The work force is a mess. But deep skills will always be in demand.
“This is a dire moment to enter the work force.
It is a perfect moment to spend four to seven years acquiring rare and valuable skills before entering a work force which will not be, in five years, what it is now.”
“The Ph.D. process teaches broad expertise in research methods. Doctorate holders know how to evaluate evidence, chase down sources, verify claims. They learn methods for finding reliable information, when to be suspicious of data, and how to act upon those suspicions. In addition to learning what we know, a Ph.D. student gains expertise in what we don’t know, learning where the frontiers in a field are, the big questions, incompleteness, and areas a field has not yet tackled.”
Read more in There Has Never Been a Better Time to Start a Ph.D. in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Ada Palmer, published on Oct. 27, 2025.
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