The traditional academic science Ph.D. has been in decline for years. Some programs have been infected with DEI madness, and many graduates have trouble finding employment. Could the federal government actually improve matters?
Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes. In today’s Martin Center article, Neeraja Deshpande discusses the Industry-Integrated Ph.D. With funding from the National Science Foundation, “Students in the pilot program will have a year-long industry placement involving ‘practical research’ that can count towards their dissertation.”
The basic idea is to ensure that students focus on work that will benefit the country, which is not always the case with traditional programs.
Deshpande continues:
Indeed, most proposed reforms to graduate education have been Band-Aid solutions at best designed to try and mitigate the bad academic job market for current graduate students. While well-intentioned, that has meant that these reforms are essentially faddish — for instance, a lot of them have gotten graduate students to study something for which “all the fields are hiring right now,” like DEI-colored research in 2020, only for the graduate students to graduate into a job market (and political climate) five years later that has largely passed DEI by and is looking for completely new things.
This new program offers an alternative to the standard academic Ph.D. in science, and this competition will prove beneficial.