The mental health crisis among graduate students is a result of academia’s unsustainable pyramid scheme

This superb article by The Atlantic, and the studies underlying it, are long overdue. Pursuing a Ph.D. is terrible for students’ mental and physical health. So long as advanced education in the sciences is run as a pyramid scheme, wherein a large underclass of graduate students and postdocs performs the tenured professors’ research, and supports a proliferation of superfluous academic administrators from the “grant overhead” that these trainees’ work earns, this problem will continue. Doctoral programs have become less about education, and more about the big business of universities harvesting grant money. Not only does this lead to a perversion of universities’ educational purpose, it incentivizes research misconduct and mistreatment of students by faculty. We can and must do better; the present system of doctoral training must be radically changed. Universities should be incentivized to prioritize efficient, student-centric education, not to maximize income/overhead/profit. Of course, any attempts at reform are stymied by regulatory capture: funding agencies and university governing bodies are controlled and/or influenced by the beneficiaries of the status quo. I suspect that only outrage and public awareness will enable change, and that both the impetus and the methods for reform will come from outside of the academy. It’s time for an academic trainee uprising. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a serious proposition. The formation of graduate student and postdoctoral unions, like the one at UCSF to which I belonged, is a good but inadequate start.

Everet Rummel, a former student, observes in The Atlantic’s article that

“[For doctoral students] it’s accepted that you’re supposed to hate your life for a long time.”

Believe him; this is the unacceptable norm. If we want to train our best and brightest students to tackle the practical scientific challenges facing humanity (among them infectious disease, the effects of global warming, etc.), then we must do it differently and we must do it in such a way that our young scientists aren’t crippled by depression.

Like numerous others, I experienced the soul-crushing “scientific trainee lifestyle” that The Atlantic article exposes. It was needless and it was damaging.

It is time for research academia to face a moment of truth, and if in the glare of candid self-assessment it cannot or will not reform itself, then it must be reshaped/reinvented by external forces.

This article was originally published on Nov 28, 2018: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mental-health-crisis-among-graduate-students-result-metzger-iv/