For any young person contemplating a graduate program who is also interested in technology and science (ie HN reader), the only reason to do that is if you gain

For any young person contemplating a graduate program who is also interested in technology and science (ie HN reader), the only reason to do that is if you gain access to tools and materials and knowledge that are unavailable anywhere else. This means cutting-edge research labs in whatever discipline you're interested in, opportunities to travel abroad to other research centers, affiliations with National Labs or NASA's JPL, Stanford SLAC, etc. Also, they should be paying you enough to cover expenses and tuition, paying for it yourself or heaven forbid taking out more loans is not how it's supposed to work. Of course, you'll have to have put in the work and be at the top of your class to have much hope of getting such offers, plus get some good recommendations from your undergrad teachers, and have done a fair amount of technical work on an independent thesis or as a research lab assistant or some such. Also, you have to vet your prospective PI's lab very carefully to make sure they're not a fraudster or a manipulative sociopath. Not as uncommon a situation as you might expect. You also might just end up working as someone's underpaid lab tech for six years and while you get the PhD at the end of it, nobody will ever even cite your research and you'll probably regret the experience (in industry, you might have been into a six-figure salary and well on your way career-wise by that point, while learning more real-work skills at the same time). If you're doing it for vanity reasons or because it's expected best option is to bail on the whole thing and go get a job in industry, same if you find yourself in some crap lab run by a shyster PI. You can easily end up overworked, underpaid and with nothing much to show for it in the end.