The 'need more PhD graduates' needs to be contextualised; and I feel that none of the news reports trully delve into were the need stems from. But since the overall thesis is, we need PhD graduates to grow the economy, it can be assumed that PhD graduates are required by:
- Industry, to enable it to develop competetive products and services
- Academia, to enable a higher quality of education and research; feeding industry with higher quality university graduates, and
- To create new industries and services, through start-ups etc
In my graduating class of 2007, there were 3 PhD graduates (in December at least, and for Computer Science only). Of us 3 - I am the only one who remained in South Africa; and all of us work in industry. Most South African companies in South Africa do not really value PhD graduates - it is clearly seen in the recruitment drives and for that matter in industry itself. This is also seen by the relative lack of R&D institutes in South Africa, that are fronted by industry. In fact, other than Sasol, I do not really know of any other South African company that has a big R&D setup in South Africa. Without viable R&D labs, are South African companies really interested in employing PhD graduates for their skills? And without a need for PhD graduates in industry, the pool of students wanting to do a PhD drops due to a lack viable job opportunities.
I agree that deploying PhD graduates within South African universities would have a significant impact on a number of factors - and not just acamedics. However, for this to successfully work out, South African universities need strong post-doctoral programs; ideally on an international exchange basis - that can be used to hone in the research skills and widen the research skill base.
Nurturing start-ups and protecting research outputs are things that South African universities and research institutes just do not seem to be good at. From my experiences at UCT, there was no drive for patents or setting up startups from the research outputs. This is a vital cog in the research process that can trully contribute to the economy. If I compare my experience at UCT with my internships at German research institutes in 2007, my actualy research output was actually higher for the time: I had one paper at ACM DRM 2008, one patent application and contributed towards 2 OMA standards for the mobile industry; all in 3 months at one research institute.
Tied into the last point, I think there is also a need to have focused research programs instead of the ad-hoc research that happens in many SA universities. It is hypocritical on my part to say this - when my own research was ad-hoc and very much removed from most other research at UCT - but if I compare my PhD experience in terms of the actual research project; to my peers in my research field around the world - formal research programs where a team of students, post-docs and academic staff work on the same research topic has a tremendous impact on the quality of the work produced. I think the outputs discussed above, with regards to my internship can also be similarly attributed - there my team was 5 persons (including me) in my specific stream and a total of 10 persons in the research program as a whole.
So yes, I agree that more PhD graduates will have an impact on economic growth - but I do not think that can happen without the supporting environment from both universities and industry. Other factors such as primary and secondary education are also important - but for PhD graduates to have meaningful impact on the economy there needs to be mechanisms for them to contribute meaningfully.
2 comments:
Hi Alapan
Saw the article too and will post you my response to the presenters at the conference who said the same thing--and I disagreed with them (in fact, my request for the name of your institution was the last piece in my rebuttal argument that I needed :) )
So rebuttal went as follows: PhDs != patents and a lot of people conflate the two. I'm not saying they CAN'T produce patents, and you're absolutely right in saying that incentives towards patentable research both from industry and academia is necessary. That said, I contend that
a) most academics are not inventors by their nature, but documenters and narrators
b) most inventors are not academics--in fact, you could make a strong case that some of the BEST inventors are not academics as they have not had their imaginations curbed by excessively institutionalised education.
So 'number of PhDs' is a bad indicator of the type of economic growth that people are looking for.
of course you need a decent amount of technical expertise to create patents such as mp3. But for every PhD who has invented such a thing, there is a young garage coder who has done something just as special--and your garage coder is then your young entrepreneur on top of it.
Re: the discourse of 'more PhDs' a lot of people like to hold England up as an example. But England is currently buckling under the burden of an over-educated population of people who have loads of Masters and PhDs and not many actual employable skills. This discourse of valuing PhDs ignores the importance of the artisan trades at its peril.
It is also very telling that those of us who value PhDs (and I count myself amongst these) are ourselves academics--we need to be careful of allocating disproportionate value to our own educational choices when they are not necessarily those that generate revenue and jobs for the large majority of people.
In summary, I think this talk of PhDs is premature; we need to be talking of getting more matrics with maths and science first, we need to be talking about how, when we get them, we will have the capacity at technikons, vocational colleges and universities to absorb a larger pool of tertiary students into some form of tertiary training at the under-grad/intern/apprentice level because we do not have that capacity. We need to remember that every engineer taking 5 years over a PhD (and this is not unusual) is an engineer who is not out there building roads, hospitals and water/electric infrastructure. I think we're talking Shakespeare before we've conquered Nancy Drew and it's not really useful.
The two biggest hurdles to PhDs in South Africa are
(1) Funding. It is simply not worth most student's while to stick around for it. To do a PhD means big sacrifices - either you have a pre-existing reserve of cash, or you take a huge pay cut compared to your BSc classmates who have gone to industry
(2) Global competition. Good students are headhunted from all over the world, be it by other universities or industry. The deals offered are often better, because the work is closer to the cutting edge, and the pay is better. The NRF and local universities don't really understand that they are competing - the attitude is still "they have to come to us".
On the comment about patents: In the past patents came from garages, but the modern patent process is complex and expensive - you need a lawyer to complete a patent application, so very few entrepreneurs can do this on their own any more. In South Africa academics might not be inventors, because they are not required to be by their departments - but almost everywhere else patents are considered required production for academics working in engineering fields, and are considered more important than producing publications. In Japan, the UK, US, most of Europe, Brazil, India and other places engineering professors are expected to invent and patent - they are not expected to be narrators or documenters. They are expected to invent, to patent, and to use those patents to bring money in to the university through licensing.
I don't know if you can make the case that some of the best inventors are not academics. Great research institutes such as Bell labs and the MIT media labs have produced many great inventions. Lately this has been reduced because there is more money in directly productizing patents, and this is easier to do in industry where you have the infrastructure to do that in-house (Microsoft research is sinking a lot of effort in this avenue lately).
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