The premise that Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be mainly training for academic careers is wrong, at least in technical/engineering fields. It is very common fo

The premise that Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be mainly training for academic careers is wrong, at least in technical/engineering fields. It is very common for people to enter e.g. CS or EE programs with no intention of pursuing an academic career, and instead planning to find an industry job afterwards. Indeed, there were some people I met in grad school that left well-paying jobs at (say) Microsoft with the intention of getting a Ph.D. and going back to industry to work on more interesting stuff. As far as I know, they usually succeeded. Does a Ph.D. increase your expected salary, if you get an industry job afterwards? Probably not enough to be worth it. Does it raise the level of problems you will be solving, and the quality of people you will be surrounded with? Absolutely.