I graduated with my Ph.D. in Materials Science in 1992. Through 2014 I worked as a metallurgist in a variety of industries including academic, nuclear, consulting, manufacturing, and specialty steel production. For a period of ten years within that time frame I worked at Crucible Materials Corporation as a Senior Metallurgist, and worked concurrently as an adjunct Assistant Professor in Engineering at Syracuse University.
The PhD can prove useful in industrial research jobs and tenure-track academic positions. If your goal is to obtain an industrial engineering position, my own experience suggests that the PhD will close more doors for you than it will open. You will hear the phrase, "You're overqualified" more often than not. The pay that you receive will not be substantially greater than the pay earned by someone with an MS degree in the same discipline. And you may unknowingly inspire a sense of jealousy in your less secure co-workers who do not have an advanced degree. If your goal is simply to work in an industrial engineering position that does not involve research, then obtaining the PhD will serve no useful purpose, and will likely make your job search and work life much more difficult. The MS degree will result in a greater career benefit to you for the effort required to earn it.
What I find that surprises many people about having a Ph.D. is that employers are reluctant to hire you unless they absolutely need someone with your particular skill set. There are several downsides that a potential employer sees in hiring a PhD when they could just as easily hire a BS or MS candidate. They fear that you will become bored and seek employment elsewhere as soon as a better job comes along. Then they will have to go through the hiring process all over again. Why should they put themselves through that when they can simply pay someone who is not overqualified less money to do the same job? And the lesser qualified candidate will probably be less likely to jump ship as quickly. There is a general perception that PhDs are over-educated individuals who lack practical hands-on experience and common skill sets. This perception has been clearly expressed in the responses that have been posted to the original question in this thread. This perception is, at least in my particular case and those of my fellow PhDs, untrue.
Other factors also come into play when they do in fact need to hire a PhD. The applicant’s ethnicity presents an even more difficult problem for employers than usual because most Ph.D.'s that are currently employed in the United States are caucasian men. The federally mandated affirmative action guidelines that employers are required to adhere to stipulate that not only must each company hire a sufficiently diversified workforce, but the employees at each level in that company must also show evidence of this diversity. I myself have been denied the opportunity to interview at more than one company/academic institution because I am not a minority. A friend of mine who formerly worked for a major aluminum manufacturer told me precisely that when he explained to me why I would not be interviewed for the job that he originally encouraged me to apply for. If you look in the job postings for academic positions in the ASME publication Mechanical Engineering, for example, many of the ads contain a phrase at the end of the job posting that are similar to the following, “The University of ________ is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.” If you’re a white American male, that statement tells you that your ethnic background and gender are inconsistent with the job description, even though they have no bearing on your ability to do the work. If you had planned on getting a research position in an academic setting, you likely would have run into that problem. This is one of the reasons why many of the college professors that are currently employed in these academic institutions are foreign born. The odd part is that many of the foreign-born students who win fellowships to come here to study for their PhD (which you and I pay for with our tax dollars) are typically hired much more quickly by US companies than US citizens for the same reason, provided they have the paperwork to remain here. It's a good deal for them, and can leave a bad taste in the mouth of Americans like myself. Most people who have not been through this may find it difficult to comprehend. Our own system discourages Americans from earning a PhD. If you look at any engineering PhD program in the US, the vast majority of the students in that program are probably not Americans. It should not be this way, but I see no motivation for this to change anytime in the near future.
Maui
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