There's another side to this that isn't discussed and that is - at least for me - the easier and more lucrative path was to take my bachelor's degree in physics and get a corporate job.

My GRE / GPA wasn't going to get me into Princeton anyway.

But the road to a PhD in Physics in 1994 was basically 1) Probably 8 years of study + teaching assistant work and 2) a quality dissertation.

That gets you in the CV pile for the next phase.

The actual career of being a physicist includes 1) multi-year post-doc(s); 2) University job, which would have been associate professor then, adjunct professor now; 3) "Publish or perish"; 4) Hustling grants; 5) Managing TAs and RAs.

For peanuts (unless those grants are fat money) compared to a corporate job.

For foreigners, the difference between academia / corporate work probably isn't as stark economically.