I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.

The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.

I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.

For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV style salaries. That made me feel like it was all a bad decision.

But now that I'm approaching my 50s, I feel a bit differently. I traded variability for steady consistent growth. When SV lays of 80% of the work force and a bunch of people lose their jobs and their fancy SV salaries go to 0, I've luckily (knock on wood) never had that experience.

I bet in the long run a person making SV salary right out of college and invests smartly will still out perform economically than a steady growth after a delay for the PhD. But mentally the lack of variability has been good for me. YMMV.

Its hard to know if the risk of a bad time is always high or if it is dependent on culture etc, but I do not recommend PhDs as a pathway anymore.

In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going

I feel like everyone says this regardless of what level of education they have. I have a PhD and I've never felt this way. Everything I've learnt has contributed to the whole. The broad, shallow exposure from school has been extremely useful. I think I've used just about everything at one time or another. The PhD was less about learning in the specific area and more about learning how to do a PhD. You have to learn how to study a field and get on top of it, how to organise and assimilate that information, and how to build on top of that. This is definitely still useful to me and I'm not sure I would have learned to do it without actually doing it.

- I did my PhD in Europe where it's only 3 years after master, so the opportunity cost is less

- I noticed a lot of frustration with PhD candidates comes from applying to academic positions. If this is not the end goal, this could also lead to a better experience.

- I said a lot of what I learned is useless, this can be mitigated by carefully choosing a topic, although not easy when you have little perspective, and possibly limited options (lots of candidates pick a topic in their local university for instance). It's also possible to intern in companies during a PhD.

- Having a PhD can open new doors.

My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).

This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)

What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)

More power to pure academics who don't pursue money or fame, and instead make an impact.

Not sure that is a perk. In EU (not sure about this exact offer in Norway) to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU). But it is mandatory social insurance (tax) of 10% to 40% of your income.

This is not my experience (close friend in a flyover state makes 55k), so I googled and found this website: https://postdocsalaries.com/results

55k looks to be well within the normal range of American postdoc salaries.

It’s not HN. It’s the fact that doing PHD is only a reasonable choice if you either want to get into academia long term or you come from wealth. (Historically science and research was a rich people thing, and only became accessible once student loans were more accessible)

I genuinely considered doing PhD after my Masters degree. No matter what I couldn’t justify spending 5 more years, borrowing more money on top of my tens of thousands of student loans just to stay afloat. I would still be living roommates well into my 30s, have no prospects when it came to dating, rely on student loans and my parents to support me, while literally any job I did would put me in a better position. Like I could bartend full time and I’d be making more money than the stipend. All of this in the hopes of what? That I’d have a dissertation in super specialized field, not necessarily the one I want in because I won’t have the advisor I need and the one I have only wants me to do very specific things they want. And that dissertation may or may not be relevant to the industry or even academia in a year or two.

And if you decide after your PhD, that you’ll join the industry, you’ve lost out on 5 years of compounded growth financially and personally. It’s not like a PhD gets you more money in 95% of the jobs.

Realistically, the only people with me who ended up committing to doing this were people who had no other prospects or were looking for a full time role in academia.

What about a decent stable life where you are not struggling, and actually can start a family before turning, say, 35?

I don't think it can be supported by academia anymore.

I just don't want to go through 5-10 years of PhD, then two postdocs, and then start a job that is by no means tenured.

And PhD isn't really a place for satiating your unfettered, unhinged curiosity. You have to do research along your advisor's line of inquiry, look at funding prospects, churn out papers at a cutthroat pace, and then deal with politics. Also, you can somewhat easily change a job, but cannot switch advisors that easily. Switching institutions is considerably harder.

If you want a FAANG job, you can get that without a PhD. And earn much more by the time your PhD were to be finished if you didn't go for it.

EE and CS are fields where you can do your research on your own if you are genuinely curious. Maybe, you won't have a career as a researcher. But you also won't be with a thinning hairline, single, and far from financial indepence at 33.

In defense of being money centric, we are not talking about yachts and drugs level money. To me, money means buying a house, starting a family, taking care of my parents, looking after my own health, and overall stability. These are the hallmarks of what used to be a middle class lifestyle in America.

If people are getting PhDs to earn more money long term, these are also not people who intend to live lavishly. It only seems exceptional because almost every other avenue to previously “normal” life has been closed off.

There’s nothing wrong with studying something because you’re interested in it. But for me, it would’ve likely meant foregoing the above.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people are putting a premium on financial stability these days.

What people are, quite rightly, pointing out about getting a PhD is the "will live in poverty for a decade+ with better odds of winning the lottery than getting a tenured position to do research".

Even if you want to do research, you have to eat, too.

It's just not a great win in any way unless your main thing in life is your job being your main intellectual stimulant.

Counter - I recently asked a faculty candidate how he would recruit curious, talented graduate students, and he said “I develop connections from interesting online communities like Hacker News.” I loved this answer because it’s consistent with my observations. HN may seem cynical but the average level of potential PhD students is higher than many alternatives!

Not to be dismissive, because career academics are important. But there is an unnecessary anxiety for many about leaving school and entering the workforce.

I think one attraction is also: “wow, I can get paid to continue my education?”

Academia is like universal basic income for the highly intelligent. It’s a good system, overall and I think it will have a strong future. But it is not a good way to build wealth.

That said, the freedom it provides can make a PhD a great place to start a business, start a family, etc. But, it requires bravery and self direction, because it certainly won’t steer you there.

Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that.

If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.

If you get lucky and find a PI that is interested in exactly the same thing, you're good. You might get lucky enough to find someone who is interested in something near what you want. Most likely, you will be assigned the thing you do for your PhD.

That's why I did a PhD, but of course, I'd still like some job security at the end of the pipeline. Currently a postdoc.

I always thought I was lucky because I was into computers and was able to do what I actually enjoyed, but when I look back I don't think working for Wikia for $850 a month was the best choice I could have made.

If you're able to ignore that fantastic, great for you and I hope you're happy, but even fully funded positions have just enough money to cover the minimum length of a PhD. To get the most from it chances are you will either end up with minor debt or wipe out some savings. Unfortunately such is life.

IMO the goal of the PhD shouldn't be to think of a city job as a high frequency trader at the end, but that's my worldview that why spend X years studying in a field of you don't intend to follow it...

Chances are if you say that during an interview for a place, unless it's in studying high frequency trading you won't get a call back.

All that while your age mates from school/college/town are progressing in their life and career.

Also if you get into non-academic job then those early years foregone usually have disproportionately bigger impact on your career progression and your accumulated wealth.

The decision is really big one and it’s only natural to consider money angle. I’ve known quite a few get into it because of interest and then getting disillusioned as they watch the world pass them by.

Further, there was an "unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption" that faculty were in the business of bringing in grant money, and he who didn't wouldn't last long.

Then in the last few years we came to learn that much of the "academics" that gets published today is completely bogus. What subject are those "researchers" interested in?

Then you need a stable situation first. Not everyone can choose to spend years badly paid while accruing debt from tuition and renting in a high cost area.

You read like a privileged person who comes from money or won the lottery.

Lol! Are you new here? Y-combinator is literally about selling your soul to VC.

Not surprising at all. It's a forum run by a VC firm populated with a decent number of people who are wannabe founders, trying to jump on the latest fad, hoping to win the startup jackpot.

And (way back when it was small), I think a big part of the appeal was you could rub shoulders with some VC people and founders who actually made it.

> It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research.

I think it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.

> It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.

I don't know about "earning a lot of money," but the whole PhD thing seems to have gotten super exploitative. Passion is one thing, but it's not a good thing to get taken advantage of. IMHO, long and difficult educational programs should be designed to guarantee a high chance of a reasonable stable and comfortable outcome.

I think it is beneficial for everyone that the money angle for PhD is openly discussed and made public. This way, the correct audience (those who don't need to work for a living, i.e. born rich) might be attracted instead of burning out middle/lower class youth with dreams.

...Or steps can be taken to change PhD programs. Which does not seem likely.

I don't think I read a single first-hand account in this whole thread; just a lot of whining, hearsay, entirely made up bollocks, and a hell of a lot of chips on shoulders.

Frankly, no. Because as beautiful as that concept is, it's 6 years in your younger decades, where the magic of compound interest makes every dollar you save or spend count a lot more than any money you make later in life.

Add tuition and loans, also with compound interest, and well, I have no resentment against people from wealthy enough backgrounds that they can just do this. If that's how want to use your privileged background, nothing but respect from me.

But 99% of us have to consider the money.

Dude, you got-a eat.

It has always been heavy on Silicon Valley (legal) hustler types? Even more earlier. Concerning startups most seems disillusioned about the prospects nowadays.

Why is it surprising? The market is saying most people don’t have that privilege and academia is still in denial about that and completely out of touch, your surprise suggests you are… in touch? if this was a standardized test question, which you’re probably good at, you would not choose that answer

Both the private and public sector have co-opted university credentials as prerequisites for employment, leading a different audience to demand and feel entitled to being accepted at universities

I will give you something though: I agree this is all a mistake and the universities will outlive this 100 year folly of the plebs wanting to be there for employment, and revert to being half millennium old networking and refinement clubs for upper class children

> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.

So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part

they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.

Otherwise this point is indeed correct.

The academic pyramid was never sustainable.

However, for some fields (science and engineering being good examples) there are decent jobs outside of academia.

PhDs might not be working in schools, but there's plenty doing meaningful research outside of academia.

I'm sure 3M hires plenty of PhDs; and venture-capital-backed health device companies; and oil companies looking for new ways to capture oil; and so on.

The opportunity cost isn’t just in life-time earnings, it’s also the time you sunk hyper focused on one very specific topic.

There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/

I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.

You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.

Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.

Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.

I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.

It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.

My sense is you might get paid when you start what an undergraduate makes after one year and a pay raise.

Your career will probably develop faster than the person who started working after undergrad. Your ceiling is likely hire.

I don't have a PhD, but this is what I've observed.

35,566 / 57862 = 61.5% (overall)

26,622 / 45,533 = 58.5% (stem PhDs)

Survey of earned doctorates, national center for educational statistics, 2023 data…very useful, as are many of the data products the federal government collects, for however long this is up

https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data

You're looking at this wrong. PhD was always about financial security for the vast majority of PhDs. You think all those Chinese and Korean etc. students are coming to study engineering to get invited to the good parties back home? No, they're doing it because it provides financial security. Same for places all over the world. Europe, everywhere.

It's basically upper and upper middle class white Americans who pursue PhDs for the social prestige, because they already have actual capital, so they're pursuing social capital. Everyone else does it for a combination of money and love for the subject matter.

This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.

The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.

The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.

Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.

I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.

All-in-all, it's not really a retirement hobby. If you're really rich and can self-fund your graduate studies, then you can probably go to all types of schools and work in all sorts of labs. A self-funded rich student would be great for most labs. Many schools will accept all types of people, but if you're not getting an acceptance letter with an offer of funding, it's basically like a rejection letter.

I've heard of people in retirement becoming a student for the healthcare benefits some schools offer though. They maintain enough credits to have the right status so they aren't paying a boatload, but can still be on a student healthcare plan that gives great benefits.

While we all can agree to that, reducing the PhD to just the new MSc comments is a bit worrisome.

But then take a look at so many ML PhD theses and one can truly see this is the case. So much unregulated garbage on ICML, NeurIPS as well.

The later if you love working in a particular field and want a reasonably straightforward path to success.

I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.

Everyone wants the benefits of research but no one wants to pay for it, and slowly over the last three or four decades administrations have pushed researchers into these Faustian bargains that have led to the system have today. A lot of what we have is a pyramid scheme, but that pyramid scheme exists in part because people somewhere along the legislator-funder-administrative chain decided that is what would be rewarded. Once it started and was encouraged it snowballed.

All of it is made worse by governments that don't seem to understand the problems or implications of their decisions. Anti-immigration laws (not talking about the US here actually necessarily) hurts enrollment, which has downstream effects even though that immigration is bringing in net income. Yes, indirect costs are gamified sometimes, and there should be some accountability system put in place with researcher protections (the original point of tenure), but no, that doesn't mean just cutting indirect costs down to some unsustainable level that doesn't reflect real costs.

Also to be fair there's a lot of this gamification and false prestige that happens all over the US and world economy, we just don't like to admit it. I think it's one of the defining problems of our time probably.

Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.

In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).

Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).

I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.

I see this as being the same as

> the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.

Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position.

Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.

what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything

Did you ignore almost every other comment in this thread when you wrote this?

What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.

The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.

So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.

Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.

Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.

Also, circulating particularly weird dissertations for the express purpose of angering people has gotten a lot more rewarding