tim's experiment

It seems that a lot of mainland bigwigs have been caught flourishing bogus degrees. And we are not here dealing with minor matters like the local hero who attended a prestigious and expensive American university but kept rather quiet about the fact that he never actually graduated. You want a top job on the mainland now then you had better have a PhD. This has led to a variety of sad stories.

Some people bought one, not realising that the University of West Hartlepool PhD in Life Experience is not actually accepted by many people as the Real Thing. Some of them were ripped off by people who promised that the University of White Pigeon would do the right thing if its palm was crossed by a large piece of silver, then made off with the fees. And some of them, it seems, deliberately set out to get a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, Minnesota, in the hope that it would be mistaken for something else.

The curious thing about all these cases is that in none of them were suspicions aroused because the person flaunting a newly minted doctorate did not seem to have any doctoral qualities. Indeed it seems that there aren’t really any doctoral qualities. It helps if you are smart and it is almost indispensable to be hard-working (nobody will dispute that it’s a long slog – never mind the quality feel the length) but basically as long as you pay the money and put in the hours you emerge with the degree and only two discernible new skills: the ability to write badly and to please senior academics. As these have no conceivable usefulness in careers outside university teaching the enthusiasm for PhDs is a bit of a puzzle. Surely all these embarassed people weren’t seeking careers as industrial chemists?

Anyway there are two morals to this story. For employers, look at the applicant’s employment history. It takes an average of seven years to get a PhD and many people take ten. If there isn’t a large hole in your applicant’s work history he hasn’t done it. Part-time PhDs take forever. Potential employees who really want a PhD without doing the seven-year stretch need to wait until they are seriously rich. Perfectly respectable universities who receive lavish donations will generously bestow an honorary degree on you sooner or later, even though they know many of the less scrupulous recipients will then flourish them on their business cards. Strictly speaking this is a serious breach of ettiquette – honorary degrees should be worn only in the precincts of the university awarding them – but nobody can stop you.

Of course if you can become seriously rich without a PhD this suggests that it may not be as essential as all that. It is supposed, after all, to be a degree for researchers. If that is not what your potential employer is looking for then his interest in your educational attainments is probably irrelevant. A doctorate looks good in company reports, perhaps?