Several reasons. Firstly, it's a boys club up top-- a lot of PhD requirements are build around basically hazing rituals. It's designed to make you "prove" your

Several reasons. Firstly, it's a boys club up top-- a lot of PhD requirements are build around basically hazing rituals. It's designed to make you "prove" yourself-- instead of remembering the Frats founding members, we memorize moments of inertia and rotation matrices, but it's really the same thing, seeing as how I don't deal with those items on a daily basis at all, and a quick duckduckgo will give you more information than I ever could. Secondly, astronomy and astrophysics is arguably the least essential of the sciences, so our funding shrinks accordingly when economies crash (what do we really make, coffee books?). We don't make quantum cryptography, and we can't levitate objects... although we have some remarkably military grade trajectory maps for all your satellites... Thirdly I think it really is an attempt to make us work well past what any other industry would consider remotely acceptable. For a bit of insight into the situation, check this completely serious correspondence sent to an unnamed faculty which is now famous in the astrophysical community: http://jjcharfman.tumblr.com/post/33151387354/a-motivational-correspondance http://jjcharfman.tumblr.com/post/33151387354/a-motivational... I personally work with a 40 year old doctor, a leader in their field, who has not published a major paper in the last 3 years. They're being deported and are moving back in with their family if they can't get a job in the next month or so after having 2-to-3 3-month "pity" contracts. Of course this is just a hearsay example, not the norm, but it illustrates. Another thing to remember is that we basically cannot have real families-- our jobs frequently require us to change states or countries at the terminus of our postdocs, and our salaries are on the order of entry position BSc coders 50-80k usually depending on skill. The hotshots in the field get 5-year contracts. At age 30 a 5-year contract is pretty much the best you can possibly do.