The author of this piece didn't ignore this point, though. He commented on how even if you're in it for the intellectual gratification you're still very limited

The author of this piece didn't ignore this point, though. He commented on how even if you're in it for the intellectual gratification you're still very limited: > If I'm not going to grad school because of job opportunities, what other reasons are there? Pursuing my interests? As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy. If you aren't paid well, and you're not well respected, and there is no great job waiting for you at the end of the tunnel, and you can't even work on what you're most interested in, I can't really blame anybody for leaving.