The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s

Should that support be expected, online or not, for who is merely satisfying a desire?

 

Aren't all students satisfying desires?

My point is that the attraction of DL degrees is that they enable people to remain employed and continue meeting their responsibilities, while simultaneously pursuing an academic subject. If DL degrees are priced much more expensively than on-campus degrees, and often involve assuming a large amount of debt, that advantage is essentially eliminated. There's no longer any reason to choose the DL program over the B&M program. (And probably some reason not to.)

Oftentimes some fraction of the support that doctoral students receive is payment for their serving as teaching and research assistants, activities that may be fundamental parts of their doctoral training. I don't know why DL students couldn't serve as TAs (in online classes) and research assistants as members of professors' research teams (however remotely) and earn whatever tuition reductions they receive.

 

Maybe a new form of accrediting agency is in order. DL could use some innovators.

 

You'd probably get drafted and shipped off to World War I.

 

Gentlemen didn't draft ladies. Or read their mail.

 

Physical anthropology is basically biology. What people don't know is that psychologists and psychiatrists use the same methods. The main difference is that psychiatrists can prescribe medications in every state and territory whereas psychologists can only prescribe in a half a dozen states after earning a masters in pharmacology. If you think clinical psychology is a non-science, then you also think that psychiatry is a non-science.

Hardly anyone argues that the social sciences are like the natural sciences. They also aren't like the humanities. There is a reason why they have their own category.

To Steve's point, economics is just like the other social sciences. Many people incorrectly categorize it as a business field similar to accounting and the like just because it involves calculations and is sometimes taught out of business schools.

I'm a woman. I would have probably been a sharecropper, housekeeper, or nanny and would have had to deal with Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. I also probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to college.

 

Well, they often spout pharmacologic.

 

Or pharmabrologic. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/03/jurors-end-fourth-day-of-deliberations-in-martin-shkreli-fraud-trial.html

 

"Co-worker says Shkreli 'mentally unstable'"

I think I'll go with that.

 

Then let me be one to encourage you – I returned to the educational spring later in life and it changed my life very positively. There are programs out there in your disciplines of interest (Philosophy generally as well as Buddhism), and some universities that don’t advertise distance learning will engage students through that medium if the supervisor-researcher fit is right.

I can’t speak for them all, as there’s no centralized policy, but many distance learning postgraduates in the United Kingdom are eligible for scholarship schemes just like residential students. In addition, a good friend studied philosophy in residence at a British university, and at least partly paid for it by teaching undergraduate philosophy classes at an American university via distance learning.

 

You are entitled to your opinion but what is science or not, it is not based on a bias opinion or on the quantitative nature of a subject. Something becomes science when it uses the scientific method that has it's roots in philosophy (another subject that you might not call science because it does not have math).
The academic community that mainly means recognized universities, recognize scientific subjects based on the contribution to humanity of a subject demonstrated mainly by the publication of scholarly peer reviewed journals that follow the scientific method.
Sociology is a recognized science without doubt, it has many scholarly journals and recognized faculties around the world.

Sociology might not have the economic marketable value of engineering or medicine, but this does not mean that it does not contribute to human knowledge. Economic value is relative, engineering has economic value because the economy needs it due to a high technological society but we might change our paradigm and go into a shift of values that might require sociologists to humanize more society and this could mean a demand of these professionals at some point.

We should not undermine other fields just because they don't have economic value or we don't understand them.

 

Really? I guess you are not aware of Quantum Physics and the observer effect. The observer plays in fact a role in the result of a physics experiment in the same way a bias ideology affects as social science study.
Physics although might be seen deterministic, it might not behave in this way at the quantum level that seems to be influenced by human consciousness.
It is all relative, not because something seems to be more tangible it means that is real.

 

There is another market besides those that want just to make more money, some of us actually take DL courses for self improvement and personal development.
There is a market out there for this, there are a number of schools that offer subjects that have little market value but high human interest such as psychology, religion, Buddhism, Health, Personality improvement, Spirituality, etc. Some people prefer to take accredited degrees in these subjects mainly because they want to get recognized learning while others with less money pursue just unaccredited degrees in these areas.

If you check this forum, about half of people coming here asks questions about degrees in Religion, Ministry, etc even these subjects have little economic value.

 

I see that no one said anything about the life sciences, but I don't think we have any biologists here. Biology is not only lab work. There are fields of biology that study animal behavior. It's not much different from the social sciences.

Clinical and counseling psychology have high market value. If you're licensed and unemployed, you're either living in a very economically depressed area without public resources or terrible at getting and/or keeping a job. When even penny-pinching, conservative states are offering to repay your student loans, you know there is a real shortage.

In Texas, all you have to do is work in a county with a shortage (there are over 200 out of 254 counties) for five years, and the government will pay off $80,000 of your student loans.

 

I'm skeptical about that too.

I'd prefer to say that scientists have a whole tool-kit of methods, that they employ as situations arise. Often scientific originality consists of an unexpected choice of methods and using established methods in new and creative ways. Occasionally scientists will invent entirely new methods to address scientific problems that they are faced with.

If one watches what scientists spend their time doing, it's quickly apparent that they aren't all doing the same things in the same order. There's no single algorithm, no single flow-chart or methodological procedure, to which the practice of science invariably conforms.

That's not to say that scientists employ their methods randomly. The method chosen needs to be relevant to the problem at hand, it has to have a reasonable likelihood of contributing to the resolution of that problem, it needs to be logically and epistemologically justifiable as well as being justifiable in purely scientific terms, and it needs to provide results that are objective (true about the natural world itself) and not just subjective (imaginary, true about the beliefs of the individual who is talking and not about the world that he/she is ostensibly talking about). Establishing that last is seemingly where the hypothesis testing and verification steps become most important.

The phrase "the scientific method" is often used in such a way as to suggest to the public that 'science' is distinguished from, superior to and more authoritative than other human activities due to its possessing some magic algorithm. Supposedly it's the discovery of this 'method' that explains the scientific revolution in the 17th century and the extraordinary success of the natural sciences since then. It's the use of this 'method' that supposedly demarcates real science from religion, pseudoscience and superstition.

During the 18th century, it was believed that if the scientific lightening exemplified by the success of Newtonian mechanics could just be trapped in a methodological bottle and applied to social problems, then obscurantism could be swept away and the world could for the first time in its history be organized on rational lines and experience non-stop progress. In the 19th century new (and largely unsuccessful) "social sciences" were invented so as to realize that program.

My own view is that to the limited extent that an overarching epistemological structure exists above all of science, it seems to me to largely be 'common-sense' trial-and-error combined with steps to ensure objectivity. There's nothing really unique to science in that. We see the same things in prehistoric humans learning to salt meat and in the craft-tradition practices of ancient potters, textile weavers and blacksmiths.

So what did happen in the 17th century to create what was interpreted (with considerable justification) as a scientific revolution? That's a much harder and more subtle problem and it's still an open question in the history of science. I'm inclined to think that first off, it was the use of mathematics to address physical problems in new and fruitful ways. But perhaps most importantly, it was just luck. The scientific revolution jumped out of the gate because mathematics were applied to classes of physical problems where the underlying principles were simple enough that they could be discovered and understood with the means at hand. It was assumed (largely for theological reasons) that nature behaved according to "laws". And examining the motions of the planets or geometrical optics, early science discovered that relatively simple mathematical regularities do in fact underlie the complexity observed in nature. Chemistry and biology proved far more resistant to these early efforts, not because there aren't regularities embedded in them as well, but because chemical and biological phenomena are emergent from the underlying physical principles in ways that aren't nearly as obvious or simple. Today psychology and the philosophy of mind are what's still resisting this kind of understanding.

 

Er, are you saying that psychologists don't study the biological/physical aspects of the psyche? They do. It varies by specialization, but they do study and acknowledge these things. Psychologists study chemical imbalances, brain structure, pharmacology, the effects of brain damage, brain activity, the effects of physical health on mental health, the effects of drugs on the brain, etc.

More and more, medical science is acknowledging the psych-social aspects of healthcare. That's why a behavioral science section was added to the MCAT. One or more behavioral science courses are required as prerequisites.

A doctor could get a better understanding of a patient's poor diet if he or she could think to ask about things such as income and access to stores. It's kind of hard to get your patient to take his diabetes medications when he's not taking his medications for schizophrenia. A lot of times, people will constantly go to the doctor complaining of pain not knowing what the issue is. If the doctor can't find any physical ailments, then he or she might write the person off as being a hypochondriac. A doctor who remembers his or her training in psychology will remember to assess the patient for depression because it can lead to psychosomatic symptoms. I noticed that people who criticize psychology harshly usually know very little to nothing about it. Isn't that kind of the opposite of being scientific...drawing conclusions about something without studying it?

 

Is study required to know that walking off cliffs results in injury and death?

Cannot it be reasonably deduced that mental health has not improved despite permeant 'socializing' in our institutions?

Given that the social science bridges fall down, shouldn't we ask for some positive results before squandering more tax monies on that insatiable beast of social science?

 

No, I had been discussing science's tendency to explain complex and seemingly unique phenomena in terms of simpler underlying principles (often but not always mathematical in nature) that seem to apply more broadly throughout nature. And I was thinking specifically of David Chalmers' so-called "Hard problem of consciousness" and Frank Jackson's "knowledge argument", both of which insist that physicalist principles, the principles of physics and chemistry, won't serve to explain consciousness. I was also thinking of RFValve's mentioning a hypothetical quantum 'observer effect', a sort of metaphysical quantum-idealism that apparently seeks to put consciousness at the heart of 'collapsing the wave function' and thus at the center of constructing a coherent physical reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

My own view is that attempts to understand mind and phenomenal consciousness today resemble the situation in the biological sciences before the appearance of physiology, biochemistry, developmental biology and molecular genetics. If you go to Archive.org and look at the late 19th century biological literature, you will see many prominent scientists still arguing that being alive is some unique irreducible non-physical property of living organisms that sets them apart from, and is inexplicable in terms of inanimate non-living matter. Today we see that very similar arguments being still being made about mind. I expect that the rise of neuroscience and cognitive science will eventually have the same effect on psychology that molecular biology had on 19th century biology, but we aren't exactly there yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

 

Well cats have but nine lives so I figure that observer effect must be a finite phenomenon.

 

So, mental health is as simple as walking off a cliff? Why don't you go to a physician who never studied anything since he or she doesn't need to study how eating too much sugar causes diabetes?

No. This is a ridiculous statement. I've provided you with a few examples in this thread and another thread how mental health treatment has improved.

You make these same unsubstantiated statements over and over again, and I keep refuting them. You never have a good comeback. I don't know if you have memory loss or what. I provided you with an example of how Texas spends money on substance abuse treatment because it significantly reduces recidivism rates. The Texas Sunset Commission studies these things. These studies are, in and of themselves, a social science. You're asking for social science to find results on whether social science works because you don't even know what social science is.