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Comment by fungiblecog | Hacker News Reader

I’m guessing this just reflects the declining usefulness of a PhD in the modern world. I received one in 2001 and never used it because the prospects for an academic were terrible and they don’t seem to have improved since.

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This is also true of the Bachelors degree to a certain extent. With white males this is played out in the media as them lagging behind (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/white-males-fall-behind-s...) but I think its more of a trend of people realising the earning potential of jobs that don't require a degree e.g. plumbing, welding etc.

Which is a side effect of educated workers demanding higher wages. Trickle down is purposely built into the political economy.

Carmack was recently highlighted for saying it’s easier to educate a doer than motivate the educated.

Frankly that almost feels like a nice of way of saying less educated have questionable negotiating skills.

I can be busy collecting fractions of cents or lazy and earn more in an office doing data entry, not unstopping toilets.

History has shown us a whole lot of those “get er done” programmers and projects just made fragile messes we had to babysit later.

If we’re busy “doing” we aren’t negotiating social progress. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, just to persuade folks to move along.

Plenty of overengineered projects became fragile messes as well, it's hard. You need to actively break some subset of "best practices" on any given project.

only experience can save you from making a mess

There is also the fact that many of the traditional jobs that required a standard BS have become over saturated lower the pay for those jobs. While at the same time the push by public schools to send every child to univeristy meant skilled trades suffered from low talent pool driving up wages in those markets.

This is a re-balance, and honestly employers need to be look at their positions that traditional they want a degree for, middle management, some IT roles, and other "information worker" roles to take a hard look if those positions really do need a degree. I suspect no...

Further on that point, perhaps men don't require as much higher education to make a decent living, at least to start. As a woman, I got a degree because it was the only path I saw to be able to earn close to what my brothers were earning without one in blue collar jobs. As time has progressed however they have become less employable as the job market shifted around but my career has advanced. There was also motivators for me that my brothers didn't have; financial independence. A woman without an education was a lot more limited than a man. For you a PHD wasn't necessary but for a woman it might what is needed to work against gender bias.

You could have gotten on onlyfans and made more than all your current salaries combined. Women have blue collar work too. A stripper who saves her money will invariably become wealthy.

Sex work is still work. It's not enough or even necessary to be conventionally attractive. If you have to put in the work anyway, it might as well be something you want to do, and not everyone wants to do sex work.

Gay porn pays well too but I don't hear a lot of men fighting over that career choice.

This is, I think, a prescient observation. Most will take this factoid as anti-boy, which is also a problem as they are left to fend for themselves. But I suspect it also indicates the status of higher education will shift.

True but why does the fact that PhD's aren't as useful create a gender imbalance?

I'll take a stab at this:

The societal pressure placed on men to earn enough to be a provider or at least earn more than their partners causes men to assign a higher weight to ROI when evaluating pursuing higher education.

Anecdata: I have no degree, my company will pay for me to get anything up to the PhD level - I have little interest in this because I don't see it increasing my earning potential vs investing the same amount of time in progressing my career or looking for a new job.

EDIT: I have a second conjecture too now that I think of it - increased levels of education and career progression for women puts a sort of "floor" on whether getting an education is worth it all for some men since even after investing the effort they're at or below the income levels of their potential partners. I don't know enough about the effect income disparity has on partner selection to put much stock in this but maybe it's a thing?

>The societal pressure placed on men to earn enough to be a provider or at least earn more than their partners causes men to assign a higher weight to ROI when evaluating pursuing higher education.

It's biological to some degree. Female sexual selection prefers status, so any sort of signaling of status in society will encourage competition and put pressure to select for the ability to signal said traits. Sure it's 'society' that makes status == money, but I think any society that uses money will defer to that.

Due to various complex reasons, on average more men than women treat income as a strong "hygiene factor" and are more eager to abandon fields that are nice in other aspects but have weak pay in favor of less respected jobs with larger pay. For example, if some high-skill/high-education profession starts earning less than taxi drivers or construction workers, then a larger proportion of men than women would abandon that respected high-education career and start driving taxis or painting walls to ensure better pay, causing or increasing a gender imbalance in that job. So I would expect that the decision to abandon their studies just because PhDs become less useful for generating income would be (on average) somewhat correlated with gender.

I know two stay-at-home moms working on PhDs. If your family earns enough money it’s a way to be a stay-at-home parent (of sorts) without the giant resume gap. Or at least with a “justifiable” resume gap.

Depends on your field. If you have a CS related degree getting a tenure track position at a university in the US is not hard (if you're good), there are always openings. At my institution, we run a search every semester for multiple candidates, and can't attract enough good ones because they all get snatched up by big fat tech salaries.

While that is true it doesn’t -just- reflect that. There are similarly more female MDs graduated each year and MDs certainly have good job prospects.

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