Thoughts from an ex-LSE lecturer (Part I)

I couldn't resist blogging about this since it concerns one of my alma maters, the London School of Economics (LSE). I was alerted to this blog by an ex-LSE lecturer (Thanks Alain Chong for the headsup) and he has the following advice for prospective Asian PhDs and undergraduates who are thinking of applying to study at LSE and more generally in the UK.

Here's some of his pointers for prospective Asian students who are thinking of applying to LSE, Oxford or Cambridge to do their PhDs:

- English universities really aren’t all that good. Far inferior than the best American universities and certainly not much better than universities in Scandinavia, Germany or France.
- Don’t forget, PhD programs in UK universities, in contrast to American, have no course component. All you get for your tuition fee — some 12,000 pounds per year — are a few chats with your supervisor. When you factor in the cost of living in a city such as London, this is likely to be about as much as your family’s entire annual income.
- Add the lousy weather, the lousy food and it all becomes very unattractive indeed. Yes, and I forgot the barely concealed racism against anyone with an East Asian accent. They’ll take your money, but they won’t take you seriously.
- If you go ahead with your UK PhD, what you’ll soon realize is that you’ll be far better off doing your research back in your home country. You’ll save money that way and you’ll be closer to your primary sources. Before long you’ll find yourself sending 12,000 pounds off to the UK every year and getting absolutely nothing in return — no library access, not even an absent-minded supervisor. Before long the absurdity of the situation will be hard to ignore.
- The only thing you’ll get in the end is the alledged prestige of a UK degree. Yes, this is still worth something today but only since universities and employers in East Asia are slow to catch up on the serious trouble that UK academia is in. The Singaporean authorities have. They are not encouraging students to travel to the UK for a PhD anymore. Other Asian countries will soon draw the same conclusion.
- Let’s assume that the prestige of UK universities has a half-life of about 50 years. If that’s true, your PhD won’t be worth nearly as much by the time you are ready to go on the job market, and it’ll be worth even less some decades into your career.

Who is this blogger?

Erik Ringmar, 林艾克, is professor at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He grew up in Sundsvall, a big industrial town in northern Sweden, and in Mellanfjärden where his father was a sheep farmer. He received a PhD from Yale University in the United States in 1993, and a Fil.Dr from the University of Uppsala in 1998. Between 1995 and 2006 he taught in the Government Department at the London School of Economics.

While I broadly agree with his advice, which is to go to a US institution to do your PhD if you can get into a good school, I'd like to make a couple of corrections to some of his points.

Firstly, the course component requirements in UK universities differs according to field. Erik, whom I think was did his PhD in political science at Yale (I think Jim Scott was one of his advisers), is probably right to say that for fields such as political science, sociology and most certainly the humanities, there is little or no course component in UK universities (Although this might change in the near future as more UK universities try mimic their US counterparts). This is certainly not true for a field like economics. As far as I know, you have to do one year of pretty rigorous coursework and obtain a pretty high passing mark before you can proceed to the PhD stage, that is if you want to. If you don't, you can leave the institution with just a Masters. This is the way it works in LSE and Cambridge for economics, at least when I was there in 1998/1999. One year of coursework is still not as rigorous as the 2 years (minimum) of coursework which you have to take in most fields (social sciences and humanities) in US universities.

Secondly, the weather in London or the UK generally might be bad but it's not as if Boston (where Harvard and MIT are) is all warm and nice during the winter months. You'll get your fair share of bad weather (a combination of snow, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, hail, etc...) in most parts of the US outside of California. In sunny California, you just have to worry about the earthquakes, which are fairly rare or so I'm told.

Thirdly, it is possible that you'll encounter racism in most countries where you're not the majority race. I found London to be an amazingly cosmopolitan place and I didn't remember any racial slurs being directed against me nor was I discriminated in any way. Although I was called a 'chink' by two English lasses while I was in Cambridge doing my Masters. Here at Duke, I've been spared of any racial incidents so far, thankfully.

Fourthly, I think he underestimates how much you can benefit from being in an institutional setting in a UK university. He recommends that potential PhD students stay at home instead, where they are closer to primary sources. This is probably true for those who need access to primary sources (sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians etc...) but he doesn't point out that in many East Asian countries, the library facilities are far from good. Indeed, you might not be able to access certain journals because your university doesn't subscribe to them or that many books which you require somehow mysteriously 'disappears' from circulation. By being in a place like London, you can have access to the LSE library, which is one of the best social science libraries in the UK, as well as the British Library which has rare and previous documents found nowhere else in the world. (I don't get this comment about the lack of library access. I would have thought that all PhD students can access the library of the institution where they are studying at)

I think that Erik is being too harsh to the UK universities. I would still recommend prospective Malaysian students to go abroad to do their PhDs. And if the Malaysian government is willing to spend the money, a good UK university is not a bad choice. But do try to get into a good US university first. Failing that, then go to a UK university.