My sister is the opposite.

She's got her bachelors back in 2010 and got a Masters while working full time. This part was brutal, but not technically PhD yet. She's in Health Policy, a lot of statistics and junk.

Anyway, she works for some special interest think-tank for a bit, works on insurance company some other bit, and finally settles down in the CDC where her skills in statistics / health policy were very much appreciated. She's getting to a point where it takes a Ph.D however before she can move forward with her career (she's already surrounded by Ph.Ds, and she sticks out in a bad way by not having one), so she's going for her Ph.D.

From her side of the aisle, she's seeing a whole bunch of silly 20-something year olds who don't even know what the field of Health Policy is about, trying to create Ph.D Thesis topics that have obviously no relevance to anybody in any of the fields she's ever worked in (politics, insurance, or CDC).

Meanwhile, her first idea was basically "Think of something CDC is blind at, which she can think of rather easily because she's worked there for 5+ years and everyone at the office is basically spitballing complaints about the CDC's statistics every damn day", and propose it as a Ph.D thesis.

Granted, her day-to-day work is filled with constantly interacting with Ph.Ds who are interested in improving the CDC's statistical collection techniques / improving accuracy / finding new ways to slice the data and innovation. That's literally her job. And those subjects just so happen to be very useful Ph.D thesis material for advancing the state of Health Policy.

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How much blood, sweat, and tears are we setting up Ph.D candidates for because they're straight-out-of bachelors with no real world experience or knowledge of their damn field?

Some of these things _are_ easy to figure out after you've got 5 to 10 years of real world experience.

The treadmill of Bachelors -> Masters -> Ph.D is broken. It probably needs to be Bachelors -> Real world experience -> Masters -> Real World Experience -> Ph.D.

This "Read paper -> Think of idea -> Woops, someone already did it -> Read another paper" loop from the video game, is that how most Ph.Ds try to come up with their thesis? Isn't that obviously broken compared to other "life-loops"?

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Ex: her office solved the question of "how to report statistics within one month to policy makers", because as late as 2018 or so, CDC was still on a yearly schedule of death statistics releases.

Imagine if we were still on the yearly-schedule when COVID19 happened, instead of the rapid schedule of monthly-statistics that we actually had! Monthly statistics, much like Inflation NowCasting, is actually a forecast / prediction because not all the data is in. But coming up with a forecast for this month (or last month) of data is still a problem that needed to be solved, especially in a way that policy makers would accept in a political environment where everyone's nitpicking at the details.

There's so many blind-spots and questions about how to improve statistics and statistical reporting at the Ph.D level in that field. But you are only aware of these blind-spots if you actually work in the field for a bit.