Differences in graduate programs
Anna Kushnir
Monday, 07 July 2008 14:21 UTC
PhD programs in the biological sciences tend to take a great deal longer to complete in the US as opposed to the UK and other countries. It took me seven years to get my degree, which was well within the average time to completion at my institution. Meanwhile, graduate education in the biosciences is capped at three years in the UK and takes far less than 7 years elsewhere in Europe. Is there any upside to my 7 year PhD? Beyond differences in funding structure between the US and other countries, why does it take so long here? Are there differences in how the degree is received by future employers?
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My MSc degree from Holland (which at the time was combined with BSc in a 4 year program, but is now 3 year BSc + 2 year MSc) was good enough to start a PhD anywhere in Europe, but was not recognized by UofT (Canada). I was treated as if I had a North-American BSc, which meant I started in the MSc program and then reclassified to PhD.
Once you have the PhD, it doesn’t seem to matter – people with those really short three-year UK PhDs seem to get North-American postdoc positions without any problem.(Yes, I think North American PhD programs are way too long, especially with people being kept in the lab for six-seven years. It’s not necessary for your personal development, it’s just cheap labour for the supervisor. Many European PhD programs are like jobs, with a contract, so you have to leave at a certain point. I used to not like that idea, but now that I’m at the end of year six of my PhD I would have loved to be done two years ago.)
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Actually in Spain our BSc takes 5 years and then you could start a PhD (4 years or more). At the other countries of Europe they have something similar Eva´s programme. Like you can see in Spain our bioscience career takes 9 years. Is then too long in US?
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Anecdotally, I think many people take longer than the planned 3 years to complete their PhD in the UK.
I wonder whether some of this difference is related to the more general nature of the US educational system? In the UK we are always reading reports and being told that our education system, in schools (US=high school) as well as in universities specializes far too soon, whereas in the US one can do really very broad subjects even at graduate school and above, before specializing.
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Dear Eva,
I don’t think its because of PhD students are treated as cheap labour in US (but actually they are).It takes time, Because graduate students have to do laboratory rotations and also must complete a minimum of some units of course work in the area of the major subject.
However, in UK, you can start your PhD work from the day you joined the lab.
And it really makes a difference.
I am finishing my PhD this September, but my friends, in US, are still looking forward for at least 2 years of lab work.
When they will finish their PhDs, I’ll be finishing my First Post-Doc.
Cheers,
Amit -
The length of a US PhD is come under significant fire from the NIH recently. Universities are pressured to get their students out in 5 years (still longer than UK, but far more reasonable than my seven. Gulp). The NIH is threatening to cut off funds for students enrolled past 6 years. That is doing the trick, at least for my institution. Students past year 5 now have to schedule regular thesis committee meetings (every three months, or so) and account to the department for their extended tenure in grad school… which is strange, because it implies that the student really wants to be there past year five and is dragging the process out on purpose.
Besides the cheap labor point Amit made (a very valid and painfully relevant point), there is at least one other reason that PhDs in the US take longer than in the UK – students in the UK can graduate whether or not they have published their graduate work. In the US, it is rather difficult to graduate without publishing. The general guideline for time to graduation is 7 years minus the number of papers published. This speaks to the general attitude toward a PhD, in my mind. In the UK it’s education, in the US it’s education and production. I think each has its pluses and minuses.
(It now occurs to me that I outed myself on the number of papers I published out of my graduate lab. Oops.)
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I think Maxine nailed it when she mentioned the specialization issue. That is indeed an enormous factor for increasing the time in the US. Often biology graduate programs require 2 years of classes before the qualifying exams, with the first year also including lab rotations. Therefore, the US student cannot fully dedicate himself/herself to the bench until the start of the third year. As long as everything went okay with the qualifiers, of course…
Piggy-backing on Anna’s point, I think that US programs are beginning to become paranoid about the amount of time it takes to get a PhD in their system. Many programs around the country are pushing their students to graduate when they are close to finishing, however, have not fully completed all of their work or finalized their publications. These new PhDs then tend to stick around as a post-doc in their former graduate lab to finish their projects and figure out what they want to do next. In a way, everyone wins, since the amount of time is the same for the former student anyway, this same former student now takes home a post-doc salary, and the pressure is off while s/he looks for a new job.
So if the average time statistic to receive a PhD begins to creep downwards for US graduate schools, there may be more behind it than an improvement in efficiency, better training, success at the bench, or increased diligence on the part of the committee.
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Javier – In the US, the BS degree takes four years, and the PhD is 5 years and up. So I guess it adds up to the same amount of time as what you mentioned. The problem is that the ‘and up’ portion of the 5 year PhD keeps rising. Seven years is just too long. That’s 11 years total schooling!
Noah and Maxine – My family always complains about how Americans waste half their lives before they figure out what they will do when they grow up. In Russia, it’s decided by the time you are 16 or so. That terrifies me. How can anyone make any sense of life at 16? I don’t know how one can expect a 16 year old to make a rational decision. It would be nice if earlier specialization could cut down on the total amount of time spent in school, but 16 seems mighty early to me. I made no kind of sense when I was 16.
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In Finland the PhDs tended to be quite long for various reasons, some of which are mentioned by others.
I’ve seen several 10+ year PhDs in Biological sciences. It isn’t really that exceptional. I did mine in 5 years and that was considered to be fast.
One of the reasons is that they are of course cheap, and once trained they are of course very skillful. Why turn them away because they then can get a piece of paper? And for the PhD students it’s usually more secure to be a PhD than a postdoc since the funding possibilities for postdocs are much more restricted.
It’s also very difficult to do your PhD as a monologue. The Departments don’t like them, the groupleaders don’t like them. So you basically need 4 papers in peer-reviewed journals, preferably good ones, and preferably most as a first author.
Nowadays there is a push though to get the job done sooner. The PhD funding of graduate schools is 4 years, there is a structural program of thesis committee meetings etc to keep the work on track, and all the other stuff other nations are doing as well.
We also have some Marie Curie PhD students over here now. And they only have 3 years of funding. For the rest they are at the mercy of the individual groupleaders.
The funding of PhD students is really flexible though. I was never in a graduate school program myself for instance other than as a matching funds student; meaning my boss was paying my salary. Usually PhD students receive a tax free grant, which comes with no benefits, pension wise and such. Nor does it give right on unemployment benefits.
The flexibility of this kind of funding means that PhD students can linger a long time in a group.
And there is of course also a group of PhD studens who have switched at least once between groups. Obviously they take much longer as well.
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Mark, it seems like there are a lot of similarities between the graduate education in Finland and in the US, beginning with time to completion of degree. The one thing grad students in the States never have to worry about is funding (at least not in the biological sciences). Our tuition and stipend is covered by the NIH. I cannot imagine what it would be like to deal with the added pressure and worry of financing my education while working in lab for 70 hours a week! It seemed to me from what you said that most grad students in Finland have to figure out their own funding. Am I understanding you correctly? Is that common for the rest of Europe?
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Depends on the lab really. Usually there is some grant money lying around ‘belonging’ to the groupleader as part of a larger grant that can be used for PhD students. People often start with this kind of rather flexible money. They then often apply for graduate school positions, which are nowadays quite plentiful.
Graduate schools usually only pay half the salary, so the group still has to come up with the rest.
In small groups money can be really tight. People are often forced to find their own money in the very end.
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