Crazy PhD

There’s No Comeback for the PhD

"The internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information."

For example, music, books -- and universities, at least in their present form.  The entire credentialing industry seems almost certain to undergo dramatic changes.  The focus will be on what you can demonstrate that you know and can do, with where you learned it of lesser importance. (In the old days, you didn't have to go to law school to be licensed to practice law; all you had to do was to pass the bar exam in your state. How you prepared was you business, usually by "reading the law" for a few years from a local lawyer's law library in exchange for sweeping out his office. The law schools fought to change that, of course...)

The models for external certification are medicine, law, and a few other professions, where to practice you have to pass licensing exams set by an external authority responsible for certifying you competence.  In PhD programs as they now exist, the department that trains you also certifies your competence. Hmm.  A change to external certification will have dramatic effects on the content of many PhD programs, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, which are currently free to vary all over the place, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Byron