It's a truism that we get the outcomes that are rewarded.
PhD
supervisors are typically rewarded for their publications and for the
grants they receive. Rewards entail tangible benefits to their career
such as promotions, nominations to influential committees, editorial
positions on journals, decision-making powers in their workplaces such
as university departments, and the like.
While
most academic workplaces vociferously tout the importance of mentoring,
including training and teaching, it's also patently obvious they offer practically no tangible rewards for good mentoring.
Are there even objectively defined assessments of good academic
mentoring? What does it mean to be a good mentor? What distinguishes
good training and teaching from bad? Is objectively defined mentoring
even considered by promotion committees? Has anyone ever heard of a
professor getting promoted because they were a good mentor who trained
and taught their PhD students well? Clearly academic mentoring is not
just a case of There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, but also of lip-service.
For
far too long and far too often, PhD students, and in many scientific
fields, post-docs as well, are mere fodder that helps a PhD supervisor
advance their own career. Tasked with shepherding PhD students but not
offered any tangible rewards for doing so, any wonder in the typical PhD
supervisor's world, PhD students and post-docs all too often end up as
extra pairs of hands, cheap labor to instead help bring about the
outcomes that do reward their PhD supervisors, namely, publications and
successful grant applications?
The average PhD
experience would likely greatly improve if instead tangible
training-based outcomes were part and parcel of assessing a PhD
supervisor and had a bearing on their future career. Where are the
metrics such as how many of their PhD students later found a job or even
how many stayed in the same field? Who tracks such metrics? Likely no
one. After all, such a system doesn't exist even for the US National Institutes of Health
postdoctoral training program, probably the largest such training
program in one place anywhere in the US, maybe even the world.
Put another way, currently, academia tangibly rewards academics for their individual selfishness, not responsible stewardship of their chosen study fields.
Such a system is obviously unsustainable in the long run. Problem is it
takes years for the insurmountable nature of such unsustainability to
become undeniably evident, a situation analogous to Climate change for example.
So
we come back to where we started, namely, that we get the outcomes that
are rewarded, not the ones we ostensibly seek. Unless good mentoring,
i.e., good training and teaching is a) defined more objectively, and b)
PhD supervisors get tangibly rewarded or punished using such objectively
defined criteria, PhD programs will continue in the same vein, i.e.,
causing far too many PhD students unnecessary stress and suffering.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-redesign-the-PhD-experience-in-order-to-minimize-suffering-of-graduate-students/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala
