Bingo! It’s free country — you don’t like to be in academia, go somewhere else!

It is also a free market — you get paid how much you are worth.

Disclaimer: dropped out of PhD program many many years ago for this and other reasons. Don’t regret it for a second.

I don't regret leaving either.

I do wish that 24-year-old me had either enough wisdom (or perhaps, say, an ethical advisor) to skip getting into massive debt.

I don't agree that folks get paid what they are worth, but that's probably a deeper disagreement than warrants discussion on this forum.

Going in to academia is always on my mind because I would love to be on the cutting edge of research, but I can never justify leaving my job to work twice as hard and get paid 4x less.

It's a shame that you need to be rich to continue your education past a point, but it just doesn't make sense to keep going.

Industry left to China: https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i41/Chinese-chemistry-PhD-gr...

The only thing that the US is producing these days is student debt.