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Comment by magicsmoke | Hacker News Reader

Even then, depending on your speciality the economic return from a PhD is iffy since you're losing 5+ years of industry wages and experience.

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Few people pursuing PhDs are doing so to maximize earning potential.

Disregarding the mental toll of a PhD (one problem being that too many people want to be paid to think than there are available positions), I totally disagree with the parent poster's claim that graduate school is a rip-off. Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.

The argument you put forward doesn't make sense. It's not a ripoff to make close to minimum wage for a number of years (and possibly take on high levels of student loan debt), all to work in a field where there is an oversupply of labour that depresses wages?

Ok...

My experience is the work in academia is more interesting and intellectually stimulating than my high paying tech jobs. That would be one motivation to go the academia route instead of the tech route.

If you come out the other end of a PhD, then you have the opportunity for best of both worlds: high paying job to work on the problems you find intellectually stimulating.

Also, it is cliche, but doing a PhD does train a person in a way to think that you don't necessarily pick up in a normal job.

Yeah fair points. I was sick of studying by the time I graduated - I enjoyed my experience at University, but I wanted to get into the private sector (probably worth mentioning that I studied business at the undergrad level, so I think a lot of that 'postgrad research' in marketing for example is suspect at best).

Having a PhD is a bar raiser, it automatically disqualifies you from a lot of jobs that don’t have intellectually stimulating problems to work on. This is all fine and dandy if your area overlaps with a hot field, but not if it doesn’t (or is then but isn’t now). Right now, 95% of the CS industry jobs for PhDs are in AI.

The thinking advantage of a PhD is really valuable, its like an extended apprenticeship with your advisor. Also, it gives you time to look at things you find interesting (well, it should, sometimes not).

It's an economic ripoff, his oiubt is that people still want to do it, for reasons other than €€.

> Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.

I guess your mileage may vary. The best description I've heard about grad school is that it's a self induced neurosis. That was certainly my experience at the time I did it.

I did my Ph.D. to get access to the interesting work that I wanted to do. This work was / is actually less well paid than a standard CS career (in the UK this is IT contracting in the City of London/Finance sector - rapidly £600 a day, often much more). But, if I had done that I think I would probably have had to quit after 10 years, and I would probably have ended up doing something like teaching. This would arguably have been a social good (depending on how good a teacher I might have been) but in terms of pay back I think that the fact that I've managed more than 20 years and am still going is clearly a good bet financially. The seniority that I have in the industry now means that I am able to command good remuneration and the work is as interesting as ever, but more stressful!

Even though the college premiums might be declining, I don’t think your logic is supported by this article at all. The stats in this article show postgraduate degree holders earning 3x what non-graduates earn, and accumulating 5-10x the wealth.

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