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Someone on Twitter asked why we have so many PhD holders in Nigeria...

Someone on Twitter asked why we have so many PhD holders in Nigeria with no significant contribution to knowledge or innovation. I was expecting people to engage him in intellectually-charged debates but all I saw was insults, dismissive comments, personal anecdotes of how stressful PhD programs are or people telling him he’s jealous.

His question is valid and the erudite community should be accountable to the public… and enlighten them NOT intimidate them. First, we in the academia can testify that most PhD programs don’t train people to be inventors. We’re equipped to explore problems, understand the mechanisms, discover new dimensions to that problem and make intelligent inferences which could serve as possible solutions.
PhD is engaging in a philosophical journey in practice!

Only a few programs, like mechatronic Engineering, that lead to invention or enhancement of existing technologies. If you’re studying sedimentary rocks, xenobiotics in pigeons, impact of marine snows in microbial environments of the Indian Ocean, access to HPV vaccines in LGBTQ communities, housing and insurance price dynamics in the aftermath of a flooding crisis, significance of Omugwo in post partum care, AI-driven customer satisfaction analysis..

Many of the above projects will give you a great deal of insight into the research, but may NOT lead to a tangible invention that the layman can identify.
Just because people can’t directly identify the impact of a work doesn’t mean the work didn’t contribute to the society. At the very least, it contributed to the academic subfield and fostered understanding of a particular topic.

PhD programs train students to know a lot about a specific thing. For instance, my work looks at how hurricane events impact water quality in coastal cities. Such findings can help city planners, but a bus driver in Houston will not know about it and he may blame me for having a PhD yet not discovering new engine oil for his bus. Essentially, PhD is an intellectual experience... only a few fields lead to invention.


By: Ifeanyi Eze
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