The Cognitive Dissonance of Ph.D. Holders Refusing to "Apply Down" in the Job Market

Several years ago, this blog concluded in a post that the meaning of a doctorate is related to a particular career option, not a reflection of the Ph.D. holder's intellect. The time was my early days of coming back to academia, right after a couple years in the East African outback for an American non-profit. The idea of getting back into the books after two years in the maize fields still felt new and exciting. Being an academic was still a viable option, made worthy of consideration when thinking about the joy of doing fieldwork in countries around the world.

The perception of a Ph.D. has certainly changed in years since. A few years of COVID put paid to the idea that the freedom of travel is always possible for people with the right professions, passports, and financial means. As the threat of future pandemics looms, digital technology has become a substitute for flying around the globe for face-to-face meetings, however imperfect it may be for building rapport necessary for non-work-related interactions. For academics who rely on interviews and qualitative data collection, and are much more short on funds than corporate types, Zoom became, and still likely is, a necessary evil.

But if there is anything that has not changed about Ph.D. in all these years of global upheaval, it is that vague and superficial perception of intellectual excellence. In the white-collar world that values those who have the intellectual capabilities for critical thinking, analytical processing of information, and constructing clear arguments from rational curation of evidence, those with doctorate degrees seem to at least have the relevant soft skills, if not the industry knowledge, to be of immediate use even outside a purely academic research setting.

The perception of "seems" then feeds into an often baseless sense of pride that a Ph.D. holder may have. By its very definition, a doctorate is based on a niche study, touching on a very narrow part of a particular field in the hope of pushing the frontier of human knowledge just a bit more outward. While the soft skills to figure out those niches and the effort to push the intellectual frontier may contain elements that are universal in nature, the niches themselves are likely to be of very little use in practical business settings unless the original research had commercial implications from the get-go. 

Yet, blinded by pride, the Ph.D. holder may just as well be rationalizing the "natural fit" of the perceived intellectual capabilities within multiple organizations, irrespective of their goals and needs. They see the years of effort it took to conduct the niche research not as a sunk cost, but as a process of preparing for the "real world" outside academia. The Ph.D. graduate may see their academic preparation as a reason that companies should be lining up to take them in when they graduate. The prestige of the Ph.D., in their eyes, translates directly into value on the job market.

As a consequence, Ph.D. holders may become hesitant about "applying down" in the job market, dismissing positions that require anything less than top academic degrees and financial returns on years of wiling away in research labs. The refusal to consider a broad range of employment, in all levels and industries, limits both the prospect of a Ph.D. holder quickly finding any job and quickly leads to a sense of disillusionment that the world does not understand the effort that was needed to pursue the Ph.D. Academics, then, are stuck in academia, unwilling to face the truth of being unwanted elsewhere.

Some Ph.D. holders may ultimately compromise, triggering a cognitive dissonance that impacts relationships with future coworkers and clients. Those who seek out positions that they deem as too lowly for their intellectual capacity may enter the workplace from a position of condescension, believing that those they work with are very lucky to have someone with a doctorate around the office. They try to reconcile the supposed lowliness of their job with an unchanging sense of intellectual pride, by looking down on those around them and remaining emotionally distant.

Such cognitive dissonance only ends up hurting the Ph.D. holder. In any workplace, the value of a worker is evaluated by contribution to the work itself, not what educational history is on the resume. Contribution to work is much more than just bringing brainpower to the table, but also how to smoothly build and maintain relationships with work-related partners so that collaborative projects can get done without a hitch. The sooner that a Ph.D. holder learns this reality and abandons the high-nosed belief in intellectual superiority, the faster they can acclimate to the reality that they are just another part of a team like others.