The bachelor’s to Ph.D. STEM pipeline no longer leaks more women than men | Hacker News Reader

The bachelor’s to Ph.D. STEM pipeline no longer leaks more women than men

journal.frontiersin.org

98 pointstomp85 comments

I've discussed this in the past, but the basic reasoning here is that more and more people ("men" are singled out for this article but it's irrelevant) are leaving academia and not looking back, along with rising populations of people opting to not enter academia in the first place.

Science offers a shitty value proposition: spend your youth in the laboratory for poverty-wages, then your late youth doing the same for poor wages, then your middle age doing the same for poor wages, then maybe you become a professor and make average to decent wages. Sure, science is interesting, and for a certain kind of personality (mine, for instance) the bullshit can be tolerated, for a time. Some people can tolerate it forever because tolerating bullshit means they get to research something that is intensely interesting to them.

But everyone sees the writing on the wall-- science is not a path to a healthy middle class lifestyle for the current generation, and wasn't for the previous generation of scientists either. In fact, I reckon you'd have to go back to the boomers if you want to see people who really had a good thing going in the scientific establishment. There is no opportunity to "hit it out of the park" and somehow come back with a windfall.

I'd like to note agreement and support of this perspective. Personal anecdote to follow.

At a Top 60 World Ranked Research University, I have seen first-hand the students / Post-Docs dealing with a critical lack of jobs or opportunities within academic research. Not to belabor my overall vitriol toward the Boomer generation regarding their behaviors in the market (e.g. "Get all I can, screw those behind me"), but those who have 'made it' and are decision makers now have changed the dynamics to reflect more of a cut-throat, race-to-the-bottom labor pool perspective. That doesn't even factor in the 'IP creep' of interests outside of science trying to get a piece of the action these days.

The most telling example? A person working in a good lab (good publication record, pretty well funded) was a PhD Post Doc from the institution where they were working in the lab. Due to cutbacks, the Chair told the PI that costs needed to be cut, which meant 1 employee had to go elsewhere. Rather than suggest the last-hired employee be the one, the Chair pointed to the PhD Post Doc and said: "Just fire her and get an H1-B."

I trust my sources and do know the context of the conversation / lab's outlook. It was pretty stunning to me though. Go to great university, get PhD, put in effort and be on papers as a Post Doc, then kicked to the curb for an H1-B on a purely fiscal basis. That's some hot garbage right there. I'm glad to note that the Post Doc in this story has left bench science and is now a full time professor elsewhere, where she is appreciated much more. And, without hesitation, she steers talented science minds away from research as a career.

I call bullshit. Given how little a department actually spends on employees that report to PIs, it would be interesting to know how this happened! Further, H1B is not a zero-cost or low cost proposition for universities and departments, especially for short term appointments! He said she said can provoke discussions, but should also be viewed with skepticism! It might work for large companies because the upfront cost ($10k attorney, filing, etc.) amortizes over the several years the h1b is likely to be employed.

Well you can call bullshit but I have the math and you can't argue with it. The Post Doc was 1 year away from being promoted to Instructor, which meant they were at the upper bound of the Post Doc salary. Also, if the Post Doc was promoted to Instructor, they would become Faculty and would be unable to be shit-canned during a Reduction In Force (RIF) scenario. The Chair made all of this clear. So, if you're going to call me a liar, you can go pound sand because that's not how I roll.

Thanks to a little tool I found here on Hacker News, I was able to look up the number of H1-B Visa applications for this Top 60 Research University, and in one year alone, they applied for 70+ Post Doc H1-B Visas. Obviously they know how to pull it off.

Besides, everybody in science knows that students / Post Docs are expected to be like slave labor, and as many have pointed out, the conditions of the H1-B are extremely beneficial to the employer in the context of pressure to perform and retention. Skepticism is fine, but it's not bullshit. Your rebuttal is ineffectual and belongs in the circular file.

>but I have the math and you can't argue with it.

Where is "the math"?

You just reiterated your previous post with more vitriol.

Debating the validity someone's anecdote (when it is only incidentally relevant anyway) is not something to get hung up on.

I am not accusing you of lying. These are hardly facts to lie about and involve a lot of supposition. For instance, the chair may have made an offhand remark, but the faculty (especially if tenured) may or may not be beholden to the chair. No promotion anywhere is obligatory, so the postdoc could have been denied Instructorship for a hundred other reasons, etc. etc. Further if the postdoc was denied instructorship and another H1B was hired in their place, then it is just tantamount to eliminating the instructor position. It goes on and on.

For context, I'm assuming this is said tool

http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-database

For example Cornell appears to be quite familiar with the process

http://visadoor.com/companies/cornell-university

He probably misspoke and meant J-1, but the import is the same.

That sounds surprising as a post-doc will be paid significantly less than a staff member (which an H1-B implies.)

It seems like at least some universities use H1-B for some postdocs, eg [1]

I think it's worth adding that for higher ed, H1-B is uncapped.

[1] http://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1b...

This was pretty much the reason I didn't go to grad school, despite having a full ride. Seemed like a one-way ticket to misery and poverty, and I was kinda over that after working my way through college (having as many as 3 jobs at a time plus classes full-time).

No, you don't understand.

Science is its own reward. You're pushing forward the frontier of human knowledge! You should share everything you learn for free with the world, and just be happy that you left the world a better place than you found it.

Money is such a lesser reward anyway compared to the adulation scientists get. After all, history will remember the guy who discovered the capacitive touchscreen, not the one that made billions putting it into a phone.

The world would be a better place if we all had this thought process, but I could never have this perspective. Even when I first read your comment, my gut reaction was disgust. It took me a moment to reflect and even then I know I couldn't condition myself to think like this. I crave external approval and as much as scientists might think of themselves, the world at large see's you as a tool used by politicians and entrepreneurs.

Thanks for being able to have a healthy perspective and I hope you can convince more people to do the same.

I also am having hard time getting this perspective, but not for the love of money. On the contrary, being employed usually cuts down my effectiveness compared to doing the same task out of my own volition. In other words, I hate work, but I'll gladly do the same thing for free - if someone took care of bullshit concerns like having a warm meal and a decent place to sleep for myself and my younger siblings who are still in education. I believe lots of science-minded folks think the same - they'd love to do reasearch, but maybe they want to start a family, or maybe they have parents to support, or maybe they don't feel like being someone's slave labor.

I'm pretty sure his post was dripping with sarcasm.

I'd agree - I'd bet more people know the name Steve Jobs than Bill Buxton.

Er, he has posted elsewhere about advising his brother to take the money and go to Wall Street instead of doing science.

Personlly, I was disgusted as well (and I'm a scientist).

The monetary rewards need to increase, but here's another perspective regarding your comment on the world seeing scientists as tools.

Scientists discovered the elements, the atom, DNA, semiconductors, etc-- beyond money or fame, these were tangible huge advancements for mankind. To follow in those footsteps and stand on the shoulders of those giants is rewarding.

>as much as scientists might think of themselves, the world at large see's you as a tool used by politicians and entrepreneurs.

Just who the hell do you think we are?

That's exactly why academia sucks so much - since for the best scientists science is its own reward, people figured out they can skimp on monetary rewards.

Ironically, this sabotages science very much. Research works best when you can focus on your work and are free from dealing with bullshit like worrying whether you'll have enough money for your rent or groceries of health bills.

I understand how the forces of the market lead to this, but it still rubs me wrong - jobs seem to be rewarded inversely to their social value. ER personell and doctors saving people work three shifts and live on minimum wage. Soldiers risking their lives can barely get by (especially after they actually took the risk and didn't die). All that while celebrities earn millions for being nothing more than celebrities.

And don't get me wrong - I don't mind that a talking head earns in a week more than most in a year. I only wish the society could reward properly the people who are working their butts off to make a positive difference.

Yeah the incentives are totally screwed with regard to long-term incentives. Hence, PhD biochemists, material scientists, and physicists finding greater renumeration in Uber-driving than their academic field.

A few years ago I had a colleague leave academia to become a waiter at a not-even-trendy restaurant... that's a pretty exceptional example, but it illustrates the same concept you are getting at.

More presently, a different friend completed his PhD in physics, couldn't find a job, and now is working in software.

Research is its own reward to a substantial extent, but as well as (relatively) reducing salaries/job security/etc, there's also a lot more 'publish or perish' pressure, which IMO seriously screws with the pleasure of doing research. Good researchers don't like wasting time publishing tiny incremental improvements on their previous work, but they have to to stay in the game.

I can understand that in a competitive market for jobs, monetary rewards will go down, but it's a shame that the joy of the work is being broken down as well.

Yep. This is the same bullshit that some companies with open-source products try to shove down your throat.

Money? No, we have an even better reward - you'll have a great entry in your portfolio!

I think I'd rather take the billions than the place in history.

He was being sarcastic. Nobody (including me) knows who invented the capacitive touchscreen. Everyone knows who Steve Jobs is.

Apple and touchscreens is a bit of an outlier here. History remembers the following guys, but few know who made billions putting it into stuff:

1. Jack Kirby and IC

2. Bardeen, Shockley,and Brattain and semiconductors

3. Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura and blue leds

4. Boyle and Smith for CCD arrays

5. Townes, Pokhorov, and Basov for lasers

6. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for structure of DNA

It's besides the point that some of them weren't necessarily in academia.

You can find their names, their speeches, their books and papers in any library or in many places online. Whilst, who remembers CEOs of Intel (notable exceptions apart), or of the 10s of other important semiconductor IC companies, or of companies that made commercial 'laser' disc and cd drives, or biotech companies, etc.?

> who remembers CEOs of Intel

You're right. We should pity those poor CEOs of Intel who have nearly no recognition except for daily news articles and a single wikipedia page, leaving their wretched souls with merely their 8 figure annual salaries to comfort themselves.

Surely we can do something to get them what they really deserve? Won't someone please think of the Intel CEOs?

History remembers everyone. But the layperson has never heard of most of these folks. The choice between such low-level fame vs. billions in fortune (along with its own low-level fame) is, well, not a very evenly-matched one.

*Jack Kilby

Sorry, but until I did further searching, you had me believing that a comic book artist was also responsible for the development of the integrated circuit!

You forgot Franklin on point 6. She deserves more credit than Wilkins, anyway.

You don't do science for the money[0] nor for the adulation. You do it because solving real problems that nobody else has is exciting. There is some of that in industry too (I think?), but I imagine it's not the same environment.

[0] My social worker wife always reminds me that we are compensated well enough. Physics, at least, seems to pay better than e.g. biology (physics postdocs usually pay 50-60k nowadays while bio postdocs can be less than 40k).

The penchant for solving problems that nobody else has but are potentially massively socially useful is actually the entire reason science jobs are compensated so poorly.

You talk to many scientists (myself included) and they'll tell you they'd do the job for free because of how interesting it can be, provided that they were comfortable otherwise. This is well known by the suits, and so, wages trend in the direction of zero.

The problem appears when people aren't paid enough to fit their definition of comfortable. People in science are highly educated by default, and their definition of comfortable takes that into account. This is why people leave science and don't look back. They can be comfortable doing something else, and it only gets more appealing over time. In your 20s, slumming it is to be expected, but beyond that it starts to get awkward.

A postdocship worth 50-60k only happens after 5 years of school (making 18k-25k) working 12 hour days. Realistically for the social utility of science and the sheer effort and difficulty, science should pay 2-3x as much as it does-- but frankly, our society doesn't value science in the way that it did during the Cold War.

Grad school stipends have gone up, not down (was 34kish at MIT last year, although Cambridge is expensive). Public schools usually have smaller stipends. 12 hour days is a bit of an exaggeration too (although it happens sometimes). I get that other fields with similar experience pay more, but we're not exactly living on ramen...

speak for yourself (or for other top-10 schools) - i worshiped my rice cooker for filling my belly day in day out for 50c a pop. i got about $10k per year and even in the mid-90s that was !#@!@# all.

I couldn't tell you how invented the capacitive touch screen (probably several) and I'm an EE, but Steve Jobs made billions putting it in a phone.

I think that was rayiner's point.

Academics don't want to play entrepreneur. We don't want all the money. We want enough to do what we like doing.

I don't think it's necessarily the case that academic science is a shitty value proposition; it could work well if funding were increased (obviously) and the university science model was done away with in favor of something resembling the institute model:

1. Everyone should be able to call themselves a PI and get space if they can bring in grants, and everyone should be able to apply for all grants. You shouldn't be locked out of getting funding just because your employer hasn't given you an arbitrary title.

2. The faculty / student model should be done away with after the masters degree. PIs should be spending 100% of their time doing research (or raising money) and stop wasting time on tenure track nonsense. If you want to employ someone to do science under you as a grad student or post doc is now, then they should be paid a salary at least as large as what a technician would make in industry. There should also be no institute or government ceiling on salary, as people should be able to negotiate for whatever they are worth.

3. Salaries should be increased at the expense of overhead, which could be massively reduced outside of a university.

4. Investigators should own their IP. Institutes should have TLOs in place to help investigators monetize the IP for a percentage of ownership if they want.

The main issue with this model would be funding start up packages, which is a non-trivial problem which I haven't figured out a solution for yet. Perhaps these could be partially crowd funded? I would be interested in getting peoples' input.

If the research is publicly funded then the IP should be public in my opinion.

Fully in agreement. I think the answer to the PhD/postdoc glut should be more institutes. We still need the universities for teaching, and they are doing an outstanding job at that. I think of all the university systems in the world, American is perhaps the best. But unfortunately, institutes are more prevalent as a research model in Western Europe. More British and French researchers in my field are affiliated with institutes than American. Institute affiliation (INRIA,CNRS, private-endowed institutes in UK, Max Planck Institutes, etc.) is the norm in Europe, while it is an outlier in the US.

How are appointments handled in the institutes in Europe? Are investigators typically also affiliated with universities to get students, or is everyone working there a salaried employee of the institute?

The reason is more men are leaking. Unless you think this a good thing then this is not progress. We would not think we are making progress in equalising gender differences in life expectancy by bumping off little old ladies.

Why would "more PhDs" equate with "more progress"? Maybe the people purposefully avoid PhDs, because they don't consider them valuable enough?

I think that's true; many people do avoid Ph.D.s because they aren't a good investment. Whether or not that's progress depends on your goals: if you just care about more people having more money, then sure, more Ph.D.s doesn't equal more progress in the short run.

But at least in the US, there's a huge problem that the problems we have that can be solved are increasingly technical, requiring more and more education. Meanwhile, the incentives we're providing incentivize not getting more education. If we're going to continue the charade that capitalism is meritocratic, we need to align the incentives with the needs of our culture and economy, or the results will be disastrous.

>But at least in the US, there's a huge problem that the problems we have that can be solved are increasingly technical…

I would have to agree with this statement.

>…requiring more and more education.

I disagree with this statement if it means dealing with the BS that entails submitting oneself to the pipeline in order work on research.

>Meanwhile, the incentives we're providing incentivize not getting more education.

Oddly, I think this still holds true despite my disagreement with the above (if education == submitting oneself to the pipeline in order work on research).

For myself, I write software for mobile devices and eeg hardware for research and data analysis in a neuro lab and have to consult with other labs around the world who want to do experiments and don't have those capabilities in house, without having a degree of any sort. Occasionally this involves reading papers from topics like DSP, EM, comp geometry, and neuroimaging on top of software/hardware documentation for use in such software.

The post-docs and phd students I see are increasingly becoming inept when it comes to even conducting experiments and has lead to gross inefficiencies as more and more things require not only basic knowledge of computing and systems but other fields they are simply not exposed to on a practical degree. Even worse, there seems to be this expectation that they don't have to pursue/learn or do such things (probably because it wasn't covered in their syllabi and they wont receive a grade for it…), though I see a lot of superficial efforts at trying address such.

I think as long as the dynamics continue as they are in academia, they will allow for opportunity for those who have skills sans degrees (not signals of skills) to find work that is meaningful for them and possibly society… that will bought and paid for those who willingly submit themselves to the usual pipeline (at increasing expense).

> Meanwhile, the incentives we're providing incentivize not getting more education.

I think we need to be careful here. Education does not stop after you leave school, I think that idea more than anything is causing this rift in our educational system in the US.

Speaking from personal experience, I graduated with a degree in neuroscience, currently working as a software developer. In the three years since I graduated uni I have learned exponentially more than I ever did in undergrad, and its knowledge/experience that is actually pertinent to my career, interests.

I think degree inflation is a problem, I think our preconceived notions of "education" are a problem, and ultimately this one-size-fits-all, push them through an antiquated teaching model is absolutely the wrong approach, and the proof is in the pudding.

> If we're going to continue the charade that capitalism is meritocratic

Strawman, this is never the claim, the ideal for capitalism is not meritocracy, rather providing a platform for people to trade, labor for their own wants and needs and be able to attain them through their own volition. If the wants and needs of a traditional education are no longer in the mind's eye of our future scientists/engineers, then I think we ought to rethink our educational system altogether instead of reincentivizing a highly flawed system.

A potential solution to this problem is to offer other routes to becoming scientists, engineers of which we can point to examples over seas for insight. Germany, for example, has an extensive apprenticeship program that is sort of like co-ops here except the student gets paid to work on the job, and one doesn't have to go to a 4 year uni to get one.

> I graduated with a degree in neuroscience, currently working as a software developer. In the three years since I graduated uni I have learned exponentially more than I ever did in undergrad, and its knowledge/experience that is actually pertinent to my career, interests.

I'm not sure why this would be surprising to anyone and it certainly is not a criticism of the education system. You got a degree in a field and it didn't prepare you for work in a completely different field? Be still my heart! How can this be!!?

>> If we're going to continue the charade that capitalism is meritocratic

> Strawman, this is never the claim, the ideal for capitalism is not meritocracy

That's ridiculous. Meritocracy is definitely a claim that supporters of capitalism say is what makes capitalism better than the alternatives.

Yes, exactly: Maybe men irrationally pursued more PhDs than made sense, while women made more logical decisions all along, and men's lower rates reflect them improving their life choices.

Maybe both men and women irrationally pursued more PhDs than made sense, but the men were historically more likely granted the opportunity to find out for themselves why it was a bad idea ;-)

(I get your point though. "Just sayin'", as the phrase goes)

Aren't the "worthless" (market-wise) degrees (humanities, social "sciences", etc.) mostly women? Also, many men pursued CS even back when it's wasn't such a lucrative career. I'm not convinced that people choose their professions particularly rationally...

Well I did preface with unless…, but we are talking about the loss of people who start a STEM career and don’t finish. It is not an efficient use of resources to have people start a long career path and not finish. What has happened is more men are now dropping out so as a cohort they have the same chance of finishing as women.

As for why this is happening yes I agree with you that even men have figured out that the the whole STEM career path is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme designed to exploit idealistic young people. As someone who loves science this makes me so angry I can’t politely put it into words - by this I mean the running of science as a Ponzi scheme, not people realising this is the case.

How do you know it's not a sectoral shift away from STEM impacting both genders uniformly, coupled with successful efforts to correct for attrition among women?

As more women enter in and stay in a field, it becomes perceived as 'women's work' and men will abandon it.

Sure, that's a thing - but I'm pretty sure that STEM PhDs has not reached that point and so that phenomenon is probably irrelevant here.

I had a long discussion with my old supervisor last week about the merit of a PhD (in Biology, Physiology, Pharmaceutics and that genre of field) and she mentioned to me that she doesn't recommend students pursue them anymore.

It was a sad conversation but not surprising. So many students, myself included, invest such significant portions of their lives pursuing a level of education that statistically won't be useful for them or society.

There are no jobs available, funding is drying up and specifically theres an over supply of PhD qualified researchers out there. Thats not to say doing a PhD isn't a bad idea, but from an academic persective there are better alternatives. Especially in the biology field.

After the 7-10 years it takes to pursue a PhD one could become a clinical specialist, employed with arguably better working conditions and research prospects.

Is that really new ? The Biology teachers when I was at school were much better than those for other science subjects, the Biology ones had all done research but had gone into teaching as there were few other jobs available.

In most of european countries only fools will expect to do a PHD and get money out of it. it is common knowledge that you will gt a PHD, some prestige around it, some students will go private with luck if they work on some employable field such as a PHD thesis on machine learning for instance but most of the other PHDs will end up teachers which isnt the best pay ever in europe. and this is true for the real scientific PHDs. I am not talking about "PHDs" on gender studies, sociology or psychology which is a synonym for "please do not employ me my degree is useless". at the end it is really the subject of your PHD that will decide how much you will make. Even more than the outcome of your thesis...

The suggestion that a psychology, sociology or even gender studies PhD is useless reeks of ignorance. A serious body of academic work, no matter what It's field, is important for the advancement of our society, no matter how gradual.

The maxim that no one goes into a PhD to get rich is true, but at the same time, no one goes into a PhD to be unemployed or to become a teacher. Theres no reason to invest a decade doing primary research when an undergraduate with a masters in teaching will suffice.

I meant "employability" of the PHD is useless. and I do not agree with any body of academic work being 'important for the advancement of our society'. looking decades back and now i can guarantee you that a lot of bodies of academic work contributed to make our society regress rather than advance. Computer science is even one example of this, where litterally some guys spend two years of PHD to look where to put a "next button" on a UI.

I know many people that did a PHD on the sole basis to become a teacher as this was the best they could aim for in terms of pay/benefits.

Do you have the thesis or publications of their findings. I'd be interested to see what they discovered after two years.

I'd be interested in seeing a citation for that "next button" work, too. In general HCI is a serious (and useful) field.

And while I agree that there's high variability in quality of work, both between and within disciplines, I would argue that there have been mountains of really fundamentally useful things that have come out of CS academia (and EE / computer engineering academia to support it), both historically and recently. Everything from programming language theory and optimizing compilers, to modern computer architecture, to all of the fundamental algorithms and data structures, to the basis for modern machine learning and distributed systems and ... I could go on. Industry applies and polishes it, but (in my experience at least) there's simply no way that most of industry would tolerate the multi-year risky projects that lead to useful breakthroughs.

Are you seriously suggesting that psychology is not a pseudoscience, or that "gender studies" is something at all?

I think that you could do some perfectly good science in both fields.

Now, as to whether good science is being done in those fields, I'm not qualified to say.

Yeah, there's not many jobs in biology, and funding is pretty bad in the public sector. Biotech is a rocket ship in the early phase of blastoff, though. Jobs are still ultra-competitive to get, but there's plenty of cash to go around for the actual projects(since employees are plentiful and disposable).

Plenty of people in the biotech industry just have a bachelors. There's still some holdovers from academia who insist that PhDs have to be the ones making the science decisions, but it's still not as ossified as academia.

"making the science decisions"

If you want your tech (in biotech) to be novel, then yes you need people with experience who can imagine solutions to problems.

Proud STEM PhD drop out from MIT reporting in. Aside from a few who went into consulting or banking, I make way more as a code monkey than those who stayed to finish.

And if that's how you are measuring "success", then you obviously made the right choice for you.

Don't get me wrong, I left academia (albeit further on) and think there are lots of sensible reasons to leave.

However if the relatively low pay is either a) a surprise to you or b) a known problem for you when entering a PhD program - then you just didn't do your homework and probably shouldn't have entered the program. Of course sometimes it takes a while to work this out for yourself.

With a few very specific exceptions, entering a PhD program for the money is inept.

It's one thing to do your homework and another to be eat ramen when you are 25 years old.

not really -- ska point was that graduate school in STEM is transparently not about maximizing your salary potential. He is completely correct.

I went to a USNEWS top-25 undergraduate program, and had offers at consulting firms, ibanks and science phd programs. My top-10 USNEWS phd program was quite open about a 22k-30k salary for the duration of your phd. The substitution effect had I chosen another route (back of the envelope) was a few 100k in lost earnings.

No one does science (in particular, a phd) for the money, because these are smart, academically accomplished individuals who could find more profitable work elsewhere.

I mostly agree, but I interpret kelukelugames's comment as saying that it's one thing to do your homework and be aware of what you're getting yourself into, but it's quite another thing to actually be living on ramen in your mid- to late-twenties. That is to say, people--especially your typical 22 y.o. undergrad--probably often overestimate their willingness to fully live the life of a PhD/postdoc, regardless of how much they "aren't in it for the money".

Total lifetime earnings is a great way to measure success, from the perspective of how the 7 billion people on this planet, minus you, value your work. If you value your own work differently, that's fine, but yours will be the minority opinion.

Overall low career pay to work difficulty ratio in comparison to other fields is a clear signal for young people to not pursue that option as a career. Despite the trope about falling education standards, the young people entering college and choosing their concentrations are not entirely stupid. They know that they won't get a job in the art field with that degree in art history. But they also know they won't get a job in the biology field with a biology degree, so they might as well study whatever they like, to qualify for that tier of mediocre jobs that just requires any 4-year degree.

I elected to stop at the bachelor's degree, because I could already tell that continuing beyond that in academia was very obviously not worth it. It wasn't just diminishing returns. After considering the money value of time, it was a negative return.

I am astonished at the huge number of supposedly smart people who will continue to suffer from institutional maltreatment for decades, willingly and without complaint, because they have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that they are lucky to have the opportunity to be worked like dogs without external recognition or remuneration.

Just don't do it. Get a bachelor's degree and go to work. If you wanted to be a doctor or lawyer, be a nurse or paralegal instead. Trade up later, if you can earn enough by working to pay for the extra degree, and you like doing that kind of work. My personal opinion is that nobody should be trying to pursue advanced degrees without ever doing any work in the real world first. When academia has to get its candidates to come back from the real world, rather than sinking its hooks into naive and gullible fresh graduates, a lot of the obvious problems would fix themselves.

  Univ: Hey there, chief, how about you come back to school for a rewarding career in academia?
  Dude: I have a job now.  I can buy stuff like *actual* furniture and food with *nutrition and flavor*.
  Univ: No worries.  We'll give you a living stipend of $18000!
  Dude: That is literally less than what my neighbor gets on welfare.
  Univ: Does your neighbor get to work with prestigious professors on cutting edge research?
  Dude: No.  Is that what I'd be doing?
  Univ: Yes!  A little.  And also doing most of the grunt work for the undergrad classes.
  Dude: But after I finish, I would get to be one of those professors, right?
  Univ: Welllllll.... possibly.  You'd be an adjunct for a while.  Maybe forever. [0]
  Univ: It wouldn't be prestigious if we just hired everybody!
  Dude: But they get paid well?
  Univ: Our associate profs get paid a whopping $75000 per year!  Full profs get $95000! [1]
  Dude: So less than someone with a bachelor's degree in the right field [2], or public servants in certain places [3].
  Dude: And that's if I even get a tenure-track job in the first place.
  Univ: Discounted membership at the university athletic center?
  Dude: Get lost.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adju... [1] https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey... [2] http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/majors-th... [3] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm

   Total lifetime earnings is a great way to measure success, from the perspective of how the 7 billion people on this planet, minus you, value your work. If you value your own work differently, that's fine, but yours will be the minority opinion.

No, that approach largely misses the point. I agree with you about the problem of young people not knowing what they are getting into, and entirely agree that people should do other work before committing to a lot of education (the "real world" distinction is false). In fact the first advice I would give almost anyone considering graduate school is: do something else first.

But lifetime earnings is a terrible metric for success. It's a pretty good metric for what other people are willing to pay for your time, sure. And it absolutely is something you should think about in how you structure your life. And it absolutely is something a lot of young people do not think about enough.

Fundamentally, money is a tool that constrains the choices you have. For most people, acquiring it also constrains the choices you have. These things are unavoidably in some tension.

Most people I know would be happy to get paid more for what they are currently doing. Far fewer would be nearly as happy to get paid significantly more for the types of significant changes it would make in their lives, considering only the real options they actually have.

Most, if not all, of the people I know who are happiest with how things have worked out are not on track to anywhere near their maximum possible lifetime earnings. Several people I know who are near that track are miserable (not all, by any means).

The reason for this is that most people will have or can make the opportunity at some time in their lives to earn more money in exchange for things like: much more responsibility, much more stress, much less "free" time, much more travel, much less interesting or rewarding work, etc. The reason this comes up so often is that one of the the things the 7 billion people on this planet often are willing to pay your for is to do stuff that they would really rather not have to, things that are fairly objectively not much fun. If you can find fulfillment in it, all the power too you.

Trying to measure success this way ignores most of what is fundamentally important in a life. You're far better off looking at how you've managed to balance your own goals and your ability to make those happen.

It can be hard when you are twenty-two and trying to figure this stuff out, but one part of growing up is realizing that there isn't any universal yardstick or best path, and you have to work out your own path.

> The reason this comes up so often is that one of the the things the 7 billion people on this planet often are willing to pay your for is to do stuff that they would really rather not have to, things that are fairly objectively not much fun. If you can find fulfillment in it, all the power too you.

If you're evaluating career earning potential based on what other people hate to do, then you're misunderstanding supply and demand. If "how shitty a job is" correlated highly with "total lifetime earnings," then you'd see millionaire sewage maintenance technicians and pizza delivery guys.

On the other hand, wealth consistently correlates highly with happiness (up to a plateau point, usually).

Further, high lifetime earnings expand opportunity. I'm not even sure why this needs to be stated - to suggest that "money is a tool that constrains the choices you have" is so backwards as to be laughable.

Yeah, the "all jobs are drudge work" theory does not pass muster with me, either. Most jobs are the result of economic specialization. When everyone does the one thing that they are best at, and trade the fruits of their efforts, the whole economy is more productive.

The traditional example is a carpenter and electrician building houses. Now, the electrician is a genius, and he can actually frame a house faster than the carpenter. This is how long it takes them for each task, and wiring has to occur after the framing is completely done:

  Task       |Framing|Wiring|
  -----------+-------+------+
  Electrician|   44h |  24h |
  Carpenter  |   48h |  56h |
  -----------+-------+------+

If the Electrician built his own house, he finishes at 68h. If the Carpenter built his own, he gets done at 104h.

If they instead have the Carpenter do all the framing, and the Electrician do all the wiring, the first house is done at 72h, and the second is done at 120h. (If the Electrician helps to frame whenever not wiring, and the Carpenter helps to wire whenever not framing, completion time for each house is shorter at 47h and 75.5h, but that's outside the scope of this example.) The Electrician only had to do 48h of work instead of 68h, a savings of 20h, and the Carpenter only had to do 96h instead of 104h, a savings of 8h. Both benefited from the specialization, even though the Carpenter is actually slower at framing than the Electrician. They have an additional advantage in that they only need one complete set of tools rather than two. The Electrician takes the wiring tools, and the Carpenter takes the framing tools.

They are not refusing to do jobs they don't want to do. They are doing the jobs they are best at doing because it makes them more productive.

If you want to start or support a family, travel, pursue interesting hobbies, socialize with friends, experience local culture, or bump any of the metrics you may have for personal success, having money makes all of those things easier and less stressful. The stress from the acquisition of that money is usually less in magnitude than the advantage it imparts.

Most people stop working harder when doing so would detract from their overall enjoyment of life. Most.

As the Dickens quote from David Copperfield goes:

  Annual income twenty pounds,
  annual expenditure nineteen six,
  result happiness.
  Annual income twenty pounds,
  annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six,
  result misery.

When survival needs are largely commoditized, the more you earn in excess of your baseline, the more opportunity you have to make choices with whatever is left. If you like simple pleasures, low earnings are enough to make you happy. But many people measure success in part by how much they can provide for other people's needs in addition to their own. If you can get all your kids to graduate college without any of them needing loans, I think that's a big success. And you mostly need plain old money to do that. So you specialize in a job and earn money so that you can help everyone else specialize through trade.

If you can specialize in a skill in high demand that few other people are any good at (like engineering), you will almost automatically be successful.

   Yeah, the "all jobs are drudge work" theory does not pass muster with me

good thing that isn't what I suggested, then.

   "then you'd see millionaire sewage maintenance technicians and pizza delivery guys"

No, not at all - I wasn't suggesting anything quite so simple and I think any charitable reading would realize that.

What I'm suggesting is that for any individual skill set and current career X, there are often (almost always, in my experience) more lucrative but similar jobs available X' which are going to be more rewarding monetarily and less rewarding in other ways. Most people reach a point where the latter outweighs the former.

You completely mis-parsed "money is a tool that constrains the choices you have" is so backwards as to be laughable." - you are actually agreeing with me.

The amount of money you have access to constrains choices you have(or in your words, opportunities). The point is, it is hardly the only such constraint, and if you fail to consider the other ones, you largely miss the point.

Hmm. Some interesting data, but it doesn't really cover anything like the full "pipeline", which goes past the PhD to postdocs and then to faculty positions. And of course, that's only covering academic exits, while going into industry is another avenue, and there has been no analysis of whether the pipeline from bachelors to industry has been leaky in STEM fields.

Now, hitting a cap on the percentage of people entering the "pipeline" does mean that there's only so much effect that the "leaky pipeline" could have. The self-selection that happens even upon entering a bachelor's program is a pretty large factor, which needs to be studied; is it due to differences at the high school level? Difference in perceived job prospects, perhaps due to problems further down the pipeline like postdoc and tenure positions? Even if the pipeline is only getting a small percentage of women up front, it's possible that feedback from further down the line is what is causing that disparity.

Anyhow, it is good to have some concrete numbers on at least this portion of the pipeline, to inform where efforts should be spent. It sounds like the bachelors to PhD portion was fairly leaky in the past, so efforts to improve that have helped, but now effort would be better spent on looking at other aspects of the system.

Isn't it obvious that this is just supply and demand at work? There are now too many people chasing a career in academia, which is driving the price down.

Maybe in part, but that ignores the fact demand for academia has gone down what with all the cuts to science and education.

As a society, we value research and knowledge less and less.

http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/Agencies_4.jpg

Right, now measure on a per-capita basis or on the basis of percentage of GDP. At least it's adjusted for bloody inflation.

So more dollars are cuts if population or GDP grows faster?

Does the same principle apply to other quantities too? Let's try a fun one: atmospheric CO2 concentration. From 1980 to 2012, it grew roughly 17% [1]. During the same period, world population grew 57% [2], and gross world product grew 144% [3]. So atmospheric CO2 has been drastically cut? :P

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

[2] http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx

[3] http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/gdp/gdp_world.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com