Today, as an academic, I get to spend some of my time experimentally asking the universe how gravity works, some of my time working to detect hints of radioactivity in the atmosphere, and a bunch of my time working to help students learn how to make sense of, and thrive in, the world.
P.S. Being Dr. So-and-so isn't worth it as a goal. The title means zero in my daily life (nor should it, almost all the time, IMHO). The skills and experience learned in the process of getting there, however, remain perpetually important. Those don't always come with a degree.
> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade
I paid a mortgage, supported a family, and built savings while doing my PhD with no issue.
> and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time.
You don't appear on the job market like a newbie. By the time you graduate you should already be well-known enough in your field that you have a reputation, a track-record and several good options. My first job after my PhD was building my own team in industry. It's not like starting a new-grad job.
> Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field
If you're not in the top 0.1% of your field you shouldn't be doing a PhD in the first place.
> you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you
Why do you assume everyone wants to be in academia? I'm not even sure a majority go into a PhD wanting that. I never did.
> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers
Working on a PhD is establishing yourself in your career. But with 1-1 mentorship and a lot of time and space to grow, work with a lot of different people, travel to meet the important people in the field, learn to talk and present your ideas. It's the best way to establish your career that there is.
> have families
You can build a family while doing a PhD just fine. I did. Do you think they bad PhD students from dating or something?
I wasn't even a particularly good PhD student, or at a particularly prestigious institution, and I managed these things.
The OP means in the top 0.1% among PhD students in your field.
If you want to get a tenure-track position in a good department, then in many fields, you do have to be that good. (0.1% might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not that much.)
More generally, you should be aware that your post is very specific to the field you worked in. Computer science has a very well established PhD -> industry pipeline, and lots of money to throw at grad students. There are many disciplines where doing a PhD is a very different story.
That's the problem. The housing market isn't literally insane in the whole country.
Can I afford to live in the Bay Area? Also no.
Where in the UK? What field? There are several important details you are leaving out.
I remember seeing colleagues from the UK who got a good stipend. I think in general in the UK doing a PHD was good at that time, specially because it usually lasts only 3 years.
Nevertheless, after spending other 4 years in academia, I turned to Industry and would never go back. Academia is broken at this point in time.
Oh come on. I'm doing a PhD right now, but it's simply unrealistic to ask everyone admitted to the program to delude themselves into thinking they're in the top 0.1% of those admitted to the program.
Keep in mind that this is not necessarily true for schools in countries outside of the US. At my school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as a PhD student you are considered an employee of the school and you are paid a living wage with full benefits. The current salary starts at 28600 SEK/month and can reach up to 33500 SEK/month [1] which is definitely a living wage in Stockholm, especially considering that you can live in affordable student accommodation (as long as you have been on the waiting list for at least a year or so for a student dorm). Sure, you can definitely make more money working in the industry, but at least you will not be living in poverty while pursuing your PhD degree.
As far as I know the public schools in Norway and Denmark operate very similarly to this, but I am not sure about other schools in Europe.
[1] https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.52704...
In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary, which is not a lot, but enough to get by with. Add a summer internship to this, and your income is not too shabby--I made about $70K this year.
Now, of course, I realize this is half or less of what students would be making in industry. But it's enough that quality of life is pretty decent.
Erm. It's the median personal income and more than like 61% of the country's population makes. More than I make after 12 years on the job.
But below median for a college graduate, much less one with an undergraduate degree in CS or another high-demand technical field, and way below median (and quite possibly poverty level) for some of the local areas where big-name CS graduate programs are located.
Students in my program usually end up paying 40-60% of the base salary toward rent.
That's incredibly high as a base rate! Most departments I know pay between $28k and $32k. The only people I know at $40k have an NSF fellowship.
For France and Germany, stipend/wages range roughly from 1200€ to 1800€/mont, so a bit over minimal wage, and definitely under what you could do in the private sector.
A full-time position pays around 44.000€/year (varying a bit from state to state) which is ~3.650€/month. This goes up over time, up to around 56.500€/year. All of this is public information, TV-L 13 is the keyword to look for (TV-L stands for "Tarifvertrag der Länder", 13 is the group in which PhD students are typically placed by universities). Source in German: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ Table for salary per month in Euro (relevant row is E 13): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv...
If you don't get a full-time position, you get proportionally less, obviously. In theory if you only have a 50% position and only get 1.800€/month, you should be able to work somewhere else to make up for it. In reality, though, this isn't happening as the professors are tricking the system and are practically abusing the PhD students' dependency on the professor's good-will as he/she is the one who is deciding whether they graduate or not. So even even if a PhD student is only being paid for 20 hours of work a week (50%), they are still expected to work 40h or more.
In non-STEM fields this is sadly happening all the time, sometimes to the extreme where 4 (or even more!) PhD students are being paid from the budget for a single full-time position. In Computer Science, however, I didn't meet a single PhD student that wasn't employed full-time.
Also, that's not so much under what you would do in the private sector. In 'industry', you don't so often start over 1800€/month with a master, even less so in humanities. I mean, it is not rare to start with more, but something like half of people will get less, and the other half won't get much more.
PhD students definitely earn >=2k1 here.
In Portugal you get a fellowship that covers tuition and a monthly stipend which was increased for the first time in 15 years (by 1.4%) last year. PhD fellows are not considered employees of the University and since the stipend is not really a salary you are stuck in a weird financial situation.
Despite all this, it is enough to live (around 1000 Eur) in most of the country except for the capital (due to house/rent prices have been increasing for the past 2 years at galloping rate), which is where a great number PhD granting institutions are located.
Not to pile up, I've also discovered that you can be granted a PhD fellowship for a project at an host institution that is under equipped (if has any equipment at all) for that project.
In terms of adding value, I guess it depends on both the field and what your objectives are. For example, I work in a field where no one would offer you a job unless you have PhD or some sort insane amount of experience.
From my experience, IT companies only differentiate CS, electric engineers and computer engineers for entry/junior level it jobs from the rest of the engineering and scientist. Biochemists, civil engineers, physicists, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, etc. Are all the same for the HR and assume you have 0 coding skills.
People pay money to do what they enjoy all the time. People take classes, eat at fancy restaurants, go on vacations, etc. This is just a more extreme instance of that.
I'd like to get a PhD one day even though I've worked in the industry. It has nothing to do with my "career". I just have topics I'd like to do research in because I find them fascinating. Also I feel like working in the industry makes me dumber.
In my experience the percentage of people who seem super excited about their work is much higher in academia than in industry. This shouldn't really be a surprise since the proportion of people who stay in academia for money is much smaller than for industry. That said, there definitely are people who just didn't know what else to do, but there are those people in industry as well.
"You live off a meager stipend for about a decade" is not true for all students, especially under-represented minorities. I had a fascinating discussion with a student once where her 'meager stipend' was the best job anyone in her family had ever had.
"Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you." A huge amount of my cohort ended up living where they wanted to live - I'm in a field with good representation in "non-academic" jobs in government and private industry, and plenty of people made the decision not to chase a job they wanted in exchange for quality of life decisions.
"Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you." Knew plenty of people who started their families in graduate school. The opportunity cost is real though.
With my new position, my friends in software engineering without a PhD are making 5-30% more than me (in much more expensive areas) and don't have near as much freedom as I do to work on what I want.
I'm definitely glad I went this route.
I have told that I didn't spend 6 years getting a PhD to be called Doctor---if the title was what I cared about, med school would've been faster and easier than a PhD.
However, what happens if someone in their mid-30s who has been in the party for quite some time now wants to leave it and go back to school?
It's a good thing for him that I've only gotten good at math in the last couple of years.
You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only place that wants you is a state school in the middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. Once you start, you're now going to spend the next 4 years grinding and busting your ass to make sure you actually get tenure.
Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you.
But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that.