting to the finish line.

(Is this really the case?)

This brings us to the question of how easy it is to finish a PhD. The claim that it is easy rests upon online data of 26,000 PhDs from between 8 and 19 years ago. Of these, 16.2% dropped out, around 3% failed the viva, and 13% received major corrections (only given when significant changes have to be made, which often results in a re-examination). On the face of it, this does make it look ‘easy’. Four in five PhDs made it to the viva, and of these, 84% did well in their viva. Therefore, the conclusion surely must be that Viva’s simply aren’t hard enough.

But there are multiple problems with this line of logic. First, the sample size is 2% of the population. This is quite a unique group of people who are either crazy enough to decide to forgo four years of competitive wages and career advancement to obtain a ‘student lifestyle’ or love their subject enough to ask a singular question for four years. Perhaps, it is merely the love of the gown at the end which is leading this small cohort of people to gain such a credential. Regardless of why some people do it, and yes, the funky gown was definitely a factor for me, this small sample size makes it difficult to ascertain a wider assertion about the ‘ease’ of the PhD.

There is also an argument that, actually, these numbers do reveal that it is not easy to finish a PhD. If 16% of the 2% wild enough to take on the PhD don’t even make it to the finish line, you could argue it is quite a task in the first place. Around 8-10% of people who participate in a marathon don’t finish it, and I don’t think anyone would say finishing a marathon was ‘easy’ because 90% made it across the line. When taken together with the ‘major corrections’, that means 1 in 3 who start the PhD will either drop out, fail, or have to substantially revise what they finished with. Suddenly, when put into that context, the numbers don’t look quite so lopsided. I also need to add that from my own experience, with the growing number of doctoral candidates, there have been more failures, more exits from programmes, and more major revisions than was previously the case. So, this old data may be a little out of touch with the times. In today’s world of PhD study, the updated numbers may look quite a lot bleaker than what is being portrayed in this older data.

Perhaps more importantly, which the author does not consider, is that passing a PhD is merely that. It is not a demonstration of being correct, bold, or particularly new (even if somewhat so). The PhD is not defined as this, even if he wishes to reinvent it as such. Unlike in student essays, which are graded upon a variety of criteria, the PhD merely has to be defensible. You just have to show that you have not been disproved or caught plagiarising from others’ work. The examiners can think your case is quite poor and disagree with it vigorously, but still pass it. A C-grade thesis can still get minor or even editorial corrections because you’ve done everything adequately well, even if it does not blow the examiners away.

Parading over the supposed ease of the PhD also neglects how much a thesis tends to change over the years. In my cohort at Leeds, almost everyone’s initial proposal by the end of the first year had not survived further research. They had mutated, changed, and shifted; some were even downright replaced over the years as new problems were encountered, which we could not have foreseen. That is because researching largely on your own, without the comfort of a set reading list, was, for many of us, a new challenge. It required us to learn new skills quickly and efficiently, as time was certainly not on our side.

So, it is not a straight line between proposal, research, and viva as the author portrays. It is rather a zig-zag where your boulder, to carry on the analogy, can be diverted off course at any moment for a number of reasons. It may be time, money, method, another researcher publishing on your idea, or the relationship with your supervisor has gone sour. It may even be that when you do get to the end, you suffer major corrections and substantial parts have to be rewritten or re-researched entirely.

My distinct lack of pride at my graduation or after my viva exam was perhaps compensated for by massive relief and swelling pride when I submitted my work in the form of journal articles to respectable academic journals (although this was and is muted excitement until they actually get published, God willing!).

(This, for many humanities students, IS the PhD)

But even if you grant the argument over pass-rates, what about the process of completing the PhD itself? The author paints a distinction between his scientific research and his PhD. Arguing that the process of the PhD is simply acquiring the termly reports of his supervisors, a first-year viva, presenting his work once in four years, and writing his thesis, with no minimum word requirement to be examined. So, by making this distinction, the writer can separate the science from the PhD itself.

Now, every PhD is different, and I am no scientist, so I will not question the author here. I do know that clinical psychology doctorates can also take the form of a small final dissertation, as opposed to a massive thesis. However, the author’s incredibly narrow set of assumptions underpins grave misapprehensions. First, some PhD programmes do require publications before moving forward with awarding the degree. At my old university, I knew of at least one school that measured success by published articles, not the hallowed thesis. So, at least in some instances, the author is simply wrong about what a PhD entails. I believe there is some discussion of this becoming more common given the influx of PhDs and the renewed focus on careers outside of academia.

Second, for many humanities students like myself, the PhD is the research. It is not a document merely outlining or carving out what has otherwise been achieved. The thesis is the product of the experiments, and what we publish is either based on the thesis or is directly sprung from there. Just as the author details the difficulty of his experiments and the pride in potentially publishing them (good luck to him), for many in the humanities, this is also the case with their thesis. It strikes me as an odd judgment, besides the obvious virality-seeking behaviour, to pretend anything other than this.

But, what I find perhaps most odd, is the claim that finishing a PhD uses only those four criteria of termly reports, two oral exams, 1 presentation at the university and writing a thesis. It is true that this is the least amount you need to do- it is also true that pretty much no PhD only does this. At least, no PhD I have ever met has only ever done this. It would be akin to saying that to be a professional footballer you need to kick a ball around a pitch, join a team, and eat vegetables. Both are descriptively accurate but miss the competition, excessive effort, mental strain, and determination which go into that process.

Boiling the PhD down to the smallest of its parts does not give an accurate or true representation of what the commitment entails. Rather, it gives a popularised version which portrays PhDs to be layabouts in a system which uses patronage to pass otherwise unworthy candidates. Creating something new is never easy, regardless of how important that newness is really is. Academia, and the conditions inside of it, certainly do not make it as easy as it could be to produce new knowledge either.

I am all for demystifying academia, but I am not in favour of denigrating people’s hard-won accomplishments. It is rude, mean-spirited and yes, I think a nugget of arrogance does lurk underneath such an assertion too. Unlike the author I am responding to, I was proud following my viva. I had worked for four years on something that I realised was worthwhile and something that I could be proud of, even if I understood the likelihood that few would read it, fewer would understand it, and even fewer would care about it.

But all of that felt quite beside the point. The point was that it was difficult; I had gone through challenges and sacrificed to produce something. Trying to proclaim that PhDs have become easy not only fails to recognise how much difficulty many go through in pursuing them, but it also devalues what we have accomplished. Just like in a marathon, finishing is the important bit, regardless of the time on the board.

(me with my fellow Dr’s pursuing the ‘easy life’)