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My friend got a degree in egyptology, but can’t get a job, So he’s paying more money to get a Phd, so he can work teaching other people egyptology. In his case college is literally a pyramid scheme.

Copied from here, but I have seen the joke elsewhere as well.

My personal experience is that neither the university nor most university professors care to evaluate whether their curriculum has a lot of applicability/use. (Some professors claim this is not a goal or cannot be measured in any way; while many universities claim their programs are also very practical, but if you read the actual claim it is very much PR with little scientific measurement.)

Has there been any academic research into which fields satisfy the following criteria:

  1. Most of the people who complete the university program do not find placement in the field.
  2. There is some (perhaps not conclusive) statistical evidence that the program gives no benefits in the actual field (not the field the program was in) where these people eventually start to work in. E.g. it can be useful to study theoretical math even if you end up programming, as your logic may improve. Perhaps this could be measured with a control group of people who had similar backrounds to those who got into the math program but did not apply to get in; how different is their success in the same field?

P.s.: Does egyptology really fulfill these criteria?

Edit: Added the word perhaps.

Giskard
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  • I will also link this question without further comment. – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 16:13
  • I will also link this similar question, not sure if it counts as a duplicate. – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 16:22
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    There's a tiresome young man in Bay Shore. When his fiancée cried, 'I adore The beautiful sea', He replied, 'I agree, It's pretty, but what is it for?' - Morris Bishop – Michael Greinecker Mar 30 '21 at 16:58
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    What did the members of the control group with all the time they got from not getting a math degree? – Michael Greinecker Mar 30 '21 at 17:02
  • @MichaelGreinecker Excellent question! I don't know how you would control for these kind of "opportunity costs"; if the literature exists, perhaps they thought of something smart? – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 18:12
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    @MichaelGreinecker The Bishop quote is very good :) But I find that when I pick at the foundations of economics I often get witty yet unsubstantive answers - there are half a dozen that I can tell convincingly, yet without conviction - so it leaves me wanting more. – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 18:14
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    I do not know enough about Egyptology or literature on exactly the things you are asking for to provide full answer, but: 1. in literature education is not just for human capital accumulation but also signal/screening e.g. Becker vs Stiglitz view. Under the signal view even getting Egyptology degree can provide useful signals for non-related fields (e.g. signal that you can do your coursework on time etc all potentially useful at almost any job). 2. There is literature on 'superstar' professions. Many people are taking dancing lessons, acting classes, writing classes - – 1muflon1 Mar 30 '21 at 19:04
  • yet only very few of them become professional actors, dancers, writers etc. Here the mechanism why they do so is that being a superstar provides very high rewards so even if chance of becoming one are small as long as expected rewards are high you have incentive to try to become one. I would conjecture that Egyptology is one of the fields with high rewards for superstar scientists (e.g. book deals, but also non-monetary lots of travel to exotic places, doing interesting work). Hence, I conjecture this is what's happening here, and this is not pyramid scheme – 1muflon1 Mar 30 '21 at 19:07
  • @1muflon1 In most pyramid schemes someone does make a lot of money, it is only the masses that lose. – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 20:43
  • @1muflon1 Personally I would prefer to exclude costly signalling when there are no other benefits the education provides. Not sure if this is possible in practice, but those are not the type of papers I am thinking of. – Giskard Mar 30 '21 at 20:46
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    @Giskard right but the hallmark of pyramid scheme is that people make money by recruiting more people. Superstars don’t ,they make money from their performance/work. Eg for an Egyptology or any other activity to be pyramid scheme it would have to work in a way that money is earned just by recruiting others (or predominantly this way - some schemes will mask themselves by also selling some products). That joke has it right in a sense it claims that egyptologists just recruit more egyptologists to get money from their tuition who, to get compensated, recruit more egyptologists for their tuition. – 1muflon1 Mar 30 '21 at 21:05
  • Is egyptology professorship the only career for egyptology students and is it wasted if they don't do that? – user253751 Mar 31 '21 at 16:01
  • @user253751 "is it wasted" Is what wasted? If that is the only career and they can't pursue it successfully, then yes, I would argue that their years of study were wasted, unless they undertook the program fully informed, as a hobby. – Giskard Mar 31 '21 at 17:59

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Partial and tangential answer, but no other answers so far, so here goes:

For the first part of the definition (people who complete the university program do not find placement in the field), data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates may be useful, particularly "Postgraduation plans (e.g., work, postdoc, other study or training) - Type and location of employer". Papers that use this dataset may compare by field.

The "no benefit" part could be studied by regression discontinuity around the admission cutoff, but the small sample size of fields like egyptology makes it low-powered.

Sander Heinsalu
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