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Comment by _RPL5_ | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm most of the above :)

Specifically, let's talk about "cost." I did a biology PhD at a respected school in a low COL area. The annual stipend, when I graduated in 2019, was around $31k. It was enough to afford basic necessities (rent, food, car) with a few hundred dollars to spare. Obviously, not enough to start a family, but I wasn't subsisting on ramen noodles either. Plus, the work I did as a researcher is something I can put on my resume as actual work experience.

Stories like the above, about people going into massive debt for graduate degrees, send chills down my spine. I can't imagine the cost/benefit calculus that steers people onto that path.

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My school's CS grad students [0] currently get a net stipend of $17,664/academic year ($19,188 stipend minus $1,524 in mandatory fees) if they are either a teaching or research assistant. In my college town, that's a tight budget but doable with a bit of effort

However, given the state of even the CS intern job market, there's an interesting possibility where grad students could pretty easily make more in the course of a 10-15 week summer internship than they make over the course of an entire academic year (not counting the value of the tuition remission).

[0]: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/graduate/financial_support/assista...

That's what I was paid in a high cost of living area. It taught me a lot about being broke and all the different types of leverage. E.g. if you can rent the 2bdrm in your name and then rent out a room you get more leverage. Too be honest I couldn't make the salary work and had to fund via credit cards and student loans as well.

I thought it was a scam that the university paid so low... that and their anti union activities.

If they did a cost/benefit calculus, they wouldn't be on that path (or that field, most likely). I have to remind myself that most people don't think like I do. There's a confirmation bias, where I'm surrounded by people who do - build mental models, analyzed them, then play what-if. My goal is to understand; for others, it's to experience, or to connect socially.

That's a rather dismissive attitude; it's perfectly possible to think analytically and prize understanding without specifically wanting to get a STEM PhD.

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