Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

There is a pretty nice steak restaurant near us (haven't tried it).  The last two days it's been closed, with heavy black fabric over any windows, and next door a parking lot is full of trucks and trailers, some are parked on a side street as well, probably 40 of them.  The trailers are labeled "Lightning Productions", which means someone is shooting a TV show or something in said restaurant (I don't have any idea which).  They even have the sidewalk on Peachtree St. blocked off.  Two days, many many people involved.

The average time for a PhD in a science is something like 6 years now, maybe more.  Yuck.  The "standard time" is/was 4 years.  I had a couple of friends with PhDs in chemical engineering, which struck me as extreme overkill.

6 years beyond the BS?

Yes indeed.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/students/graduate/survey-of-phd-programs-in-chemistry.html

This of course includes summers, you don't get time off much at all.  The hard part for me was that no one was checking on "my work", so to speak, so if I didn't do anything, nobody noticed.  The first year is mostly classroom, like undergrad, so that is normal.  The second year is only 1 or 2 courses meant to help you with your preliminary oral exam, and by then you should have picked you major professor and started lab work on a project.  You have to pass cumulative written exams, and then your preliminary oral, which is not easy, and you only get two chances at it.  Once you pass the cumes and oral exam, it's 100% research, no classes, unless you are TAing.

I had to TA every year, my boss was young and had no funding.  That soaks up some time.  I had completed my undergrad by going summers in 3 years, so I had aimed to be finished before my 26th birthday, which I managed, so it took me about 4.8 years total in grad school and 3.3 in undergrad.  I was pretty slack my first couple years in grad school with nobody checking on me.

And for some folks, their research just bombs out, through no fault of their own necessarily, and they have to start something else.  And after that, some goodly number do post doctoral research for 2 more years.  You really only need that to become a professor.

Lots of random thoughts of yesterday's thread action:

I have several friends with PhDs in biomedical engineering, but I'm not sure how long it took them to get it. 

5 years is pretty common in engineering. Halfway through year 3, I looked to see what I would have to take to get out in 4 years, and it was NOT going to happen. 

Among the things I'm not sure about, one of them is why ASCE has been pushing so hard for it's members to get a masters degree. A masters may be needed in some sectors, but I didn't find the price tag worth it 10 years ago, and still don't, assuming I would have gotten in. I was a grinder in college, with my grades of the survive-and-advance variety.

Of the U of Minnesota's BCE Class of 2007 that had jobs lined up, less than half of them were still in the field two years later. Speaking of which, they still subscribe to a n aggressive weed-out schedule for incoming frosh.

Our agency needs to get younger, but has a hard time hiring both techs and engineers, for a myriad of reasons. Pay (already less than the private sector, with some in the Legislature bemoaning 1% annual raises as a disgraceful waste of the public dollar), requirements (must have Class A CDL with endorsements to apply as a tech), and plowing snow (many here don't belong anywhere near heavy equipment).

Most of the engineers in my office got their degrees from Iowa State (UMN, Platteville, and Mankato State follow in frequency). They're here because either they're from here, or their spouse is from here, or the spouse works for the Mayo Clinic and significantly out earns us. 

The most bizarre thing about the admissions scandal is that at least some of them had the means to donate a million to get their underqualified kid in the traditional way.

I also think average intelligence has probably already peaked. The reality is that there is a negative correlation between fertility and intelligence / education. I see it for myself in looking at women's dating profiles. The women who already have and/or want kids disproportionately only graduated from high school or community college and/or have non-professional jobs. To be sure, most women want kids, regardless of their education, but more educated and professionally accomplished ones tend to have fewer, if any.

The masters degree in chemistry is a "terminal degree" in most places.  It often means you didn't pass your prelims.  Harvard confers masters degrees after you pass your prelims but that seems unusual, so PhDs rarely have a master's degree.  It's a mark of shame unless you went to Harvard.

That's interesting about Harvard but my experience is the same. In both biochemistry and medical sciences, an M.S. is a mark of shame. And if it's the mark you get, you pray that it happens as early as possible. The saddest story I know to tell is of a girl in my lab who pursued a project for 11 years (beginning 7 years before my arrival) and ultimately "ran out of time," was no longer welcome to enroll, and exited with a masters. Imagine all that work, those years of expecting it'd be traded for being called Doctor, and leaving entirely empty-handed. 
Soul sickening.

The admissions scandal, as I saw it, mostly reintroduced the question of the value of a prestigious college degree. And how difficult that question is to answer. Many parents either live vicariously through their children and/or use them for social status. And for them, a prestigious alma mater is incalculably valuable. Of course, parents aren't the only ones who can be struck by superficiality. Many kids want those degrees just because they want them - for competive or status reasons. 

And then there are the "good" or non-superficial perspectives. Of course, one needn't attend Stanford to become well educated. A community college grad (or in the vernacular of Good Will Hunting... a person with just 10 cents in library fees) with the right degree of curiosity and determination to chase knowledge can go anywhere once they get in the door. So, once you're years into employment (decades after graduation), the diploma doesn't seem to matter. But when starting out, it does provide a boost. And if you have eyes on something like the Supreme Court, I suppose going to Harvard/Yale is basically indispensible.

And at that point, we've just about covered the whole conversation. The only thing that's left out at this point is the stuff that's bigger than a single self-determined individual. For example: What's the value of being immersed in environments with different concentrations of intellectualism? Will the same self-determined individual necessarily turn out the same way whether they enter a highly, moderately, or lowly concentrated intellectual environment? Hard to say.

Ultimately, I think a prestigious university has a lot of non-fake value, but actually quantifying it is hard and the ways we try (like ROI - Return On Investment) probably miss the point.