The PhD Outlived Its Purpose Without Changing Its Price
The professoriate contracted, the training did not shorten, and candidates still pay the same years for a shrinking return.
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The doctorate exists to produce the next generation of academics. That was its purpose when the modern form was settled, and it remains the purpose the training is shaped around. The difficulty is that universities have spent four decades dismantling the career the degree was built to supply, without shortening the degree or telling the people enrolling in it. I write this holding a research fellowship and teaching in executive education, so I have an interest to declare.
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
The academic labour market has been restructured. About thirty-two per cent of faculty members in American colleges and universities held full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments in the autumn of 2023, against roughly fifty-three per cent in 1987, while contingent appointments rose from about forty-seven per cent to about sixty-eight per cent over the same period. Nearly half of all faculty now work part-time. Between 2002 and 2023, full-time tenure-track appointments fell by about seven per cent while full-time contingent appointments grew by about sixty-five per cent and the number of graduate student employees with teaching or research responsibilities rose by more than forty per cent.
The placement figures follow from this. Concordia University found that twenty-two per cent of its doctoral graduates held tenure-track positions. A University of Toronto biochemistry department found fifteen per cent. One assessment of the humanities concluded that half of candidates never finish and that between twenty and thirty per cent of those who do find full-time academic employment, meaning only ten to fifteen per cent achieve the outcome the degree was designed for. Where the degree was obtained made almost no difference.
INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS
None of this is contested. What is remarkable is that the training has not moved. Comprehensive examinations were designed to guarantee a shared knowledge base that no longer exists. Dissertation requirements were calibrated to what a hiring committee expected. The years, the structure and the intensity remain sized for a destination that most candidates will never reach.
The South African version has its own arithmetic, and it is a different problem. The American and Canadian difficulty is overproduction against a contracting academic market. The South African difficulty is throughput. The National Development Plan targets one hundred doctoral graduates per million people by 2030, and the rate stood at fifty-nine per million in 2021. Tracking of more than thirty-two thousand graduates by Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology found that just over sixty per cent were employed full time during their doctoral studies, which means most study part time. A separate qualitative study of fifteen working candidates at a research institution found that none completed within the standard three-year period, most taking five or six years, and that participants consistently reported receiving more support from their employers and workplace mentors than from their doctoral supervisors.
That last finding is small in sample and large in implication. If working professionals are getting better research guidance from their employers than from the institution charging them for supervision, the value of what they are buying deserves examination.
The financial evidence is equally unflattering. Doctorate holders earn a median of four million dollars over a career against two point eight million for bachelor’s degree holders, yet one quarter of bachelor’s degree holders out-earn half of all workers holding a master’s or a doctorate. The credential predicts remarkably little.
IMPLICATIONS
For anyone considering enrolment, the useful question is not whether you want an academic career. It is whether the qualification is a gate.
Clinical licensure, certain regulated professions and some specialised research posts genuinely require it. Credibility, authority and advancement do not, and are acquired faster elsewhere.
For universities, the choice is to reform the degree or to stop presenting it as a career pathway. Reducing the intensity of comprehensive examinations, accepting different forms of thesis and integrating professional development rather than appending it are all available. Continuing as though the professoriate still absorbs its graduates is not.
For South African policymakers, a target that is missed by a wide margin while postgraduate enrolments soften is telling you something. Prospective candidates are reading the incentives accurately.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
The doctorate is not worthless. It is mispriced, and it is mispriced because its cost was set for a destination that has largely closed.
For most people, in most fields, the honest answer is that the years are not recoverable and the outcome the training points toward will not arrive. That is not a failure of the candidates. It is a failure of institutions that continued to sell a pathway they had themselves dismantled, and of a sector that has known these numbers for more than a decade without acting on them.
Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net
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