Deprogramming From the Academic Cult | Hacker News Reader

Deprogramming From the Academic Cult

chronicle.com

9 points13ren5 comments

I find it funny that a PhD (modern European History) considers a 3 month consulting gig earning 12K "lucrative." That's only ~48K/year ... after taking inflation into account, I was making more without a bachelors.

Oddly, most of my friends pursuing graduate degrees in the hard sciences aren't too worried about job prospects. From what I understand, it's almost impossible for them to get a tenure track position at a decent university. But most do have the option of working in their field in industry or just becoming quants/traders in finance world.

I have a bachelor's degree in finance. I am currently working on a bachelor's degree in mathematics in preparation for a PhD in applied mathematics at, hopefully, either Princeton or MIT. My ultimate goal is to get a quant job. For certain types of PhD's, the job prospects continue to look very lucrative; financial mathematics is one of those areas.

The only examples given here are those of liberal arts degrees. Does this happen as much in engineering or the sciences?

To some extent. The big difference is this: if you leave the academic career path with a PhD in ancient history or medieval basket weaving, you're pretty darn-near unemployable and will probably wind up making $35K editing crummy manuscripts for a fourth-rate publishing house (or doing three months work in Moscow for $12,000 and calling it "lucrative"). But most of the folks I know who've left the academic career path with a PhD in physics have jumped straight into obscenely highly-paid jobs in finance, management consulting, etc.

This article is from 1999, but everything I've read recently suggests that the situation has only gotten worse. For a while I seriously considered getting a Ph.D. in philosophy or psychology, but various articles like this one convinced my of the insanity of that idea.

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