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Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills. You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the

Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills. You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only place that wants you is a state school in the middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. Once you start, you're now going to spend the next 4 years grinding and busting your ass to make sure you actually get tenure. Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you. But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that.

aswanson 8y ago
I dunno. I went back to my alma mater recently to drop my son of at a robotics summer program. I saw energy, ideas, new projects...as I scuttled back to an office doing the same lowbrow stuff I've been doing since graduation.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  Engineering and Computer Science are a different ballgame because the industry aggressively siphons off the pipeline, but for most other fields it's a drought.
navidfarhadi 8y ago
> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade Keep in mind that this is not necessarily true for schools in countries outside of the US. At my school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as a PhD student you are considered an employee of the school and you are paid a living wage with full benefits. The current salary starts at 28600 SEK/month and can reach up to 33500 SEK/month [1] which is definitely a living wage in Stockholm, especially considering that you can live in affordable student accommodation (as long as you have been on the waiting list for at least a year or so for a student dorm). Sure, you can definitely make more money working in the industry, but at least you will not be living in poverty while pursuing your PhD degree. As far as I know the public schools in Norway and Denmark operate very similarly to this, but I am not sure about other schools in Europe. [1] https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.527042 https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.52704...
- ethelward 8y ago
  > but I am not sure about other schools in Europe. For France and Germany, stipend/wages range roughly from 1200€ to 1800€/mont, so a bit over minimal wage, and definitely under what you could do in the private sector.
  - simonbarker87 8y ago
    UK had a couple of options in my day for STEM stuff. Basic research council stipend was an untaxed £13K per year and then it could be upped with industry funding to £18K. I know that the Wellcomme Trust had some cross discipline medical/engineering programs that went up to £24K. Decent money and graduated in 4 years
  - emilfihlman 8y ago
    lolwat, first year summer students make that in Finland :D Generally speaking, no graduated Bachelors should accept anything under 1800€ from the school and for graduated Masters anything under 2100€ from the school is an insult (in the workforce the numbers are something like 2k€ for first year students and <3k is an insult for Masters). PhD students definitely earn >=2k1 here.
  - foepys 8y ago
    This is false for Germany. A full-time position pays around 44.000€/year (varying a bit from state to state) which is ~3.650€/month. This goes up over time, up to around 56.500€/year. All of this is public information, TV-L 13 is the keyword to look for (TV-L stands for "Tarifvertrag der Länder", 13 is the group in which PhD students are typically placed by universities). Source in German: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ Table for salary per month in Euro (relevant row is E 13): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv-l-2018&matrix=1 http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv... If you don't get a full-time position, you get proportionally less, obviously. In theory if you only have a 50% position and only get 1.800€/month, you should be able to work somewhere else to make up for it. In reality, though, this isn't happening as the professors are tricking the system and are practically abusing the PhD students' dependency on the professor's good-will as he/she is the one who is deciding whether they graduate or not. So even even if a PhD student is only being paid for 20 hours of work a week (50%), they are still expected to work 40h or more. In non-STEM fields this is sadly happening all the time, sometimes to the extreme where 4 (or even more!) PhD students are being paid from the budget for a single full-time position. In Computer Science, however, I didn't meet a single PhD student that wasn't employed full-time.
ISL 8y ago
People do a lot of quantitatively-irrational things for love. Today, as an academic, I get to spend some of my time experimentally asking the universe how gravity works, some of my time working to detect hints of radioactivity in the atmosphere, and a bunch of my time working to help students learn how to make sense of, and thrive in, the world. P.S. Being Dr. So-and-so isn't worth it as a goal. The title means zero in my daily life (nor should it, almost all the time, IMHO). The skills and experience learned in the process of getting there, however, remain perpetually important. Those don't always come with a degree.
s-shellfish 8y ago
There's no reason to go into academia unless you value it. There's no reason to be negative about it just because it looks like pretensiousness.
chrisseaton 8y ago
Not this anti-PhD negative nonsense again! It doesn't ring true to me at all. > You live off a meager stipend for about a decade I paid a mortgage, supported a family, and built savings while doing my PhD with no issue. > and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. You don't appear on the job market like a newbie. By the time you graduate you should already be well-known enough in your field that you have a reputation, a track-record and several good options. My first job after my PhD was building my own team in industry. It's not like starting a new-grad job. > Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field If you're not in the top 0.1% of your field you shouldn't be doing a PhD in the first place. > you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you Why do you assume everyone wants to be in academia? I'm not even sure a majority go into a PhD wanting that. I never did. > Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers Working on a PhD is establishing yourself in your career. But with 1-1 mentorship and a lot of time and space to grow, work with a lot of different people, travel to meet the important people in the field, learn to talk and present your ideas. It's the best way to establish your career that there is. > have families You can build a family while doing a PhD just fine. I did. Do you think they bad PhD students from dating or something? I wasn't even a particularly good PhD student, or at a particularly prestigious institution, and I managed these things.
- raziel2701 8y ago
  Where did you go to school that you were able to pay a mortgage and have a family while doing your phd? I'm paying a wee bit more than half my monthly salary on rent alone. Am in Bay Area though.
  - thebooktocome 8y ago
    > Am in Bay Area though. That's the problem. The housing market isn't literally insane in the whole country.
    - Fomite 8y ago
      This. One of my graduate students just bought a house here, because the housing market isn't utterly disconnected from reality. Could they afford to live in the Bay Area? No. Can I afford to live in the Bay Area? Also no.
rifung 8y ago
> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you. People pay money to do what they enjoy all the time. People take classes, eat at fancy restaurants, go on vacations, etc. This is just a more extreme instance of that. I'd like to get a PhD one day even though I've worked in the industry. It has nothing to do with my "career". I just have topics I'd like to do research in because I find them fascinating. Also I feel like working in the industry makes me dumber. In my experience the percentage of people who seem super excited about their work is much higher in academia than in industry. This shouldn't really be a surprise since the proportion of people who stay in academia for money is much smaller than for industry. That said, there definitely are people who just didn't know what else to do, but there are those people in industry as well.
amorphid 8y ago
I friend of mine got a PhD in Electrical Engineering, which took him 7 or 8 years years. Right around his 30th birthday, I remember him saying that he'd been in school since he was 5. When I think of it that way, if my 20-something self could have been paid to delay entering the working world, I enjoyed school, and I was willing to be a professor's minion, getting a PhD would have been an extremely attractive option.
rflrob 8y ago
> But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that. I have told that I didn't spend 6 years getting a PhD to be called Doctor---if the title was what I cared about, med school would've been faster and easier than a PhD.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  Nobody calls me doctor anything and I've only twice gone out of my way to point it out - both times with someone who was pissing me off.
azhenley 8y ago
I just finished my PhD at the age of 28 from an unranked department and received several offers for tenure-track positions at R1 universities. Internships brought my annual income up to well above the national average. With my new position, my friends in software engineering without a PhD are making 5-30% more than me (in much more expensive areas) and don't have near as much freedom as I do to work on what I want. I'm definitely glad I went this route.
- bibixii929 8y ago
  That is a very field-dependent experience, and probably unusual even in your field. In many STEM fields, there is essentially zero chance of obtaining a TT position directly after PhD.
scarecrowbob 8y ago
Well, to be fair, I had a kid when I was 22 and getting into grad school. It's a good thing for him that I've only gotten good at math in the last couple of years.
axiom92 8y ago
Starting in your mid-30s, you can get a family, get a job, start making money and eventually get to the 2-3x. Sure, you'll be late to the party, but you'll make it. Moreover, it's going to be a looooong party. Does it really matter if you were there for N hours instead of N + 5? However, what happens if someone in their mid-30s who has been in the party for quite some time now wants to leave it and go back to school?
Fomite 8y ago
A couple notes: "You live off a meager stipend for about a decade" is not true for all students, especially under-represented minorities. I had a fascinating discussion with a student once where her 'meager stipend' was the best job anyone in her family had ever had. "Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you." A huge amount of my cohort ended up living where they wanted to live - I'm in a field with good representation in "non-academic" jobs in government and private industry, and plenty of people made the decision not to chase a job they wanted in exchange for quality of life decisions. "Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you." Knew plenty of people who started their families in graduate school. The opportunity cost is real though.

aswanson 8y ago

I dunno. I went back to my alma mater recently to drop my son of at a robotics summer program. I saw energy, ideas, new projects...as I scuttled back to an office doing the same lowbrow stuff I've been doing since graduation.

spamizbad 8y ago
Engineering and Computer Science are a different ballgame because the industry aggressively siphons off the pipeline, but for most other fields it's a drought.

navidfarhadi 8y ago

> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade Keep in mind that this is not necessarily true for schools in countries outside of the US. At my school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as a PhD student you are considered an employee of the school and you are paid a living wage with full benefits. The current salary starts at 28600 SEK/month and can reach up to 33500 SEK/month [1] which is definitely a living wage in Stockholm, especially considering that you can live in affordable student accommodation (as long as you have been on the waiting list for at least a year or so for a student dorm). Sure, you can definitely make more money working in the industry, but at least you will not be living in poverty while pursuing your PhD degree. As far as I know the public schools in Norway and Denmark operate very similarly to this, but I am not sure about other schools in Europe. [1] https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.527042 https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.52704...

ethelward 8y ago
> but I am not sure about other schools in Europe. For France and Germany, stipend/wages range roughly from 1200€ to 1800€/mont, so a bit over minimal wage, and definitely under what you could do in the private sector.
- simonbarker87 8y ago
  UK had a couple of options in my day for STEM stuff. Basic research council stipend was an untaxed £13K per year and then it could be upped with industry funding to £18K. I know that the Wellcomme Trust had some cross discipline medical/engineering programs that went up to £24K. Decent money and graduated in 4 years
- emilfihlman 8y ago
  lolwat, first year summer students make that in Finland :D Generally speaking, no graduated Bachelors should accept anything under 1800€ from the school and for graduated Masters anything under 2100€ from the school is an insult (in the workforce the numbers are something like 2k€ for first year students and <3k is an insult for Masters). PhD students definitely earn >=2k1 here.
- foepys 8y ago
  This is false for Germany. A full-time position pays around 44.000€/year (varying a bit from state to state) which is ~3.650€/month. This goes up over time, up to around 56.500€/year. All of this is public information, TV-L 13 is the keyword to look for (TV-L stands for "Tarifvertrag der Länder", 13 is the group in which PhD students are typically placed by universities). Source in German: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ Table for salary per month in Euro (relevant row is E 13): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv-l-2018&matrix=1 http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv... If you don't get a full-time position, you get proportionally less, obviously. In theory if you only have a 50% position and only get 1.800€/month, you should be able to work somewhere else to make up for it. In reality, though, this isn't happening as the professors are tricking the system and are practically abusing the PhD students' dependency on the professor's good-will as he/she is the one who is deciding whether they graduate or not. So even even if a PhD student is only being paid for 20 hours of work a week (50%), they are still expected to work 40h or more. In non-STEM fields this is sadly happening all the time, sometimes to the extreme where 4 (or even more!) PhD students are being paid from the budget for a single full-time position. In Computer Science, however, I didn't meet a single PhD student that wasn't employed full-time.

ISL 8y ago

People do a lot of quantitatively-irrational things for love. Today, as an academic, I get to spend some of my time experimentally asking the universe how gravity works, some of my time working to detect hints of radioactivity in the atmosphere, and a bunch of my time working to help students learn how to make sense of, and thrive in, the world. P.S. Being Dr. So-and-so isn't worth it as a goal. The title means zero in my daily life (nor should it, almost all the time, IMHO). The skills and experience learned in the process of getting there, however, remain perpetually important. Those don't always come with a degree.

s-shellfish 8y ago

There's no reason to go into academia unless you value it. There's no reason to be negative about it just because it looks like pretensiousness.

chrisseaton 8y ago

Not this anti-PhD negative nonsense again! It doesn't ring true to me at all. > You live off a meager stipend for about a decade I paid a mortgage, supported a family, and built savings while doing my PhD with no issue. > and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. You don't appear on the job market like a newbie. By the time you graduate you should already be well-known enough in your field that you have a reputation, a track-record and several good options. My first job after my PhD was building my own team in industry. It's not like starting a new-grad job. > Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field If you're not in the top 0.1% of your field you shouldn't be doing a PhD in the first place. > you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you Why do you assume everyone wants to be in academia? I'm not even sure a majority go into a PhD wanting that. I never did. > Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers Working on a PhD is establishing yourself in your career. But with 1-1 mentorship and a lot of time and space to grow, work with a lot of different people, travel to meet the important people in the field, learn to talk and present your ideas. It's the best way to establish your career that there is. > have families You can build a family while doing a PhD just fine. I did. Do you think they bad PhD students from dating or something? I wasn't even a particularly good PhD student, or at a particularly prestigious institution, and I managed these things.

raziel2701 8y ago
Where did you go to school that you were able to pay a mortgage and have a family while doing your phd? I'm paying a wee bit more than half my monthly salary on rent alone. Am in Bay Area though.
- thebooktocome 8y ago
  > Am in Bay Area though. That's the problem. The housing market isn't literally insane in the whole country.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    This. One of my graduate students just bought a house here, because the housing market isn't utterly disconnected from reality. Could they afford to live in the Bay Area? No. Can I afford to live in the Bay Area? Also no.

rifung 8y ago

> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you. People pay money to do what they enjoy all the time. People take classes, eat at fancy restaurants, go on vacations, etc. This is just a more extreme instance of that. I'd like to get a PhD one day even though I've worked in the industry. It has nothing to do with my "career". I just have topics I'd like to do research in because I find them fascinating. Also I feel like working in the industry makes me dumber. In my experience the percentage of people who seem super excited about their work is much higher in academia than in industry. This shouldn't really be a surprise since the proportion of people who stay in academia for money is much smaller than for industry. That said, there definitely are people who just didn't know what else to do, but there are those people in industry as well.

amorphid 8y ago

I friend of mine got a PhD in Electrical Engineering, which took him 7 or 8 years years. Right around his 30th birthday, I remember him saying that he'd been in school since he was 5. When I think of it that way, if my 20-something self could have been paid to delay entering the working world, I enjoyed school, and I was willing to be a professor's minion, getting a PhD would have been an extremely attractive option.

rflrob 8y ago

> But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that. I have told that I didn't spend 6 years getting a PhD to be called Doctor---if the title was what I cared about, med school would've been faster and easier than a PhD.

grigjd3 8y ago
Nobody calls me doctor anything and I've only twice gone out of my way to point it out - both times with someone who was pissing me off.

azhenley 8y ago

I just finished my PhD at the age of 28 from an unranked department and received several offers for tenure-track positions at R1 universities. Internships brought my annual income up to well above the national average. With my new position, my friends in software engineering without a PhD are making 5-30% more than me (in much more expensive areas) and don't have near as much freedom as I do to work on what I want. I'm definitely glad I went this route.

bibixii929 8y ago
That is a very field-dependent experience, and probably unusual even in your field. In many STEM fields, there is essentially zero chance of obtaining a TT position directly after PhD.

scarecrowbob 8y ago

Well, to be fair, I had a kid when I was 22 and getting into grad school. It's a good thing for him that I've only gotten good at math in the last couple of years.

axiom92 8y ago

Starting in your mid-30s, you can get a family, get a job, start making money and eventually get to the 2-3x. Sure, you'll be late to the party, but you'll make it. Moreover, it's going to be a looooong party. Does it really matter if you were there for N hours instead of N + 5? However, what happens if someone in their mid-30s who has been in the party for quite some time now wants to leave it and go back to school?

Fomite 8y ago

A couple notes: "You live off a meager stipend for about a decade" is not true for all students, especially under-represented minorities. I had a fascinating discussion with a student once where her 'meager stipend' was the best job anyone in her family had ever had. "Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you." A huge amount of my cohort ended up living where they wanted to live - I'm in a field with good representation in "non-academic" jobs in government and private industry, and plenty of people made the decision not to chase a job they wanted in exchange for quality of life decisions. "Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you." Knew plenty of people who started their families in graduate school. The opportunity cost is real though.