Should You Do a Business PhD?
I frequently talk to students considering a PhD in business.
This has been the perfect career for me. I love the research, the teaching, and the self-directed nature of the work I do. I get paid to study and think about ideas that interest me all day long!
But the truth is, this path is not for everyone. I don’t mean that you can’t hack it, it’s just genuinely not a great fit for most people. I’ve seen a lot of folks start a business PhD thinking it’s one thing, then drop out after years of frustration.
So I’ll give you the basic facts about the career, in hopes that you can more realistically assess whether it might be a good fit for you.
The typical timeline
First off, let’s make sure you understand a typical timeline:
| Stage | How long | What you’re doing | Pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| PhD student | ~6 years | The first 2 years are mostly classes; after that, almost 100% research (ideally), maybe with some light teaching. | Free tuition + ~$45k stipend |
| Assistant professor (pre-tenure) | ~6 years | Mostly research, while worrying about getting tenure. At R1 schools, tenure is awarded to those who can publish 4–6 top-tier peer-reviewed journal articles. You do get to teach, and it’s fun, but it takes a small share of your time and energy relative to research. | ~$220–260k market range at many R1 universities |
| Tenured professor | Rest of career | More security to pursue the research and teaching you care about. | Small pay bump at tenure (not huge); afterward it roughly keeps up with inflation. Outside money is possible (executive education, consulting, etc.), but FYI most of those opportunities go to professors at top schools. |
You may have noticed that a huge portion of what you do is research. This is what most people don’t truly understand before they enter the PhD. You live or die by your ability to produce novel, valuable research in peer-reviewed journal articles (like Strategic Management Journal or Organization Science — not pop business magazines like HBR).
The real question: do you actually like research?
So the real question you need to answer for yourself is: would I enjoy doing “business research” the rest of my life? If the answer is yes, then continue reading. If not, run away as fast as possible.
Seriously, if you only like the idea of teaching, or of being a business guru, but you don’t like the idea of doing research almost all day every day, then this is not for you. Go start a successful business, and later on you can teach as an adjunct or teaching-track professor. But do not do a PhD if you do not like research.
To answer the question “do I like research?” as quickly as possible, I recommend:
- Clicking around on the websites of research faculty and skimming the papers they are writing. Can you imagine yourself spending years reading these types of papers?
- Taking research seminar courses. At BYU we have a strategy and organizational behavior research seminar course specifically designed for pre-PhD students, where different professors come in and discuss research papers with you for hours at a time.
- Trying to do research with a professor if possible. Here’s info about my research lab.
If you love all of those things, you may be on the right track, and you should consider the career. If you don’t love it, run away.
Other attributes of a good candidate
In addition to liking research, here are some key attributes of a good candidate:
- Has raw intelligence (often roughly proxied by great test scores and grades)
- Likes to play with ideas and discuss them with others
- Reads intellectual stuff for fun
- Can diligently work alone at a computer for hours, days, weeks, months, years, without anyone guiding them or telling them what to do
- Genuinely likes the bread-and-butter research tasks: writing, reading, coding, etc.
- Is entrepreneurial, constantly learning and pushing on new things
If you have those traits, you may be a great fit for the career. But if you have all of them, you can probably also do almost anything you want for your career, and you have lots of options. So it’s still not a guarantee.
Pros and cons
To finish up, here are some of the pros and cons. Many of them are two sides of the same coin:
| The good | The bad |
|---|---|
| The PhD is an amazing opportunity to just level up your intellectual ability and interact with smart people discussing interesting ideas. | PhDs are long. Six years is a significant opportunity cost. |
| Your job is very flexible and you direct your own time. You don’t have a boss! Every day is a Saturday! | …but you do have to work on Saturdays, and no one is making you do it. Because of this lack of structure, PhDs are typically not great for a person’s mental health. Getting published and landing a first job involve significant uncertainty over long-horizon tasks (research papers take years) with almost no immediate positive feedback. You control the inputs (time at your desk, papers submitted), but not the outputs (a 3rd-round rejection! your dream job not hiring for the next 3 years!). Even though your time is flexible, you start feeling like you should always be working, and your papers and job prospects are constantly hanging over you and never go away. Someone once told me there’s a rare stress-induced rash that’s typically only seen in combat veterans with PTSD… and PhD students. Fortunately this stress subsides once you have some publishing success and/or tenure — but this purgatory can last 6–10 years! |
| Salaries in business schools are quite good, especially for academia. | But notice the lack of unbounded upside (no $5 million exits here!) and the relatively flat salary trajectory over the course of the career, compared to many MBA-type options. |
| You get to read, write, and code a lot. If you like that, it’s really fun. | Sometimes you feel isolated at your computer. |
| Teaching is really fun, and I believe it can be a profound way to influence students for good. | You can’t do the career just for teaching, because the bottleneck of success is research. |
If you finish this article and still like the idea of doing a business PhD, come meet with me. You might also find my Innovation Research Lab and my advice on where to apply helpful.