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Why would they emerge with devastating debt if they were paid reasonably well all along? (I am with you on the other points)

• anotherhue 3y ago
  Postdocs tend to be paid poverty wages, so if they have student loans those won't have been paid. Additionally if they emerge at 30-something but on the lowest run of the career ladder they may never catch up. Obviously less of an issue if well paid, but well paid academia is kind of a contradiction.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    I think you are reading the past with the eyes of the present. "Student debt" was not a thing back in the 70's and 80's. Secondly, PARC researchers were not paid university postdoc-level salaries. They were paid quite well. I would guess that's still true.
    • linguae 3y ago
      I’m away from home right now so I can’t verify this, but if I remember correctly from reading Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC researchers were paid the equivalent of six figures when adjusted for inflation. When considering the much lower housing prices in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, this enabled many PARC researchers to purchase homes in Palo Alto and vicinity, though I do recall a passage from The Dream Machine about people moving from other parts of the US to the Bay Area dealing with higher housing costs even in the 1960s and 1970s. My mom grew up in Oakland in the 1960s and she told me she’s always heard of people complaining about the Bay Area’s high cost of living, especially in San Francisco.
      • AlbertCory 3y ago
        They were paid corporate salaries, not academic salaries. But yeah: Bay Area prices were always higher.