France has a similar program called CIFRE and it is bad.
An academic pairs with a buddy in industry. This relationship usually remains fixed in their careers. The representative in the company hires an engineer, makes a CIFRE contract and asks the academic to register the student and takes care of paperwork. There is no open call, competitive submission of proposals, a committee and a process. I don’t know how government is OK with this. The company sends the information about the recruitment to the government and gets tax waiver. Therefore, the company hires an engineer paid by taxpayers, nearly free for the company. A small amount of money is sent to the academic for conference travel etc. In many cases, student remains in the company and there is no need for academic other than for periodic paperwork. Importantly, the student works on tasks assigned by the company, which in many cases is not really research. It could be product improvement, mechanical work, client work, or some R&D or short term research. It’s not science or long term research, and no classes are involved. Next year, next student, it will be the same pair.
The program attracts students because they want jobs (in many cases their contracts is extended after 3 years of PhD, and they are actually incentivized to work well during that 3 years and be a good employee). Companies like it because of essentially free engineers and government rapport. Academics are content because they can say they have a student (even if they don’t see the student much if at all sometimes), cite collaboration with industry, and get some money for travel. The academic cannot complain, or require student spend more time in university, because the company would say, we will replace you next time with another academic who will be happy to sign off to paperwork and not to cause issues. The three parties are happy, and the taxpayer looses, because of a badly set up program. Maybe the American version will work, not the French version!
In the UK there is the not entirely dissimilar KTP.
Officially companies apply and are selected on the merit of application, in practice it's dramatically easier for companies already 'in the system' to re-apply.
The engineer (Mostly engineers, but also some scientists) is legally employed by the university, but typically spends all their time at the company.
No tax shenanigans, the university's expenses are straight up paid by government.
They don't get a PhD, they just file reports and make presentations to the KTP org representative.
It's fairly common for them to enroll with the university during a KTP though, which sometimes can be paid for from the KTP training budget.
They also get a selection of training courses in business and management subjects, which curiously includes a large section on tax avoidance for small businesses.
My wife did her mathematics PhD under an analogous structure in Germany where it’s fairly common. She was supervised by a professor at the University of Munich and a lab at Bosch, wrote and defended a thesis as usual. Employed in industry immediately after graduating. A great experience.
During my academic career I worked at a top German research university and advised multiple of these projects. On the surface it’s a good deal for everyone: the professor gets increased publication and graduate counts without having to pay for it, the company gets a top student working on their research problem very cheaply, and the student gets a PhD, an employment contract, and often a visa.
The reality was unfortunately often not so great. What would happened is that the student would get 3-4 year contract with 50% allocation to the PhD research in addition to normal employment duties. That is not enough to graduate if the professor has high standards.
As a result, the student would transition to full time employment after the 3-4 years, try to work on research in the evenings, and give up after some time. Or they would graduate with a very low quality degree (I saw students graduate with a 0 or 1 publications and a very thin dissertation) that has practically no value to anyone beyond providing the student with a Dr. title.
In the end I was actively advising students against it, and to just go into industry with a masters degree or find a fully academy funded PhD position if they are serious about research.
I guess it depends. While doing my PhD at a top German research university, our chair advised multiple of these projects, too (e.g., BMW, Siemens, Audi).
Yes - the downsides you mention are all true. But similar downsides apply to most PhD students working directly at the university - either you have some teaching load and administrative duties, or you work in an externally funded project and have to write project reports and do a lot of non-research stuff, too.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, if you want to have an academic career, doing a PhD in industry is not the best choice. But if you want to work in R&D or as a group leader in industry, these PhD positions might be a good stepping stone.
While I understand the upside, the reality of why it’s being pursued in the United States is that this is intended to drive academia into an advanced version of a trade school.
Do the math: The number of professorial positions is not growing (or not very quickly). Under steady-state, each professor only needs to train one single tenure-track PhD in their entire career. (Or maybe 10 professors need to train 11-12 students, to account for various forms of attrition.)
If you want more PhD's than that, you have to figure out a place for them to work; industry is a good "pressure relief valve".
This is true but it doesn't necessarily mean that academia ought to shift its focus to professional training. Also keep in mind that this has ~always been the case. Sometimes you train with a specific task in mind. Other times you do something open ended and unrelated "for the experience" with the idea that it will benefit you in various ways in the future. Neither of those approaches is always wrong or always right. Sometimes you need to focus but there are other times narrowing your view would materially diminish the benefits of the experience.
I do think it would be good for all levels of academia to be more explicit about the goals of any given program. I think these things are often blurred together to the detriment of both student and staff.
The goal of PhD programs has never been to have every student become a professor. Also, strong STEM PhD students generally don't need much help finding jobs after they graduate. Claiming that PhD students "aren't prepared" for industry careers is simply saying that students lack industry experience (obviously, being students!).
The problem here -- and why universities even do research at all -- is that industry's support of basic science is not very stable. At least when I was in school, industry research generally was more applied and engineering-focused.
i think major federal funding agencies should track department-level stats on "how many phd students did you admit?" versus "how many tenure track positions did you hire?" and use that to implement mechanisms that encourage a healthier balance (e.g., changing funding lines on grants, adjusting their overhead cuts, boosting trainee grants at certain places).
this would hopefully stop departments from over-admitting and encourage less adjunctification.
That sounds like an excellent thing based on that last sentence. Anecdotally, I hear people talk about trade school as being much more practical compared to the majority of traditional 4 year degrees. So I am interpreting a "move towards trade school" as an increase in practicality and therefore utility to the student.
I just wanted to echo your comment. Most people, in my experience, pursue an undergrad program with the intention of being employable. This is my personal experience, but also a learned opinion from being a teaching assistant for some years. Places like waterloo stress co-op, it is built in to the program. IMO the average person seeking an education are served under a model that places them in or near industry related work at some point. While I understand the original post is relating to PHDs, I think most programs (or rather, participants in programs) would love to have this sort of integration despite it being a hard problem.
Interestingly enough, Kitchener, adjacent to Waterloo has a large population of German-descent. I wonder if the OP's spouse's experience in Germany has any relation.
There is no reason to assume it is “more practical” or that it will increase utility for the student. Especially at the graduate level, the deeper you are able to explore a subject and the more you can connect that subject to a broader range of topics the more utility you get from the degree. Less time to finish a degree means you are less able to do that. I would think this will decrease the likelihood of new ideas being developed which will quickly become a problem for society in general. Also no one gets a PhD because it is practical, you get it because you want to explore a topic and push the boundaries of human knowledge.
My impression is that many of the indian engineering schools are some form of trade school and it shows. A lot of people are very good at churning out things, but they vastly prefer to use well defined tools for their trade and do a lot of work impassionately. Taking the creative path or even reflecting on failures isn’t natural.
On the other side of things, you have PhDs coming out of the US with too many ideas and the inability to deal with basics such as sprint planning and CI/CD.
Not sure if this will help, but I would love it for the Colleges of Sciences peoples instead of a postdoc.
Practicality and utility to the student must be the reason I started getting junior software engineers that are computer illiterates out of whatever Java IDE they were taught in.
The problem is that this makes it friction-free for the student ... and the actual trade? Your wage. It takes away risk, which everybody likes, until the costs of that start accumulating. It's an excellent way to give the student a very strong reason to avoid applying anywhere else (and make applying elsewhere far less successful), and so effectively to pay them (much) less.
Get a PhD with years of experience, who knows your company, for the price of a secretary.
"Learn what we believe to be the textbook-correct, fundamental, foundational theories for a topic; learn about the frontiers of new research in the topic; find a niche on that frontier where there's something new to try; try something new; write down the results (no matter how boring); share with your friends; rinse, lather, and repeat" is a perfectly respectable trade.
No reason why the good plumbers, electricians, or truck drivers of the world ought to look down on academics-- no matter how stuffy or highfalutin or soft-handed they might seem.
Every once in a while, academics come up with something useful. (And in fact, I think that that might just be the whole point).
It already is. Most PhDs in, let's say CS but probably true for a lot of STEM, just get a job at a tech company. I know a guy who did a PhD in meteorology and now he just programs at Google. The promise of contributing to science and being an academic probably doesn't work out for most. There's actually a big cost to this too, this isn't just an alternative path. It's also costly to non-PhDs who suddenly find themselves competing for jobs against them in careers that really don't need them. At least if we're going to continue printing PhDs it would be great to make them shorter and less costly.
There is a non-insignificant segment of the population that would have been better suited and employed as painters or HVAC technicians than for their chosen careers. Some software developers (and 80% of the city of Portland) would also fall into this category. The world has a surplus of PhDs opening cupcake shops.
i think there are a lot of college-educated folks that would love to switch into a trade, but there are cultural barriers to starting such a career. a not-insignificant number of tradespeople have been taught to see college as the enemy and college-educated folks as soft, coddled people with poor work ethic. if you showed up at a job site after getting a four-year liberal arts degree, you'd be met with lots of mocking and "oh, you thnk you're better than me?" defensive posturing.
Germans are big on trade schools. Despite being one of the richest western european countries, Germany (and Switzerland) have along the lowest college graduation rates, because they prioritize trade schools.
I know the German system quite well and know people who did their PhD in industry, people who did their PhD in an externally funded research project, and people who pursued a more self-directed PhD while working as a research and teaching assistant.
I don't think that there is a general 'PhD inflation' in Germany (though there are some disciplines with this problem). It is well understood by most PhD students that an academic career is the exception, not the rule. Most of them choose to do a PhD because they like the academic environment and want to learn more. Most PhDs go on to work in industry research labs, science-adjacent roles (e.g., museums) or as group leaders in tech companies. There is sufficient need for PhDs in most fields.
Industry-embedded PhD students are required to meet the same criteria as other PhD students. They also publish their research at the same conferences - but it is often more on the applied side. One could argue that such research has "little scientific value" - but so does most research.
The most important outcome of a PhD is not the list of publications but a person who deeply understands a domain, knows how to critically analyze a problem, and finds good solutions. Doing a PhD 'in industry' also allows you to do this. And it gives you a foot in the door at that company.
FWIW, many PhD students I knew, e.g. at BMW, complained a little bit about the side-projects they were expected to do, or the bureaucracy at such large companies. And, because you don't have to do any teaching and rarely supervise undergrads in industry labs, you are less qualified for an academic career than PhD students who work at the university.
"The most important outcome of a PhD is not the list of publications but a person who deeply understands a domain, knows how to critically analyze a problem, and finds good solutions. Doing a PhD 'in industry' also allows you to do this. And it gives you a foot in the door at that company."
Interesting though. Not sure you can have an extensive publication list without a deep domain understanding. But an extensive publication list normally assures that you have it.
My professor always said, I don't want to see you PhD thesis, just show me your publication list. Actually, while we were obligated to write a thesis, in his opinion it should be sufficient to just submit your publications.
In all OECD countries, but in particular in Germany, there seems to be an enormous overproduction of PhDs – in case one sees a PhD as the starting point of an academic career or as an important asset on the job market.
I am aware of that system, doing a PhD in a company as an external PhD student. The "research" is extremely applied. That is good for the company, possibly even a better career choice, but has limited scientific value. You are also unlikely to switch back to academia and become a professor.
Most people mistake "feeling" for "thinking". Just because you don't like my post, does not mean it is not true.
Looking at the $$$ awarded -- that's interesting: $37k/year, and while there's a $22,000 "ancillary expenses" component, institutions administer it, and can use it like any other indirect cost $$$. Conversely, industry funders have to stump up at least $100,000/year per student.
China actually started piloting the "industry Phd" in 2025, and took inspiration from Japan, Germany, and UK where some programs do industry experience as part of Phd training. A lot of the Chinese programs are in agriculture, engineering, and biotech. China's Ministry of Education actually published the "suggestion for experimentation" (loose translation) in 2023, and it trickled out from there as each province level government and university system started designing their own systems.
Wouldn’t be the first time the US took inspiration regarding the PhD from the leading advanced manufacturing power of the day, nor from Germany for that matter.
I don't love the increasing move towards industry research instead of traditional academia. It is just going to mean more closely-held, proprietary advancements.
v.s. politicking forever, enslaving grad students and making only a passable salary? Not to mention being incentivized to lie, cheat and steal when publishing in order to maintain your position?
Academia as we know it has been dead for a while, and AI is the final harbinger. The reproducibility crisis got that much worse now that the papers that nobody ever bothered to reproduce have grown 10x in number with the press of a button.
At least the industry research jobs pay well, even if they suffer many of the same issues.
Additionally, as a former industry researcher myself who now teaches at a community college, there is less research freedom in industry, especially with very free places like 1970-era Bell Labs and Xerox PARC half a century in the rear view mirror. Focused industry research is definitely valuable, but there seems to be fewer places in modern society that allow a researcher to be driven primarily by curiosity.
well, you're allowed to patent and have proprietary rights to the contents of your graduate school research if they meet the criteria lol, in fact, that is a good idea for a student working on a novel technology.
If you work for a private firm, then they presumably own the rights to patents you develop while under their employment, depending on your contract. But also, you have access to patents and technologies through the corporate patent sharing agreements and licenses that you'd never have access to in the university system, so it can work both ways, where you may be able to develop things not possible in traditional academia, but whether you actually retain those rights is not as clear as in academia.
I did my undergrad (BSc) in the US and then came to Switzerland for grad school. In some ways, this initiative seems to split the difference between these two systems.
In the US, I've seen people start PhD programs with a BSc degree and take 6-8 years. I've encountered many engineering companies at job fairs who said that for them a PhD is a disqualifying factor for many positions, because the experience is not relevant but they would need to (or felt obliged to, for whatever reason) pay extra for this degree.
In Switzerland, people would do a 1.5-2 year MSc degree after their BSc. This would still be mostly classes with one 6-month-long research / technical project. This was the expectation for many technical jobs. Some then did a PhD, which would take 3-4 years and required to have a MSc already to apply. Many of these projects (at least in my field) were sponsored by the industry.
Europe has already pushed shorter PhDs with the excuse of facilitating development in technology/industry. It's been a huge failure in mathematics for various reasons among which are:
1. Students don't have time to develop autonomy and independence, so this remains for the postdoctoral period.
2. Students are forced into publishing things that shouldn't be published (it's often a requirement to terminate a doctorate) and these are shallower and less complete than they should be.
The true motivation seems to be that it is cheaper to fund 3 years than 5. Master's degrees have been made obligatory prior to doctorates (in the US this is traditionally not the case) and so are not covered by doctoral funding - rather they are paid for by students in many cases.
It may very well have sense to have a shorter track aimed at industry, but it shouldn't be called a doctorate and all doctorates shouldn't be shunted into this setup.
I did my PhD funded for 3 years off of NIH and the remaining year and so off of corporate research grants. I really valued the fact that I was working on an industrial project, and could see it come to life with real funding and real backing.
The critical part imho will be allowing for enough independence in research, and that the time isn't just wasted filling in remedial RAs pushing pipettes around. Real safeguards will be needed, likely overseen by the PI and committee.
I genuinely hope it works and helps industry "figure out" that R&D is more than just simply productizing over the next quarter.
In all fairness, there are various fields where your academic lab in graduate school and your entire degree is funded by a private firm through a grant, etc.
I find it interesting that semiconductor companies like Applied Materials, IBM, TI, Analog Devices, Intel, Lam, Micron have not signed up to join this program since they typically hire a significant number of PhDs. Perhaps there are concerns about IP protection.
In contrast Infineon has hosted PhD students and STMicro has an Italian government research institute on their Catania campus. https://www.imm.cnr.it/institute
Hot take but academia and industry don't have fundamentally different goals anymore. The real challenge is making sure students don't end up satisfying neither. A PhD that isn't published enough for academia and isn't impactful enough for industry is the worst outcome.
There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component that companies in relevant industries can intervene in and direct if they so desire.
So why are they calling it a doctorate? I don’t see the point. It’s not like the NSF under this administration is particularly fond of STEM doctorates.
I’m open to any theories about what the real point of this is.
It is ideology. It's very obvious the current US government thinks that universities are a waste of money, and that industry is where everything happens. This industry PhD shuffles money from the university's pockets into industry pockets. It's in line with the recent shrinking of PhD visa lengths in the US (from technically-infinite-but-usually-6-to-7-years to 4 years)
Are there professional degrees like that for, say, mathematics or physics?
An aside, the Actuarial profession's fellowship credentials (FSA/FCAS) are considered to be roughly equivalent in content to a professional doctorate (not counting a medical residency), and have a completely different format.
It's mostly exam based from pure self study, and aspiring actuaries typically work full time in the industry after passing the first 2-3 exams and finishing a bachelor's (which can be in any subject). Typical travel time from the first exam to the fellowship credential is 6-8 years, IIRC. Employers pay employees for some study time and for exam leave for each exam, with a bonus for each one passed.
I bring this all up because there are a lot of other ways for education to be structured outside of the BS -> MS -> PhD pathway, and there are ways for learning to be integrated with industry.
Funneling money from the government to private research that doesn't have to be disclosed, as the public funding won't be for research, but for student placement.
> There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component...
There isn't.
And if you are trying to snarkily describe an MS, then most MS programs are too short.
> So why are they calling it a doctorate? I don’t see the point. It’s not like the NSF under this administration is particularly fond of STEM doctorates.
The I-PhD is basically a formalization of industry-sponsored PhDs based on the program site [0]
No. It's basically allocating funding for 250 PhD seats across a couple top engineering programs (CMU, UCSD, UIUC, Columbia SEAS, Penn SEAS, etc) with the expectation that said research would be linked with an industrial partner (eg. HPE, Bayer, Nvidia)
Edit: I just reread your comment. I think it is for students who are already doing their MS or have previously done so and are applying to PhD programs
Probably also for students with “just” a bachelor’s. Most PhD students don’t enter with a master’s.
I do wonder if NSF is hoping to seed more industry-sponsored PhDs as well, e.g., the first will be funded by NSF to establish the program, and industry will fund more once the program gets going.
Definitely makes sense to me they call it a PhD, not a master’s. A PhD is more prestigious and signals the holder is ready and eager to do cutting-edge research and has some experience doing so.
There are all kinds of master’s degrees (I say as someone who has one) and reasons for getting them, so they’re not as strong a signal of anything in particular. And they can mean someone switched careers, someone dropped out of a PhD program, someone took advanced classes during undergrad, someone got a bachelor’s in one country and wanted to study and work in another, etc.
Re: Bayer - the non-health industry side? I'm surprised NIH hasn't rolled out something like this earlier, to be honest, with their increasing emphasis on commercialisation.
What are you referring to with "such degrees?" Just the name of the credential would be enough. The closest stuff I can think of is a JD or an MD, but otherwise there's no common graduate credential in the US that takes 3+ years full time, other than a PhD. I guess there are EdDs and PsyDs, but I've never heard of that sort of thing in engineering.
And to be pedantic, every single one of those credentials I've mentioned is a doctorate, even if it's not a PhD.
> There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component that companies in relevant industries can intervene in and direct if they so desire.
You're making this up as you go. No MS lasts 3-4 years, almost all MS theses are book reports/unpublished because the student is primarily attending classes, almost none are directed by industry (see points 1 and 2).
sometimes an institution will give an ms as a consolation prize for time spent not being able to finish a phd [0]. in those cases they can be upwards of 5 years, but they certainly aren't industry driven
[0] often a leadership or personality failure of the PI
I mean, how common is a terminal master’s program in STEM fields?
I imagine there are departments where it’s more common to get a master’s by dropping out of the PhD program early than through any other path. Especially for people with a bachelor’s in the same field.
there are departments where it's the only way to get a masters, and it's nothing to do with foreign students paying, and i suspect more to do with lawsuit evasion for exploitative working cobditions and mutual nondisparagement
France has a similar program called CIFRE and it is bad.
An academic pairs with a buddy in industry. This relationship usually remains fixed in their careers. The representative in the company hires an engineer, makes a CIFRE contract and asks the academic to register the student and takes care of paperwork. There is no open call, competitive submission of proposals, a committee and a process. I don’t know how government is OK with this. The company sends the information about the recruitment to the government and gets tax waiver. Therefore, the company hires an engineer paid by taxpayers, nearly free for the company. A small amount of money is sent to the academic for conference travel etc. In many cases, student remains in the company and there is no need for academic other than for periodic paperwork. Importantly, the student works on tasks assigned by the company, which in many cases is not really research. It could be product improvement, mechanical work, client work, or some R&D or short term research. It’s not science or long term research, and no classes are involved. Next year, next student, it will be the same pair.
The program attracts students because they want jobs (in many cases their contracts is extended after 3 years of PhD, and they are actually incentivized to work well during that 3 years and be a good employee). Companies like it because of essentially free engineers and government rapport. Academics are content because they can say they have a student (even if they don’t see the student much if at all sometimes), cite collaboration with industry, and get some money for travel. The academic cannot complain, or require student spend more time in university, because the company would say, we will replace you next time with another academic who will be happy to sign off to paperwork and not to cause issues. The three parties are happy, and the taxpayer looses, because of a badly set up program. Maybe the American version will work, not the French version!
In the UK there is the not entirely dissimilar KTP.
Officially companies apply and are selected on the merit of application, in practice it's dramatically easier for companies already 'in the system' to re-apply.
The engineer (Mostly engineers, but also some scientists) is legally employed by the university, but typically spends all their time at the company. No tax shenanigans, the university's expenses are straight up paid by government.
They don't get a PhD, they just file reports and make presentations to the KTP org representative.
It's fairly common for them to enroll with the university during a KTP though, which sometimes can be paid for from the KTP training budget.
They also get a selection of training courses in business and management subjects, which curiously includes a large section on tax avoidance for small businesses.
My wife did her mathematics PhD under an analogous structure in Germany where it’s fairly common. She was supervised by a professor at the University of Munich and a lab at Bosch, wrote and defended a thesis as usual. Employed in industry immediately after graduating. A great experience.
During my academic career I worked at a top German research university and advised multiple of these projects. On the surface it’s a good deal for everyone: the professor gets increased publication and graduate counts without having to pay for it, the company gets a top student working on their research problem very cheaply, and the student gets a PhD, an employment contract, and often a visa.
The reality was unfortunately often not so great. What would happened is that the student would get 3-4 year contract with 50% allocation to the PhD research in addition to normal employment duties. That is not enough to graduate if the professor has high standards.
As a result, the student would transition to full time employment after the 3-4 years, try to work on research in the evenings, and give up after some time. Or they would graduate with a very low quality degree (I saw students graduate with a 0 or 1 publications and a very thin dissertation) that has practically no value to anyone beyond providing the student with a Dr. title.
In the end I was actively advising students against it, and to just go into industry with a masters degree or find a fully academy funded PhD position if they are serious about research.
I guess it depends. While doing my PhD at a top German research university, our chair advised multiple of these projects, too (e.g., BMW, Siemens, Audi).
Yes - the downsides you mention are all true. But similar downsides apply to most PhD students working directly at the university - either you have some teaching load and administrative duties, or you work in an externally funded project and have to write project reports and do a lot of non-research stuff, too.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, if you want to have an academic career, doing a PhD in industry is not the best choice. But if you want to work in R&D or as a group leader in industry, these PhD positions might be a good stepping stone.
While I understand the upside, the reality of why it’s being pursued in the United States is that this is intended to drive academia into an advanced version of a trade school.
Do the math: The number of professorial positions is not growing (or not very quickly). Under steady-state, each professor only needs to train one single tenure-track PhD in their entire career. (Or maybe 10 professors need to train 11-12 students, to account for various forms of attrition.)
If you want more PhD's than that, you have to figure out a place for them to work; industry is a good "pressure relief valve".
This is true but it doesn't necessarily mean that academia ought to shift its focus to professional training. Also keep in mind that this has ~always been the case. Sometimes you train with a specific task in mind. Other times you do something open ended and unrelated "for the experience" with the idea that it will benefit you in various ways in the future. Neither of those approaches is always wrong or always right. Sometimes you need to focus but there are other times narrowing your view would materially diminish the benefits of the experience.
I do think it would be good for all levels of academia to be more explicit about the goals of any given program. I think these things are often blurred together to the detriment of both student and staff.
The goal of PhD programs has never been to have every student become a professor. Also, strong STEM PhD students generally don't need much help finding jobs after they graduate. Claiming that PhD students "aren't prepared" for industry careers is simply saying that students lack industry experience (obviously, being students!).
The problem here -- and why universities even do research at all -- is that industry's support of basic science is not very stable. At least when I was in school, industry research generally was more applied and engineering-focused.
With the aging population, we also hit peak college attendance 15 years ago.
i think major federal funding agencies should track department-level stats on "how many phd students did you admit?" versus "how many tenure track positions did you hire?" and use that to implement mechanisms that encourage a healthier balance (e.g., changing funding lines on grants, adjusting their overhead cuts, boosting trainee grants at certain places).
this would hopefully stop departments from over-admitting and encourage less adjunctification.
That sounds like an excellent thing based on that last sentence. Anecdotally, I hear people talk about trade school as being much more practical compared to the majority of traditional 4 year degrees. So I am interpreting a "move towards trade school" as an increase in practicality and therefore utility to the student.
I just wanted to echo your comment. Most people, in my experience, pursue an undergrad program with the intention of being employable. This is my personal experience, but also a learned opinion from being a teaching assistant for some years. Places like waterloo stress co-op, it is built in to the program. IMO the average person seeking an education are served under a model that places them in or near industry related work at some point. While I understand the original post is relating to PHDs, I think most programs (or rather, participants in programs) would love to have this sort of integration despite it being a hard problem.
Interestingly enough, Kitchener, adjacent to Waterloo has a large population of German-descent. I wonder if the OP's spouse's experience in Germany has any relation.
There is no reason to assume it is “more practical” or that it will increase utility for the student. Especially at the graduate level, the deeper you are able to explore a subject and the more you can connect that subject to a broader range of topics the more utility you get from the degree. Less time to finish a degree means you are less able to do that. I would think this will decrease the likelihood of new ideas being developed which will quickly become a problem for society in general. Also no one gets a PhD because it is practical, you get it because you want to explore a topic and push the boundaries of human knowledge.
My impression is that many of the indian engineering schools are some form of trade school and it shows. A lot of people are very good at churning out things, but they vastly prefer to use well defined tools for their trade and do a lot of work impassionately. Taking the creative path or even reflecting on failures isn’t natural.
On the other side of things, you have PhDs coming out of the US with too many ideas and the inability to deal with basics such as sprint planning and CI/CD.
Not sure if this will help, but I would love it for the Colleges of Sciences peoples instead of a postdoc.
Practicality and utility to the student must be the reason I started getting junior software engineers that are computer illiterates out of whatever Java IDE they were taught in.
The problem is that this makes it friction-free for the student ... and the actual trade? Your wage. It takes away risk, which everybody likes, until the costs of that start accumulating. It's an excellent way to give the student a very strong reason to avoid applying anywhere else (and make applying elsewhere far less successful), and so effectively to pay them (much) less.
Get a PhD with years of experience, who knows your company, for the price of a secretary.
"Learn what we believe to be the textbook-correct, fundamental, foundational theories for a topic; learn about the frontiers of new research in the topic; find a niche on that frontier where there's something new to try; try something new; write down the results (no matter how boring); share with your friends; rinse, lather, and repeat" is a perfectly respectable trade.
No reason why the good plumbers, electricians, or truck drivers of the world ought to look down on academics-- no matter how stuffy or highfalutin or soft-handed they might seem.
Every once in a while, academics come up with something useful. (And in fact, I think that that might just be the whole point).
It already is. Most PhDs in, let's say CS but probably true for a lot of STEM, just get a job at a tech company. I know a guy who did a PhD in meteorology and now he just programs at Google. The promise of contributing to science and being an academic probably doesn't work out for most. There's actually a big cost to this too, this isn't just an alternative path. It's also costly to non-PhDs who suddenly find themselves competing for jobs against them in careers that really don't need them. At least if we're going to continue printing PhDs it would be great to make them shorter and less costly.
There is a non-insignificant segment of the population that would have been better suited and employed as painters or HVAC technicians than for their chosen careers. Some software developers (and 80% of the city of Portland) would also fall into this category. The world has a surplus of PhDs opening cupcake shops.
i think there are a lot of college-educated folks that would love to switch into a trade, but there are cultural barriers to starting such a career. a not-insignificant number of tradespeople have been taught to see college as the enemy and college-educated folks as soft, coddled people with poor work ethic. if you showed up at a job site after getting a four-year liberal arts degree, you'd be met with lots of mocking and "oh, you thnk you're better than me?" defensive posturing.
Germans are big on trade schools. Despite being one of the richest western european countries, Germany (and Switzerland) have along the lowest college graduation rates, because they prioritize trade schools.
This is just because of the PhD inflation in Germany. It has little scientific value.
a) No. b) It depends.
I know the German system quite well and know people who did their PhD in industry, people who did their PhD in an externally funded research project, and people who pursued a more self-directed PhD while working as a research and teaching assistant.
I don't think that there is a general 'PhD inflation' in Germany (though there are some disciplines with this problem). It is well understood by most PhD students that an academic career is the exception, not the rule. Most of them choose to do a PhD because they like the academic environment and want to learn more. Most PhDs go on to work in industry research labs, science-adjacent roles (e.g., museums) or as group leaders in tech companies. There is sufficient need for PhDs in most fields.
Industry-embedded PhD students are required to meet the same criteria as other PhD students. They also publish their research at the same conferences - but it is often more on the applied side. One could argue that such research has "little scientific value" - but so does most research.
The most important outcome of a PhD is not the list of publications but a person who deeply understands a domain, knows how to critically analyze a problem, and finds good solutions. Doing a PhD 'in industry' also allows you to do this. And it gives you a foot in the door at that company.
FWIW, many PhD students I knew, e.g. at BMW, complained a little bit about the side-projects they were expected to do, or the bureaucracy at such large companies. And, because you don't have to do any teaching and rarely supervise undergrads in industry labs, you are less qualified for an academic career than PhD students who work at the university.
"The most important outcome of a PhD is not the list of publications but a person who deeply understands a domain, knows how to critically analyze a problem, and finds good solutions. Doing a PhD 'in industry' also allows you to do this. And it gives you a foot in the door at that company."
Interesting though. Not sure you can have an extensive publication list without a deep domain understanding. But an extensive publication list normally assures that you have it.
My professor always said, I don't want to see you PhD thesis, just show me your publication list. Actually, while we were obligated to write a thesis, in his opinion it should be sufficient to just submit your publications.
Why the Downvote?
What are you referring to?
Why does my post get downvoted?
In all OECD countries, but in particular in Germany, there seems to be an enormous overproduction of PhDs – in case one sees a PhD as the starting point of an academic career or as an important asset on the job market.
https://socialscienceworks.org/2015/07/243/are-there-too-man...
I am aware of that system, doing a PhD in a company as an external PhD student. The "research" is extremely applied. That is good for the company, possibly even a better career choice, but has limited scientific value. You are also unlikely to switch back to academia and become a professor.
Most people mistake "feeling" for "thinking". Just because you don't like my post, does not mean it is not true.
If you want to skip the fluff, the actual funded program abstract here:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2624416
Appropriately enough for a pilot, there's a structured usual cohort-mentoring and outcomes evaluation component.
(NSF brings 3 years of $$$, but as it is, it doesn't seem like attempt to nudge people screwed over by GRFP restrictions towards industry.)
I'd recommend the I-PhD's page instead of the NSF grant as it goes deeper into the partners as well as the program.
https://uidp.org/i-phd-scholars/
Looking at the $$$ awarded -- that's interesting: $37k/year, and while there's a $22,000 "ancillary expenses" component, institutions administer it, and can use it like any other indirect cost $$$. Conversely, industry funders have to stump up at least $100,000/year per student.
Thanks - the program guide at the very bottom seems to have the most detail.
https://uidp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/UIDP-I-PhD-Schol...
China actually started piloting the "industry Phd" in 2025, and took inspiration from Japan, Germany, and UK where some programs do industry experience as part of Phd training. A lot of the Chinese programs are in agriculture, engineering, and biotech. China's Ministry of Education actually published the "suggestion for experimentation" (loose translation) in 2023, and it trickled out from there as each province level government and university system started designing their own systems.
http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A22/moe_826/202312/t20231218_1...
Wouldn’t be the first time the US took inspiration regarding the PhD from the leading advanced manufacturing power of the day, nor from Germany for that matter.
I don't love the increasing move towards industry research instead of traditional academia. It is just going to mean more closely-held, proprietary advancements.
v.s. politicking forever, enslaving grad students and making only a passable salary? Not to mention being incentivized to lie, cheat and steal when publishing in order to maintain your position?
Academia as we know it has been dead for a while, and AI is the final harbinger. The reproducibility crisis got that much worse now that the papers that nobody ever bothered to reproduce have grown 10x in number with the press of a button.
At least the industry research jobs pay well, even if they suffer many of the same issues.
Yeah, academia is very 'unregulated'
Additionally, as a former industry researcher myself who now teaches at a community college, there is less research freedom in industry, especially with very free places like 1970-era Bell Labs and Xerox PARC half a century in the rear view mirror. Focused industry research is definitely valuable, but there seems to be fewer places in modern society that allow a researcher to be driven primarily by curiosity.
well, you're allowed to patent and have proprietary rights to the contents of your graduate school research if they meet the criteria lol, in fact, that is a good idea for a student working on a novel technology.
If you work for a private firm, then they presumably own the rights to patents you develop while under their employment, depending on your contract. But also, you have access to patents and technologies through the corporate patent sharing agreements and licenses that you'd never have access to in the university system, so it can work both ways, where you may be able to develop things not possible in traditional academia, but whether you actually retain those rights is not as clear as in academia.
How do you feel about internships?
I did my undergrad (BSc) in the US and then came to Switzerland for grad school. In some ways, this initiative seems to split the difference between these two systems.
In the US, I've seen people start PhD programs with a BSc degree and take 6-8 years. I've encountered many engineering companies at job fairs who said that for them a PhD is a disqualifying factor for many positions, because the experience is not relevant but they would need to (or felt obliged to, for whatever reason) pay extra for this degree.
In Switzerland, people would do a 1.5-2 year MSc degree after their BSc. This would still be mostly classes with one 6-month-long research / technical project. This was the expectation for many technical jobs. Some then did a PhD, which would take 3-4 years and required to have a MSc already to apply. Many of these projects (at least in my field) were sponsored by the industry.
Europe has already pushed shorter PhDs with the excuse of facilitating development in technology/industry. It's been a huge failure in mathematics for various reasons among which are: 1. Students don't have time to develop autonomy and independence, so this remains for the postdoctoral period. 2. Students are forced into publishing things that shouldn't be published (it's often a requirement to terminate a doctorate) and these are shallower and less complete than they should be.
The true motivation seems to be that it is cheaper to fund 3 years than 5. Master's degrees have been made obligatory prior to doctorates (in the US this is traditionally not the case) and so are not covered by doctoral funding - rather they are paid for by students in many cases.
It may very well have sense to have a shorter track aimed at industry, but it shouldn't be called a doctorate and all doctorates shouldn't be shunted into this setup.
I did my PhD funded for 3 years off of NIH and the remaining year and so off of corporate research grants. I really valued the fact that I was working on an industrial project, and could see it come to life with real funding and real backing.
The critical part imho will be allowing for enough independence in research, and that the time isn't just wasted filling in remedial RAs pushing pipettes around. Real safeguards will be needed, likely overseen by the PI and committee.
I genuinely hope it works and helps industry "figure out" that R&D is more than just simply productizing over the next quarter.
In all fairness, there are various fields where your academic lab in graduate school and your entire degree is funded by a private firm through a grant, etc.
I find it interesting that semiconductor companies like Applied Materials, IBM, TI, Analog Devices, Intel, Lam, Micron have not signed up to join this program since they typically hire a significant number of PhDs. Perhaps there are concerns about IP protection.
In contrast Infineon has hosted PhD students and STMicro has an Italian government research institute on their Catania campus. https://www.imm.cnr.it/institute
This is a good use of TIP division funding. Whatever they were doing before seemed pointless.
Hot take but academia and industry don't have fundamentally different goals anymore. The real challenge is making sure students don't end up satisfying neither. A PhD that isn't published enough for academia and isn't impactful enough for industry is the worst outcome.
I can't figure out where I'd apply for this program as a student. Does anyone know?
PhD is slavery. You would rather go straight to industry getting paid in full.
Here is the I-PhD program's website - https://uidp.org/i-phd-scholars/
Reader read NFS v4 and was disappointed in their title comprehension.
[flagged]
Very perplexing.
There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component that companies in relevant industries can intervene in and direct if they so desire.
So why are they calling it a doctorate? I don’t see the point. It’s not like the NSF under this administration is particularly fond of STEM doctorates.
I’m open to any theories about what the real point of this is.
It is ideology. It's very obvious the current US government thinks that universities are a waste of money, and that industry is where everything happens. This industry PhD shuffles money from the university's pockets into industry pockets. It's in line with the recent shrinking of PhD visa lengths in the US (from technically-infinite-but-usually-6-to-7-years to 4 years)
Sorry, I’m a bit thrown off. What degree are you referring to?
Masters is usually about 2 years, though it could be longer in some cases or if worked on part-time. PhD is often 4-6+.
What 3-4 year degree did you mean? Bachelors?
I assume they're referring to Professional (Graduate) degrees, like JD or MD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_degree#United_Sta...
Are there professional degrees like that for, say, mathematics or physics?
An aside, the Actuarial profession's fellowship credentials (FSA/FCAS) are considered to be roughly equivalent in content to a professional doctorate (not counting a medical residency), and have a completely different format.
It's mostly exam based from pure self study, and aspiring actuaries typically work full time in the industry after passing the first 2-3 exams and finishing a bachelor's (which can be in any subject). Typical travel time from the first exam to the fellowship credential is 6-8 years, IIRC. Employers pay employees for some study time and for exam leave for each exam, with a bonus for each one passed.
I bring this all up because there are a lot of other ways for education to be structured outside of the BS -> MS -> PhD pathway, and there are ways for learning to be integrated with industry.
Funneling money from the government to private research that doesn't have to be disclosed, as the public funding won't be for research, but for student placement.
Ah. That makes more sense, thanks.
> There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component...
There isn't.
And if you are trying to snarkily describe an MS, then most MS programs are too short.
> So why are they calling it a doctorate? I don’t see the point. It’s not like the NSF under this administration is particularly fond of STEM doctorates.
The I-PhD is basically a formalization of industry-sponsored PhDs based on the program site [0]
[0] - https://uidp.org/i-phd-scholars/
Is this for people who already have an MS, so 6 total?
No. It's basically allocating funding for 250 PhD seats across a couple top engineering programs (CMU, UCSD, UIUC, Columbia SEAS, Penn SEAS, etc) with the expectation that said research would be linked with an industrial partner (eg. HPE, Bayer, Nvidia)
Edit: I just reread your comment. I think it is for students who are already doing their MS or have previously done so and are applying to PhD programs
Probably also for students with “just” a bachelor’s. Most PhD students don’t enter with a master’s.
I do wonder if NSF is hoping to seed more industry-sponsored PhDs as well, e.g., the first will be funded by NSF to establish the program, and industry will fund more once the program gets going.
Definitely makes sense to me they call it a PhD, not a master’s. A PhD is more prestigious and signals the holder is ready and eager to do cutting-edge research and has some experience doing so.
There are all kinds of master’s degrees (I say as someone who has one) and reasons for getting them, so they’re not as strong a signal of anything in particular. And they can mean someone switched careers, someone dropped out of a PhD program, someone took advanced classes during undergrad, someone got a bachelor’s in one country and wanted to study and work in another, etc.
Re: Bayer - the non-health industry side? I'm surprised NIH hasn't rolled out something like this earlier, to be honest, with their increasing emphasis on commercialisation.
Huh, odd. I could see trying to get back to everyone normally finishing in 6. But 4 seems really short.
> There isn't.
My coworkers holding such degrees would beg to differ.
> And if you are trying to snarkily describe an MS, then most MS programs are too short.
It wasn’t snarky, it was a listing of common points between the two. I don’t see what distinguishes this from a MS.
A year still isn’t enough time to write a doctoral-level thesis, so if the I-PhD is supposed to represent a “longer MS” then it’s still insufficient.
What are you referring to with "such degrees?" Just the name of the credential would be enough. The closest stuff I can think of is a JD or an MD, but otherwise there's no common graduate credential in the US that takes 3+ years full time, other than a PhD. I guess there are EdDs and PsyDs, but I've never heard of that sort of thing in engineering.
And to be pedantic, every single one of those credentials I've mentioned is a doctorate, even if it's not a PhD.
Where does an MS take more then 2 years?
I guess people doing night school maybe? That’s pretty clearly not what this is.
> There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component that companies in relevant industries can intervene in and direct if they so desire.
You're making this up as you go. No MS lasts 3-4 years, almost all MS theses are book reports/unpublished because the student is primarily attending classes, almost none are directed by industry (see points 1 and 2).
sometimes an institution will give an ms as a consolation prize for time spent not being able to finish a phd [0]. in those cases they can be upwards of 5 years, but they certainly aren't industry driven
[0] often a leadership or personality failure of the PI
My program had an exam after 2 years. You could fail completely, do well enough to leave with a MS, or fully pass and continue to a PhD.
that is one way things can be structured, yes.
Why do people do this kind of "well actually" thing? Yes you're correct but it has nothing to do with whether the degree itself is intended for that.
I mean, how common is a terminal master’s program in STEM fields?
I imagine there are departments where it’s more common to get a master’s by dropping out of the PhD program early than through any other path. Especially for people with a bachelor’s in the same field.
there are departments where it's the only way to get a masters, and it's nothing to do with foreign students paying, and i suspect more to do with lawsuit evasion for exploitative working cobditions and mutual nondisparagement
> mean, how common is a terminal master’s program in STEM fields?
Lololol extremely. They're cash cows because of foreign students paying full price and not getting tuition waivers.
> Especially for people with a bachelor’s in the same field.
Lol bruh an enormous number of schools have 4+1 programs to enable students getting terminal MS even easier.
because its good to have people not be misled by absolute statements like this "No MS lasts 3-4 years" that are simply incorrect.
do you enjoy being a source of misinformation?
What percentage of all MS awarded would you wager are intended to be 3-4 years?
the verb you used was "lasts" not "intended".
> There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree
What do these words mean to you? To me they imply the degree is intended to last 3-4 years. The English is very clear here.