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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills.

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.

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People do a lot of quantitatively-irrational things for love.

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.

Not this anti-PhD negative nonsense again! It doesn't ring true to me at all.

> 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.

Where did you go to school that you were able to pay a mortgage and have a family while doing your phd? I'm paying a wee bit more than half my monthly salary on rent alone. Am in Bay Area though.

> Am in Bay Area though.

That's the problem. The housing market isn't literally insane in the whole country.

This. One of my graduate students just bought a house here, because the housing market isn't utterly disconnected from reality. Could they afford to live in the Bay Area? No.

Can I afford to live in the Bay Area? Also no.

The UK, but our base stipend is similar to the US. Internships and part-time research contracts can make up your income to a workable level, and that applies in the US as well. I didn't earn a lot, but it was enough to get on with life like a normal person. I didn't eat dried ramen like the stereotype.

Ahh the UK where health insurance coverage is much easier to attain...

Where in the UK? What field? There are several important details you are leaving out.

Manchester, programming languages. Not superstar machine learning or anything like that.

Hey, I did a PhD in the University of Liverpool some 12 years ago. I had a scolarship from my home country, but had a blast in my 3.6 years in the UK.

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.

I did my phd in Indiana and had $90k in student loans by the time I was finished (of course that includes my undergrad and masters degree). I was in the humanities though.

This. I have a feeling most of the people who complain about PhDs are those that started one just because they didn't know what else to do. They're not that intelligent, they don't care that much about doing research. But they do it anyways! In my opinion it should be a lot harder to get accepted to do a PhD, that should weed these people out better.

>If you're not in the top 0.1% of your field you shouldn't be doing a PhD in the first place.

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.

>If you're not in the top 0.1% of your field you shouldn't be doing a PhD in the first place.

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.

> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade

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...

> but I am not sure about other schools in Europe.

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.

UK had a couple of options in my day for STEM stuff. Basic research council stipend was an untaxed £13K per year and then it could be upped with industry funding to £18K. I know that the Wellcomme Trust had some cross discipline medical/engineering programs that went up to £24K. Decent money and graduated in 4 years

lolwat, first year summer students make that in Finland :D Generally speaking, no graduated Bachelors should accept anything under 1800€ from the school and for graduated Masters anything under 2100€ from the school is an insult (in the workforce the numbers are something like 2k€ for first year students and <3k is an insult for Masters).

PhD students definitely earn >=2k1 here.

This is false for Germany.

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.

I'm sure this varies across disciplines but a lot of PhD students in CS are hired to do their thesis as part of a research project. In these cases they get paid very decent salaries.

True and wrong at the same time for France. In STEM, that's true. But in humanities, one third of PhD student do not get any stipend.

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.

I had friends who did their PhD work in Switzerland, and they were making ~100K CHF a year.

This has been my experience as a CS Ph.D. student at a top US university as well--the pay is way less than industry, but it's enough to have a decent quality of life.

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.

>In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary, which is not a lot,

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.

> It's the median personal income

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.

I live in a high cost of living area, and starting salaries are usually around $100-140K.

Students in my program usually end up paying 40-60% of the base salary toward rent.

> In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary.

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.

We make double stipend during the summer, to try to somewhat offset the financial incentive to take a summer internship. I'm including this in the base rate--without, it's probably closer to $32K.

To my knowledge, in the Netherlands and Luxembourg there is a similar situation to the one you described in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

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.

Still, what I hear from some PhD students is that even with decent pay, it's not a great career. The chances of getting tenure are tiny, academic freedom isn't what it once was, and if you enter the job market, the PhD mostly cost a lot of time without adding a whole lot of value. Unless it's in Machine Learning, maybe.

I am not familiar with the situation in in other countries, but here there aren't many job opportunities for recent engineering/science graduates other than IT consultant. I've met people that took a PhD positions just because it was decent pay and less hours when compared with most junior and mid-level consultant jobs available.

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.

Really? My impression is that there's a permanent shortage of good programmers. Although my impression is that a big part of the reason is that Dutch companies are unwilling to raise the wages of programmers; that way they create their own shortage, of course.

But there is a shortage of good programmers. By engineering/scientists in my previous comment, I meant every kind of engineer and scientist.

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.

I dunno. I went back to my alma mater recently to drop my son of at a robotics summer program. I saw energy, ideas, new projects...as I scuttled back to an office doing the same lowbrow stuff I've been doing since graduation.

Engineering and Computer Science are a different ballgame because the industry aggressively siphons off the pipeline, but for most other fields it's a drought.

> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you.

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.

A couple notes:

"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.

There's no reason to go into academia unless you value it. There's no reason to be negative about it just because it looks like pretensiousness.

I friend of mine got a PhD in Electrical Engineering, which took him 7 or 8 years years. Right around his 30th birthday, I remember him saying that he'd been in school since he was 5. When I think of it that way, if my 20-something self could have been paid to delay entering the working world, I enjoyed school, and I was willing to be a professor's minion, getting a PhD would have been an extremely attractive option.

I just finished my PhD at the age of 28 from an unranked department and received several offers for tenure-track positions at R1 universities. Internships brought my annual income up to well above the national average.

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.

That is a very field-dependent experience, and probably unusual even in your field. In many STEM fields, there is essentially zero chance of obtaining a TT position directly after PhD.

> But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that.

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.

Nobody calls me doctor anything and I've only twice gone out of my way to point it out - both times with someone who was pissing me off.

Starting in your mid-30s, you can get a family, get a job, start making money and eventually get to the 2-3x. Sure, you'll be late to the party, but you'll make it. Moreover, it's going to be a looooong party. Does it really matter if you were there for N hours instead of N + 5?

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?

Well, to be fair, I had a kid when I was 22 and getting into grad school.

It's a good thing for him that I've only gotten good at math in the last couple of years.

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