I entered an MS program, where my two advisors told me I could get a PhD in just 3 years, vs 2 years for the MS. I naively thought that sounded good. I didn't realize that my advisor took over 4 years to do it herself. Nor did I realize that she was drastically over-committing herself on time, and she dropped me as a student just 1 year later because she didn't have time. Just a blatantly misleading and false advising process, I wasted 2 years due to that.

The power your advisors wield over you is terrifying in graduate school. You are severely underpaid AND they have you over a barrel.

You could always say F it and get a job in the industry.

It's 1000 times better especially when your research is clearly not on the cutting edge and you end up comtemplating life choices because what you're doing are basically useless to the world, and you're only doing it because some funds decided to throw money on it.

At least that's how it is for people whose primary research method is coding, such an easy exit. The powerpoint making variety have it harder though.

> The power your advisors wield over you is terrifying in graduate school. You are severely underpaid AND they have you over a barrel.

I realize this isn't the case for everyone, and I realize my situation was odd, but... there's always a trump card: you can drop out. I get that for international students it's not always so simple (losing your student visa, having to go home) and can be a very hard choice.

My supervisor and my department occasionally tried to push for things that I believed were ridiculous, and the threat of dropping out seemed to work reasonably well to push back on that. My understanding is that a supervisor having a low completion rate is a black mark that can hurt them, especially if they're chasing tenure. I didn't pull this out like a petulant child stomping their feet when they didn't like their chores, but rather when things were getting stupid.

Tony: "This is totally unreasonable and the timeline doesn't work for me."

Supervisor: "This is how it must be. There's no other option."

Tony: "I could drop out and continue on with my life."

Supervisor: "Now wait a minute, let's see what we can do to make this work..."

". My understanding is that a supervisor having a low completion rate is a black mark that can hurt them, especially if they're chasing tenure."

Normally, during tenure decisions, the grad students and postdocs will be interviewed by the dean. If you work for a pre-tenure prof, and decide to leave, meet with the dean and let them know your concerns before dropping out. Make sure to include lots of physical documentation, such as emails requesting you to do inappropriate things.

Your supervisor can drop out too - they can change universities midstream.

Also very true! My #1 choice of supervisor was pleasantly honest about that. He wasn't tenured, and after we'd met a few times to talk about maybe me starting a program with him in the fall, he told me "I've got bad news. There's a pretty good chance that I'm going to lose my position here due to funding cuts, and that would leave you without a supervisor in 8 months. We're looking at a pretty niche field, and there isn't really anyone else who could take over for the project we're talking about. Sorry, you should look elsewhere."

I still look back and would have loved to do that research, but I appreciate his honesty.

You had honest ones. Mine tried to milk me right up to the moment they announced they were leaving - for institutions that only offered a Master's program or for a different field department and were stupid enough to think I wouldn't see the writing on the wall long before or figured I'd quit.

> I entered an MS program, where my two advisors told me I could get a PhD in just 3 years, vs 2 years for the MS.

In Germany PhD is almost always done after an MS and the PhD usually takes 4-6 years depending on the group.

> A PhD is effectively a hazing ritual required to break into academia.

Your definition is painfully on point.

And the perks of "getting into academia" are getting smaller with each day.

But hey, you get to have those 3 letters next to your name and probably can ask for a higher salary, that is if you don't go back into the academic machine and the hunger games of chasing grants/contracts and eventually tenure (but it is my impression funding a successful startup is easier than getting tenured today)

Your last impression, if true, would come as a great surprise to me. I would check but I'm literally in a Econ PhD class right now.

My professor with commercial experience said roughly the same thing: academia is harder and more competitive than the commercial world. Now I have experience of both, he was right. Your collegues have roles and help you in commercial world. Everyone is against each other in academia, and the admin staff know your just a temp so your problems are not worth the effort.

As a nuclear physicist who left academia for Disney once told me: "Academia... The competition is so intense because the stakes are so low..."

My brother-in-law is a tenure-track professor (though not tenured yet) in cancer research, I'm working on getting a startup funded. I would agree with that impression. There are more fundable startup markets than there are tenured positions available in academia, and you have more flexibility to pursue new ones that open up than you do to change your line of research if it doesn't pan out. Both professions require an enormous amount of work, but you have more control as a startup founder, and are less subject to the whims of politics, grants, and scientific reality. Hard science involves an amazing amount of risk and hard work to manage that risk, moreso than startups do.

The rewards for a successful startup are about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the rewards for tenure, too. The latter means that you have a job for life; the former means you don't need a job for life.

>There are more fundable startup markets than there are tenured positions available in academia

>The rewards for a successful startup are about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the rewards for tenure, too.

Massive [citation needed] on both these claims. "But my brother-in-law" is not evidence. It's not at all obvious that there are more startup markets than tenure positions. Also, founding a successful startup is largely a matter of luck, and being in the right place at the right time.

3/4 of academic positions are now non-tenured. When I left academia at the end of a 4-year post-doc in the late 90s, I more than tripled my salary in a day. These days, it would be more like ~10x. Without tenure, what possible reason does anyone have to stay in academia?

And for the first decade and a half it was great to make money, but also possess the grounding to build things collaboratively with academics. But then AI happened, and the market inefficiency that academia created for itself by making 3/4 of us make less than a high-school dropout with a trade skill caused tech to suck them all up like a sponge to feed the AI craze.

And these days, the same craptastic culture that drove me out of academia (pedigree, PhD (even though I have one but not from one of the 4 horsemen of AI or even one of the right schools so it's nearly worthless apparently), and the coveted "applied scientist" title which at least at AMZN means you get 15% higher comp to order both the scientists and engineers around because you convinced an L10 you were one whatever your actual qualifications are) are now status quo in tech. But I'm old now, and every day I am tempted to just throw in the towel and retire.

Commence those downvotes guys! None of what I just wrote could possibly be true in any way. Tech is clearly awesome and we just need to keep up the great work so we can hit that singularity sprint goal by 2030 or so to save Ray Kurzweil from squandering his hard-earned money on an Alexa-equipped toupee.

If you want data:

As of 2016, academic institutions hired 21,511 full-time, tenure-track professors [1]. Your odds of getting tenure given that you're in a tenure-track position vary by institution, but seem to range from about 75% at elite private institutions to 90% at state schools [2]. Figure about 18,000 professors were hired into positions that will eventually grant them tenure.

AngelList lists about 30,827 companies at the Seed or Series A/B/C stage [3]. Crunchbase has 33,577 funding rounds that occurred within 2016 [4]. The former stat has issues in that it includes funding rounds over a broad time period, and the latter potentially has issues with multiple funding rounds for the same company happening; however, given their general consistency and the existence of funded companies that do not appear in AngelList nor Crunchbase, 30,000 companies funded per year seems about right.

The average tenured professor salary varies heavily by field, but the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports it at $104820 [5], Glassdoor at $70385 [6], PayScale at $71993 [7], Indeed at $66921 [8]. There were 12,688 mergers & acquisitions in 2018 [9], the vast majority of which were for undisclosed amounts (companies do not have to disclose the transaction if it's for < $75M). Given the distribution of the ones that are disclosed, it's a good bet that most of those are for between $1M-20M (I've heard $1M/engineer as the going rate for aquihires, where the team succeeds in delivering a product but the product fails in the marketplace). This is still roughly 100x what the tenured professor makes though.

[1] https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20S...

[2] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/dont-worry-t...

[3] https://angel.co/companies?stage[]=Series+A&stage[]=Seed&sta...

[4] https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/a416e3bdb17...

[5] https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Much-Did-Professors-Ea...

[6] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/tenured-professor-salary-...

[7] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Tenure_Professor/Sa...

[8] https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Professor-Salaries

[9] https://www.statista.com/statistics/245977/number-of-munda-d...

Great, you've given us the numerator. Now you just need the denominator.

Not quite, the average startup probably has significantly more than 1 founder.

So, it’s clear more people get funding than tenure. However, difficultly really is a function of the success rate of each track and the amount of investment they make in it. Still, for the average collage freshman tenure is likely much harder.

You can't judge difficulty simply by the number of people who have obtained something. You need to know how many startups are seeking funding, and the number of people attempting a phd. That's the denominator I was referring to.

The average college freshman is not trying to get a phd. Picking a low starting point like that is just a way of making it appear more difficult than it is. The more appropriate number is the number of phd's attempted.

That's also the wrong denominator. The fact that a million unqualified people attempt startups because the barrier to entry is filing a $100 LLC online has no relevance on my particular chances of succeeding at a startup.

I didn't respond to your comment because the right denominator is going to depend on who is reading this thread. A Stanford CS major with a 2400 SAT whose parents successfully founded a tech startup is coming from a dramatically different pool than a data-entry drone with no college degree and no technical skills who figures that a weekend startup is his ticket to riches. The former's chances at both getting a funded startup and a tenure-track position are pretty good. The latter's chances are effectively zero. The latter falls into the pool of people who could conceivably "start" startups, but doesn't fall into the pool of people who attempt Ph.D programs.

You are not a lottery ticket.

Realistically, I think that tenured professorships and funded startups largely draw from the same pool of people and hence have the same denominators. That's why I focused more on the numerator. If you have the skills, dedication, and knowledge needed to become a tenured professor you usually (not always) have the skills, dedication, and knowledge needed to found a high-growth company, but there are more opportunities for the latter around, as well as fewer gatekeepers that can exclude you for arbitrary reasons.

The reason this behavior occurs is because people compromise themselves by jumping through hoops to get degrees. Meanwhile, universities have become fixated on producing credentials and nurturing their endowments rather than producing knowledge. Ponzi schemes fail when they run out of suckers. With the federal government giving hundreds of thousands in free money to round up new suckers it seems unlikely to fail anytime soon. Perhaps corporations will fill the void. I’m not hopeful.

My PhD adviser treated us well. He could be bluntly critical of our work ("Which of these conclusions do you actually believe?" became a catchphrase) but he treated us fine as people.

If you think a hazing ritual is required, as a kind of filter for who wants to be a professor most, you can set high standards for the work while still treating people with respect.