I think the most important thing to know about PhDs is that you get paid to get them. Personally, I didn’t understand how people could afford to stay in school so long. I regularly tell Uber drivers this just to spread the PhD ambition.
In any case, whatever the downsides, I’d wager that the majority of people don’t know that you get paid to get phds. I don’t think that is misleading.
Ideally you're working on your own research project, not someone else's.
Is it even possible to get a medical or law degree for less than 100k these days without rare scholarships and grants? Even a shorter 12 quarter program still runs around $11k a quarter. And even then the school can’t be bothered to pay for basic supplies and equipment you’re required to get, nor for the thousand-dollar licensing exams. And they still expect to get paid for that one quarter you go offsite to do unpaid work for some other provider to get real-world experience.
What a racket. (It’s probably obviously I’m peeved about a specific case :p)
But law? That should be pretty cheap to provide. It doesn't change overly much and it is just books. You could probably video entire lecture series and just replay them... It is not like they need some sort of lab work with expensive equipment.
Trouble is, there has been an oversupply of lawyers. Salary distribution is bimodal, biglaw pays entirely different than smalltown law, and with a degree from a random backwater it's guaranteed that you'll never make it into biglaw. Those plans would have been an invitation for students to get into debt that they'd never be able to repay. (We are seeing a re-run, this time with pharmacy schools.)
Medicine is a cost center for universities, so medical degrees are expensive. But in a functioning society you need physicians, and no medical graduate with a choice will settle in rural Mississippi.
What I'm saying here is that education as a market is not a good model to have.
It's actually just a little under the median household income for the area, so theoretically it's doable even with kids, though that speaks more to the level of poverty in Philadelphia.
I've been in the industry for several years and made enough savings to cover my current lifestyle for a long time while also paying a significant stipent to a university.
Would it make sense to consider good PhDs where I wouldn't be able to get a salary, or are they always 100% scams?
- subject matches my interest,
- we seem to get along.
Okay, I'll probably also insist on a few practical things (sufficient time to keep some pace, awareness of what conference attendance costs, satisfies the institution's phd programme entry requirements, etc).
But other than that: sure!