Grad school trains you to be something other than a professor

I keep hearing that academia is a pyramid scheme. Are we tenured faculty luring in doctoral students under the false pretense that they all will have access to joining the professoriate?

Maybe¹.f two conditions are met. First is whether the stated primary goal of grad school is to train professors. Second is whether the financial conditions of grad school are exploitative to the on the par of folks at the bottom level of multi-level-marketing scams. who lose money rather than gain money.

I don't personally think of grad school in STEM as a pyramid scheme because the principal reward is the collection of experiences, skills, and credentials that you picked up along the way. If you're going to grad school because someone has led you to think that this will lead to becoming a professor, know that only a small number of faculty in the most prestigious positions can honor such a promise. Nevertheless, even if a desirable tenure-track position is against the odds (and what constitutes 'desirable' in a TT position is different for everybody), the grad school provides a ton of real-world skills that prepare you for non-academic careers. Even if doctoral programs are bad about knowing or communicating this fact. If you're at the end of the road on your dissertation, odds are you've picked up a metric crap ton of skills that are applicable outside academia. Maybe you just don't realize it?

I'm now two months deep into a non-professorial² role (after being a professor for more than a quarter of a century). I've been working on communicating how the skills I've picked up over the years are useful in this different realm. My elevator speech about who I am and what I do has to be fundamentally different. I now have a new resumé that looks nothing like my CV. While my identity has been about what I research and teach, that's a merely curious footnote in my current environment, which prioritizes what I am capable of doing through my 40-hour workweek to contribute to the goals of my team.

Here I'll list the different kinds of headings on a basic CV, and then translate how those things can be presented as skills that are useful outside of universities and research environments.

Publications: The hairiest bandaid to pull off is to recognize that folks outside academic research don't really care how much or where you published. Nobody is even equipped to know whether your publication records is impressive or middling. If anything, publishing a ton of academic papers might even be considered a liability, if you communicate the perception that racking up pubs was accomplished by using the same narrow set of skills over and over again. That doesn't mean these research projects were a waste of time. Quite to the contrary, look inside the papers you've published to identify all of the skills you've cultivated. Think about the things that you learned and accomplished. Here is are things that you may have done to get these papers out, that may well be strong on their own: Data management, data visualization, statistics and data analysis, technical writing, hypothesis development, any specialized software or hardware you can use, and all the lab and field techniques and experiences you have done.

Grants: Nobody will cares whether or not you "had" an NSF or NIH grant per se. That just doesn't sound impressive and doesn't inherently mean anything. But people will care very much about these things that are directly related to having external awards: that you wrote a competitive grant that got funded, and that you managed the project after it was funded, and that you carried it through to produce the promised results. If you're able to write a fundable grant proposal, that means that you took complex and technical ideas in a very narrow discipline and synthesize them such that generalists (albeit within the discipline) will see the importance and value in that work. The clarity of thought that it takes to write a fundable grant is supremely useful. Likewise, running a funded project requires so many skills. You have experience working in cross-functional teams, by working with procurement, human resources, and risk management. You have mentoring skills from working with the people on the project junior to you. To carry out the project itself, you have skills in project management and various forms of leadership. You also have experience reporting on outcomes and project assessment.

Completing a dissertation: The document of a dissertation itself is of interest to basically nobody. (I just checked on my own dissertation, it's been cited six times, all my own papers that were based on it.) But the capacity to develop a coherent long-term project from scratch and create a series of scaffolding pieces towards the accomplishment of a larger endeavor is quite something. If you explain it the right way. The development of the project is requires the integration of domain-specific knowledge, creativity, the development of new collaborations, persistence through specific challenges, and the ability to balance working on short-term priorities and long-term accomplishments. The experience and judgement underlying those things are golden in in the post-academic workplace.

Teaching: Listing the classes that you've taught does little and at first glance, it simply communicates that you're a Subject Matter Expert in that narrow area. On the other hand, once you spell out everything that you did in the process of teaching your courses, you will show that you're a multi-talented master of jack of many trades. Building the curriculum itself is a creative act in the organization of ideas and taking an entire field's worth of information and turning it into digestible bite-size chunks of information and ideas. This also gives you a ton of experience speaking in front of groups, and classroom management helps you run meetings and oversee an environment with constructive dialogue. Evaluation and assessment is typically central to teaching and the methods that we do this are often applicable well beyond academic environments. You probably have developed extremely-above-par skill in creating and delivering multimedia presentations while teaching. While working with students on the regular, you've developed manager-level skills in defining goals, setting expectations, providing feedback, developing and revising goals in response to changing environments, conflict resolution, and more. You also demonstrate through the teaching evaluation process that you're good at receiving and incorporating feedback to improve your work – which is no small matter considering the fact that academics generally don't have any bosses to report to. If you're teaching the same course repeated times, then you have experience with revising and improving your own work to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

Mentoring: What people call "essential skills" or "soft skills" are hard to demonstrate from one's record. A great way to show this whole suite of leadership skills comes from showing how you mentored your students and the ongoing relationships that you have maintained: the abilities to listen, choose your words widely, build towards shared goals, support teamwork, develop a respectful and humanistic rapport, support efforts for people to safely be their full selves in the workplace, problem-solving, and cultivate empathy and positivity. Likewise, showing the kinds of leadership roles (in academia we often demean leadership as mere "service") you've served in can make a great difference.

This is long enough, so I'll stop here. If there are specific areas that you'd like to hear more about as I'm treading water in these new depths, let me know!

¹ I imagine that this pyramid scheme is manifesting in some fields (more often outside STEM) and some institutions. In my corners of of higher ed, I don't think doctoral programs are matching up to these pyramid-scheme criteria, and yes, I'd like grad students to have more compensation (and perhaps more realistically, more economic stability and quality healthcare). While some individual labs, or some programs, might have the expectation that their PhD students should principally become professors, I'm seeing that this attitude is mostly a relic of the past that is just hanging on here and there. More and more folks running grad programs in STEM are realizing that academia doesn't have a PhD overproduction problem, we simply have an attitude problem about how people PhDs are supposed to earn a paycheck. Do we need to make progress on this? Oh, yes we do, but we have come a long way. As for the financial exploitation of grad students, well, that's still a thing. However the incomes of STEM graduate students have been increasing at a decent clip, (inflation-adjusted with a 25% over the past 30 years), unlike salaries for professors in which inflation-adjusted salaries have dropped while productivity expectations have skyrocketed. For people who have access to good-paying jobs straight out of undergrad, then there is definitely a lost opportunity cost of doing a PhD for five years before entering the world of decently-paying jobs. However, grad school is now paying above the minimum wage, and for many of my undergrads at CSU Dominguez Hills and those enrolled in other non-prestigious undergraduate institutions, the choice to go to grad school is a clear step upward for economic mobility, relative to other options, regardless of entering the professoriate. I remember the stipend that students in my cohort received when I started grad school in the mid-90s (which was a few thousand less than the NSF GRFP stipend at the time), and how it compared to other institutions. Inflation adjusted, my income amounted to $20k per year. The inflation-adjusted GRFP from back then was $30k/year. Now the NSF GRFP stipend is up to $37k, and in the places with unionized grad students, the compensation may even be higher. Moreover, healthcare insurance access for grad students is improved, also in great part thanks to unionization.

² I'm in the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship assigned to the Department of Interior, in the Office of Risk and Resilience of the US Geological Survey. This means I'm temporarily a fed for a year or two (though to be clear, technically not a fed because I'm not employed by DOI and do not speak for them). I'm on unpaid leave from my university because I only recently completed a sabbatical (lessons learned from that are here). So I'm mostly doing 9-5 M-F using all of the skills I picked up while a professor though this role doesn't have me doing scientific research, classroom teaching, running a lab, mentoring students, and so on.