I wrote a couple posts (that I haven’t reviewed recently) on this topic. You may find them informative, or at least amusing. Insightful points were made by commenters.
On reading them back over, here’s my updated take (partly informed by the fact that I am now an MS student and work with PhD students daily):
A PhD is two things: a way to support research, and a way to reward it with a sheepskin.
Budding researchers just tend to see academia as a marginally more useful and attractive place to build their career than the next best alternative. The fact that a PhD program is mostly the only way to get the most widely recognized signal of being a qualified researcher is a bonus. If they’re going to do weird groundbreaking research anyway, why not do it in an environment that’s relatively open to it, and that will provide them with a credential at the end of the process?
If I was doing this over again, then, I might reframe the question. Instead of asking “is a PhD necessary,” I might ask questions like:
“Why do excellent early-career researchers so often see a PhD as attractive?”
“What are some of the practical barriers to doing a certain type of research outside the academic system?”
“What is the next most logical alternative to building a research career without getting a PhD?”
“Why and how do some excellent early-career researchers choose to build their research career outside the normal academic system?”
“What exactly does it mean to ‘contribute’ to a field?”
As an example, if you’re going into cogsci, you might need to run experiments on people or animals. When we do animal research in our BME lab, we have all kinds of support and regulation and procedures for making sure it doesn’t create a fiasco with government, administrators, or activists. Outside the academic system, I expect that trying to do animal research would be extremely difficult or impossible, not to mention publishing it and getting it taken seriously. It’s not just a question of whether the research findings were any good. It’s the perception. Academia is as sensitive to perception as anybody, and you want your research to not just be ethical and correct, but avoid looking ethically or epistemically suspect.
As a less charged example, I at one point was trying to figure out how to visualize a DNA ladder in an agarose gel without staining the rest of the DNA. I proposed cutting off the ladder band, staining that, and then jigsawing it back onto the rest of the gel. My mentor told me “if you do that, you go to science JAIL.” His objection wasn’t that this would fail to tell us the information we needed to know. It was that it would look really bad in light of all the replication issues specifically with fraudulent gels.
Any way you slice it, you’ll have to figure out a way to do high-quality research while making it look good enough for others to take seriously. This is probably a lot easier with an academic pedigree and institutional support. Another way of putting it might be “if you were enough of a genius to not need a PhD, you’d probably know that about yourself already!” Not a diss − 99.99% of researchers are probably in this category, myself included.
I wrote a couple posts (that I haven’t reviewed recently) on this topic. You may find them informative, or at least amusing. Insightful points were made by commenters.
Was a terminal degree necessary for inventing Boyle’s desiderata?
Was a PhD necessary to solve outstanding math problems?
I will review these. Thank you for your input!
On reading them back over, here’s my updated take (partly informed by the fact that I am now an MS student and work with PhD students daily):
A PhD is two things: a way to support research, and a way to reward it with a sheepskin.
Budding researchers just tend to see academia as a marginally more useful and attractive place to build their career than the next best alternative. The fact that a PhD program is mostly the only way to get the most widely recognized signal of being a qualified researcher is a bonus. If they’re going to do weird groundbreaking research anyway, why not do it in an environment that’s relatively open to it, and that will provide them with a credential at the end of the process?
If I was doing this over again, then, I might reframe the question. Instead of asking “is a PhD necessary,” I might ask questions like:
“Why do excellent early-career researchers so often see a PhD as attractive?”
“What are some of the practical barriers to doing a certain type of research outside the academic system?”
“What is the next most logical alternative to building a research career without getting a PhD?”
“Why and how do some excellent early-career researchers choose to build their research career outside the normal academic system?”
“What exactly does it mean to ‘contribute’ to a field?”
As an example, if you’re going into cogsci, you might need to run experiments on people or animals. When we do animal research in our BME lab, we have all kinds of support and regulation and procedures for making sure it doesn’t create a fiasco with government, administrators, or activists. Outside the academic system, I expect that trying to do animal research would be extremely difficult or impossible, not to mention publishing it and getting it taken seriously. It’s not just a question of whether the research findings were any good. It’s the perception. Academia is as sensitive to perception as anybody, and you want your research to not just be ethical and correct, but avoid looking ethically or epistemically suspect.
As a less charged example, I at one point was trying to figure out how to visualize a DNA ladder in an agarose gel without staining the rest of the DNA. I proposed cutting off the ladder band, staining that, and then jigsawing it back onto the rest of the gel. My mentor told me “if you do that, you go to science JAIL.” His objection wasn’t that this would fail to tell us the information we needed to know. It was that it would look really bad in light of all the replication issues specifically with fraudulent gels.
Any way you slice it, you’ll have to figure out a way to do high-quality research while making it look good enough for others to take seriously. This is probably a lot easier with an academic pedigree and institutional support. Another way of putting it might be “if you were enough of a genius to not need a PhD, you’d probably know that about yourself already!” Not a diss − 99.99% of researchers are probably in this category, myself included.