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Comment by phillc73 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, however I think the main problem is the premise that all, or even the majority, of graduating PhD students wish to continue to work in academia.

It will be different across industries, but I work in a pharma R&D company of around 120 people. At a guess, around 40% of the entire staff (admin, management, scientists, technicians) are PhD graduates. They're working in industry and reasonably well paid.

The point is that a desire to secure senior academic positions, such as tenured professor, are not the only reasons people decide to pursue a PhD.

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By contrast I work in a field (experimental plasma physics) where there are relatively few industrial opportunities. For grad students in my field who wish to carry on working in science once they graduate, there are few options outside of academia.

But they would know that going in.

My parents are both PHDs in physics and professors etc, but I knew 15 years ago how hard it would be get a decent job in the field and didn’t pursue sciences.

So I don’t really have much sympathy for grad students who complain about having lack of opportunities.

Yes, because a 25 year old has the same maturity and life experience as a 40 year old (or similar age numbers). How dare the young make decisions that from the point of view of someone with much more experience looks silly?

Also, the assumption is faulty that brains are like computers and processing identical information using a non-diseased fully functioning brain should obviously give the same result regardless of age.

I don't think the average undergraduate has any idea of what is involved in postgraduate work or what working in academia actually involves.

They need to though. I wish it wasn’t the case, but largely it is in my opinion.

Do any career options give recent graduates a realistic idea of what is involved in working in that field?

I'm not sure that academia is any worse than a lot of other fields and it does, potentially, have a lot of advantages.

[e.g. I co-founded a startup with someone I met in academia]

In a crude sense, more career options swing the relationship in favor of the employees vs employers, so it can be used as a guideline for whether a career will be rewarding and fairly compensated.

I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)

Further, the incentives are misaligned. I wonder if we (USA) restored government funding for higher ed, would college programs be more honest about graduation rates and job placements.

When I was working in academia as a researcher it was all EU or UK Government funding and those incentives were just as misaligned.

I would say that when I started my PhD (aged 22) I didn't think about career prospects in the way I do now. I'm not complaining about my situation -- I love my job.

I suppose my point is that people know what the job market is like in abstract from the beginning, appreciating the actuality of it is something which requires more maturity than is present in many (most?) PhD applicants.

Agreed. The world is much harsher now and jobs in most industries are not secure, I didn’t want to sound harsh in my post (and it wasn’t directed at you in any way since it was clear from your post that you had something), but the reality is young students need to think carefully about their job prospects at an earlier stage than they did before.

> But they would know that going in.

If you go into a drug gang, you also know going in that conditions for the lower-rung "associates" are poor.

To be less flippant: While it's better that you at least know you're getting screwed, that doesn't make fair. It is justified and worthwhile to struggle to change the conditions of employment, even if you agreed to them and knew them going in.

Although one needs to be wary of sometimes employers dangling the prospects of a brighter future to extract more out of you.

Maybe I am just jaded :-)

"But they would know that going in."

Kind of.

Even most mature academics don't really have an idea of how industry really works, let alone 22 year olds.

Yes, on some crude level, but the materiality of what that means is hard to fathom.

I don’t disagree. It’s at a crude level and its obviously quite difficult when you are young and still haven’t fully formed a view of the world and the direction it’s headed in. But the signs were there — this is at least as far back as 2005 when I graduated. Even in the early 00s, it wasn’t an easy situation and my guess is from even before. Science has always been a difficult field to crack into.

I wonder if fields like physics are just to broad and we should be more specific? And that physics/biology/maths etc. will just become a precursor to other fields.

"of graduating PhD students wish to continue to work in academia"

I'd be interested in the number who think they want to work in academia at the start of their PhD and compare this with the number at the end - I certainly went completely off the idea, not so much because I thought getting a job would be difficult but that I really didn't like what academic research encourages.

Mind you a pyramidal "up or out" structure can be found in areas like law - relatively few lawyers will make partner or even want to take on what that involves.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I probably fall into this camp, as does a close friend of mine.

We actually talked about it recently and she mentioned there's a significant percentage of PhDs that don't continue into academia (something like a quarter or a half,can't remember the actual figure).

It's a serious enough issue that it's been nicknamed the "PhD brain drain".

Essentially, people burn out during the PhD and don't want to go back. Which is fair enough.

True - but isn't this mainly limited to the sciences? (genuine question)

No. I think all publishing disciplines seeking grants and tenure tend to the same outcome (not an academic, worked in university research and general staff many years ago in 3 UK and one Australian uni)

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