Questions

I often ask, “What’s expected of a PhD?” The literature suggests there are both private and social returns to pursuing one. But we must tread carefully: prestige, for instance, shouldn’t be conflated with a social return—it’s as private as the higher earnings a PhD might bring. Digging deeper, it’s clear that PhDs are inherently self-paced and heterogeneous. This is one level of education where each observation (in an imaginary dataset) is so unique that it could almost justify individual dummy variables in a regression, though that’s plainly impractical. Still, if we try to model the PhD journey, we might focus on two broad dimensions: the rhetorical returns (e.g., skills, signaling) and the costs (time, opportunity costs, mental toll). But here’s the catch: superimposing assumptions from lower levels of education often distorts findings, especially when analysing student costs. In this blog, I’ll offer an informal take on the Economics of a PhD, with a focus on India’s unique academi...