Why do PhDs become homeless?

Question

There is a concept circling in the air that

But, today, the following comment caught my attention:

I am asking this question, coz, I am venturing into a Ph.D., but these types of news are making me demotivated.

Does this have anything to do with academia or simply bad life-decisions?

People become homeless for all kinds of different reasons. If you're concerned about job prospects, I would suggest looking at actual data and statistics, not tweets. — Nate Eldredge, Nov 08 '19 at 00:50
Getting a PhD does not mean one now has the right to live in luxury. One still needs to get a job, be financially prudent, be a good worker, and so on. Fail any of these and one could easily end up homeless. — Allure, Nov 08 '19 at 00:57
PhDs are less likely to be homeless than similar people without PhDs. — Anonymous Physicist, Nov 08 '19 at 01:05
I voted to close. “Why do PhDs. become homeless?” Is a loaded question, like “have you stopped beating your wife?” The tweet you are quoting also contains a separate fallacy, the “no true Scotsman” (arbitrarily defining “countries that value education” to exclude countries where people with college degrees bag groceries in order to conclude that the US doesn’t value education). Maybe twitter isn’t the best source of information to draw life conclusions from... — Dan Romik, Nov 08 '19 at 01:31
Reasons for homelessness depend on the country - som countries do not have effect social support systems (such as USA evidently), whereas others do, which has a major effect on what are the likely reasons for homelessness. I suggest specifying a country of interest. — Tommi, Nov 08 '19 at 08:56
Apparently it is easier in the USA for professionals to become homeless than in other developed countries. However, having a PhD and living in your car for a couple of weeks does not imply a "failed life" associated with consistently homeless people that often struggle with addiction, mental health issues and lack of a high school level education. — smcs, Nov 08 '19 at 10:43
Perhaps this question is better suited for skeptics.stackexchange — Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩, Nov 09 '19 at 12:25
Chemistry Ph.D.s living in their cars wold surprise me. French Literature Ph.D.s living in their cars, not as much. — GEdgar, Nov 09 '19 at 13:45

Buffy · Answer 1 · 2019-11-09T12:52:15.520

In reality, few PdDs wind up homeless. A few do, and at certain times more do. But, in general, it shouldn't be a concern for someone wanting to study for a doctorate. But occasionally...

There are a lot of factors. The general state of a nation's economy at the time you finish can have a lot to do with it. When I finished (1970's) there were almost no jobs for mathematicians. We had landed on the moon and all money for science suddenly dried up for several years. I was lucky to stay in academia at all, and many PhDs at the time were pumping gas, etc. It cleared up in a few (several) years.

Some people get a doctorate not intending to use it for anything but the love of knowledge. Some turn out to be writers.

Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) was evading capture by the police.

Lots of reasons.

At the current moment there is a glut of doctoral graduates relative to the market for those skills in many fields. Academia in general graduates more PhDs in a given year than there are positions open in academia. So the system depends on jobs being available elsewhere. Sometimes that is true and sometimes not.

A lot of people take jobs below what their skills and education would require, such as teaching school with a doctorate.

And, as to bad life decisions, it is impossible to say. Having a job shouldn't be your highest lifetime goal, actually. Moreover, because of the length of time it takes to earn a doctorate the economy and the demand for your skills can change drastically before you finish. This is what happened to me. When I started grad school everyone would predict a bright future for a mathematician. When I finished, not so much. Nothing, really. I looked into becoming an actuary, for example. And, I switched fields to CS to become more employable in the short term.

But, I'm glad things are better in Kenya. Here (US) politicians have decided to drastically decrease funding for education at all levels. The feeling among some of them is that it is up to you, not society, to see to your education. This is a great way to assure that the population gets dumber and dumber and poorer and poorer over time. I have an opposite view that an educated populace is a national resource that shouldn't be compromised. Silly me.

Postscript: I didn't interpret the question as "Why do so many...". I don't see that implication anywhere in the original post.

why don't these homeless PhDs move to other countries for job? — user366312, Nov 08 '19 at 01:19
@user366312 How do you move to other countries (and in some cases, show that you have enough money to even get a visa) when you can't afford a place to live? — Luris, Nov 08 '19 at 09:18
@user366312 I moved repeatedly from academic job to academic job, twice across the Atlantic. I can confirm that it's a very expensive endeavor and not something to be done lightly if you have barely enough money to feed yourself (thankfully I had some savings to help me in the transition, but it's very much a situation where high expenses now yield a financial benefit in the long term). — Denis Nardin, Nov 08 '19 at 10:11
There is the point of actual expertise, too. At least in my country, too many PhD's don't have a sliver of real-world experience. Most of the technical jobs that could use a PhD are taken by people that did graduate while working on the field already. This is super evident on STEM fields. — T. Sar, Nov 08 '19 at 12:34
For the Unabomber, very talented at first, but taking up an academic road might have drove him to go crazy... I heard most of its targets where other academics... so also supports the claim a PhD drives you crazy/mentally-ill, which might highly correlate with being homeless. — StefanH, Nov 08 '19 at 12:42

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 08 '19 at 12:43

They do not "become homeless". This is a myth.

It's as simple as that. Or at least the implied softer statement that a person with a PhD is somehow more at risk of unemployment than other groups of people. Obviously, there is bound to be some unemployment even in that group, just by chance; unfortunate accidents can happen to anyone. But on the whole, a PhD is protective against unemployment, and for many reasons other than the simple topic studied (e.g. a boatload of transferable skills, for one, opening far more doors than their narrow topic of specialization might imply).

Your question is an example of the Bulverist Fallacy, i.e. presenting a loaded argument of the form "A is true. Why is A true?". Any attempt at answering this question that jumps straight into "Why" is fallacious to the extent that it has not addressed whether A is in fact true or not.

As for your specific question, the answer is that it simply is not the case. People with PhDs are far less likely to be unemployed than people without one.

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/05/employment-crisis-new-phds-illusion

_{Now, if and when they are in the minority of people who do end up unemployed for whatever reason, Buffy has an excellent answer on the kinds of reasons that might lead to that. But it's worth nothing that you might as well have asked "Why are there so many unemployed green aliens on earth"? The answer would have been equally valid. In that it's mostly not, simply because the premise is largely untrue in the first place.}

Here's another source, also comparing average earning potential for various tiers of education: https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-education-level — Tasos Papastylianou, Nov 08 '19 at 12:55
"... at least the implied softer statement that a person with a Ph.D. is somehow more at risk of unemployment than other groups of people." --- people often imply that. — user366312, Nov 09 '19 at 11:32
@user366312 people often imply all sorts of things that are simply not true. I will say the following though. The "PhD experience" is not a standardised thing. It's like any other investment. Do it well, and you'll be better for it. Do it badly, and it might backfire. It is not impossible to approach a PhD by focusing on a singular super-specialised aspect which nobody realistically cares about after graduation, leaving you effectively unskilled. For the most part, however, a well-rounded PhD will give you lots of experience and is generally valued by employers. — Tasos Papastylianou, Nov 09 '19 at 12:09
@user366312 also, there is some degree of truth that investing in a PhD often comes at a cost of lost wages for the time you're undertaking one, which can be significant. Which is why people who do them often have reasons other than maximizing lifetime earning potential. Having said that, if you really want to put your PhD to work in that capacity, go into consultancy firms straight after your PhD (where people hired are almost exclusively PhDs) and earn ludicrous salaries there which can more than make up for that gap. I have friends who have done just that. Not my thing. — Tasos Papastylianou, Nov 09 '19 at 12:18

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 08 '19 at 02:13

5

To add another perspective to this, there are two important factors that make people start a PhD, not least of which is a misconception about their likelihood of success.

The glut in PhD candidates is partially fueled by faculty members misrepresenting one's prospects post graduation. Doing a PhD in the hopes of securing a position in an R1 faculty position is, statistically speaking, a (very) risky prospect - lots of good people competing for very few positions.

Of course, faculty members who are already in these positions suffer from observation bias, and see their road to these positions as straightforward, whereas it is in fact far from it. I don't think that faculty members who encourage people to enter grad school are being malicious: they genuinely believe that their success can be replicated with hard work and determination; this is often not enough to succeed (there's a tremendous amount of luck, and qualities like creativity that are hard to teach). School recruitment of course has no interest in telling you otherwise - they want to keep those enrollment numbers high, thus you may get very skewed signals.

One might say that even after graduation students are still (weakly) more employable than they were before studies. This is probably true (you probably won't become homeless!), however, you are not factoring in lost wages, job experience, and losing what are probably your best years career development wise.

As an example, some people (in CS and related disciplines) start their PhD under the false impression that it will improve their chances of securing a software engineering job. As I cover in this answer, you stand to lose roughly $500k++ (probably more) by simply entering the PhD program. While you won't end up being homeless (probably) if you graduate with a CS PhD, losing out on this amount of money in sunk costs/lost wages is something that most graduate students don't even consider when entering the program (at least not the ones I had a chance to interact with).

This is not counting time spent doing a postdoc, or adjunct teaching. Both positions pay peanuts (I think in some disciplines you're better off financially by flipping burgers), and that's again time and wages lost.

To conclude, people tend to romanticize academia, and overestimate their chances of succeeding after graduation. This tends to lead to them making poor choices, and unfortunately, faculty members/recruiters often enough are not helping them understand what they're getting into.

answered Nov 08 '19 at 02:13

Spark

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You might want to specify the country in your answer. USA based on the currency, I guess. – Tommi Nov 08 '19 at 08:58
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This is a very short term view of the earning potential of a PhD. Most sources and statistics you read will tell you that a PhD effectively doubles your earning potential. You might as well discourage people from going into medicine because the first year rotation isn't paid highly enough. – Tasos Papastylianou Nov 08 '19 at 12:53
This is a very bleak picture you have painted. – user366312 Nov 08 '19 at 14:16
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@TasosPapastylianou From your own source: "You might think that Americans with a doctorate would earn more than those with a professional degree, but in fact they earn less.", which makes sense - PhD studies are not vocational. Plus you're not factoring in lost time doing a PhD. Telling people to do a PhD for the money, at least in CS/math, is misleading them. I don't know about other disciplines. – Spark Nov 08 '19 at 14:48
@user366312 I don't mean to be bleak! I'm saying that from a purely financial perspective, PhD studies are not necessarily a good idea. There are other non-financial reasons to do it - which I think are very valid (I already referenced some in my previous answer). Those are the reasons I did mine! – Spark Nov 08 '19 at 14:50
Also, medical studies are by and large vocational, so not really a fair comparison here. – Spark Nov 08 '19 at 14:51
@Spark not sure why that contradicts anything. The "professional degrees" compared to here are things like specialised doctorates. And the difference in projected earnings are trivial: $89,960 vs $84,396 annually. As opposed to $59,124 for Bachelor's students. I believe your argument here isn't why traditional "Doctor of Philosophy" students are more likely to be homeless than people with "Doctor of Engineering" or "Doctor of Medicine" students. It's whether such a specialised degree is worth it in the first place compared to going straight to work with your Bachelors. And the answer is yes. – Tasos Papastylianou Nov 08 '19 at 15:07
@TasosPapastylianou there are several studies on this topic, and the answer you offer is far from the consensus.
https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-waste-of-time-349206f9addb

see also: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63568/is-a-phd-economically-still-worth-doing
– Spark Nov 08 '19 at 15:09
@Spark as for the "financial reasons", that's exactly the point. This is similar to that argument that says women pay financially for their choice to have babies, when in fact, when you look at the numbers, this only seems to be the case in the first 2-3 years, but when looked at over a 10-year old period there is usually no difference in earnings from people without babies. If you're claiming that "in the first 2-3 years after your PhD your earnings will be lower than someone who started work when you started your PhD", then you're absolutely right. But 10 years later the PhD earns double. – Tasos Papastylianou Nov 08 '19 at 15:09
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Again, I'm sorry - but what you're saying is not backed up by facts, certainly not in CS, probably not in STEM, and in the humanities I'm not familiar. – Spark Nov 08 '19 at 15:10
Both articles you sent refer to PhDs with regard to becoming an academic. This is an altogether different question. I see people often berate their PhD because they ended up not going into academia, completely ignoring how the PhD helped their carers obtain new heights compared to if they hadn't. – Tasos Papastylianou Nov 08 '19 at 15:11
@Spark it doesn't have to be. All I need to do is point out that your premise isn't necessarily true or based on facts either. It's your opinion. My own personal experience is that all the companies that I would be interested in applying, my PhD has made me extremely more desirable. Remaining in academia (for now) is my own personal choice. I am sure there are many people like me who sacrifice obscene profits for what they perceive to be for the betterment of society, and I'm sure this skews earning figures in general. But that is very different to saying a PhD dooms you to financial ruin. – Tasos Papastylianou Nov 08 '19 at 15:15
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The Economist article discusses the economic prospects in length, citing sources that contradict your claims. Not sure what you mean. In any case - we can also stop here and disagree, that's fine :) – Spark Nov 08 '19 at 15:15

Why do PhDs become homeless?

3 Answers3

They do not "become homeless". This is a myth.