When I was a grad student in the mid 80s, we got the same basic news on our first day. We were still there on day 2 too. I think the idea that we were duped into attending grad school by inflated expectations of academic employment is something we fabricate in our own minds much later. A lot of just enjoyed studying science.

Not to discount your story, but weren't the financial implications of a PhD in the mid 80s and the mid 10s drastically different? If the benefits, the joy of learning and chance of getting a job, are the same but the costs, the massive amounts of debt you need in modern times, are much higher, but the number of PhD students is the same doesn't that mean something had to have changed? Maybe learning is more enjoyable now, which is certainly plausible with the internet, but maybe students are being liked to a higher rate?

Indeed, my parents put me through college, and I finished grad school with money in the bank thanks to the NSF.

At the time, the conventional wisdom was: Don't get a graduate degree unless somebody else is paying for it, or you are in a job that guarantees a salary bump for doing it. I don't think that's changed.

Unless you live in a high COL area where even NSF grant money isn’t enough.

The NSF grant money wasn't paid directly to students. The departments still set the pay scale, and had to deal with COL disparities like all employers do. And if your prof couldn't support you, then you didn't work for that prof, or you got a teaching assistantship.

At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students.

This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dropped out because their prof lost funding. In my view, the risk of not finishing at all is a bigger cost of graduate education than the pay scale.

Lol.. UCLA pays grad students 18k ish. Barely enough to survive. Yes not finishing is a real risk but it’s not true that students can generally survive on that without loans or savings. In other lower cost areas, they can. MIT, Columbia and other schools also have better financial packages / housing options.

I remember even in the 1980s, there were schools where the pay packages didn't look all that competitive. It's possible that there are grad students who have family support.

At least in STEM, tuition is practically free and PhD students are paid for their research work and teaching. There are even PhD student labor unions in most public and some private universities. (Whether the pay is good and whether unionizing makes sense are separate topics).

You will not get paid well as a PhD student, but there is no massive amount of debt involved either (and again, whether there are opportunity costs is a separate topic).

Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's.

I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.

I think you meant to imply that it was difficult to so, but you said "can't".

You absolutely can get a paid for ba and ma in the US. It isn't easy, but thousands do so.

Yes, but this is a problem unrelated to PhD programs (the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).

Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees). They did pay for books though...

> …(the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).

This didn't used to be the case, so, yes it is true to say it is unrelated to the PhD programs if you set aside what it takes for people to enter them in the first place and the decisions that have to be made by all actors (of which only the self has control over).

>Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees).

Yeah sure, my sister got a full ride for undergrad and for her masters and my cousin got a full ride for undergrad, but for every person like them, there are many more that even leveraging such knowledge of opportunities and trying to pursue them in earnest, doesn't net them opportunities.

It's laudable that the likely end results are presented so clearly and early. Have you ever done a survey immediately afterwards to see how many students goals align with the likely outcomes? It seems like if a student is in that position where they were very successful at being a student for the prior 16 years and succeeded at getting into your graduate school that they might think they are the 1 in 8 - maybe all eight of them for a given eight.

Is it? One way to recruit a certain kind of soldier is to build up the notion of “elite” and then ask, “are you up to it?” Young people often leap at that, and you can always say you told them it would be tough.

I don't know. It does seem that law schools don't do this based on the numerous post graduation interview/surveys, where if memory serves if one doesn't get admitted to a top 20 school or so one might want to rethink a legal education as one's avenue to financial success.

By the time of the induction lecture, won't most students be too invested already to be able to go back?

This is a fair question, but you should also keep in mind that there is no stigma to dropping out of a PhD program (if you do not mind the opportunity cost of preparing and applying it is not the worst way to "take a gap year").

Can you give some examples of what a neuroscience PhD end up doing that is not science? I hope those 66% don't cover Starbucks!

That is great and all but I would still classify this kind of behavior as predatory and taking advantage of the young.

Payday loan places are also pretty transparent about the situation.