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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

Hot take - graduate school is frequently treated as a "backup" option when getting a job directly out of undergraduate appears difficult or unrealistic. This is a very damaging mindset, as the post-graduate options are not always much rosier than post-undergraduate, but comes with a likely mountain of debt and years of envy watching peers have multi-year head starts in their careers.

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This may be the case in computer science but is definitely not the case in science/philosophy. Not doing graduate school means effectively not doing science/philosophy. We sort of scoffed at everyone who dropped out at undergrad and thought they were obviously never serious about the field. I'm not saying the scoffing was correct, just that it was mystifying to us when someone actually good didn't go on to grad school.

Even in philosophy, it depends heavily on program and concentration. Universities are not consistent about which programs fall under the Philosophy Dept, and even if we look at "proper" philosophy at a highly-ranked university, there are some areas that are considerably less rigorous than others. I think you'll find more "Plan B" students there.

I could say a lot more on this and about the decline of academic philosophy, but you get my point.

I wanted to chime in that the same is often true of mental health fields. Most upper level jobs in the mental health field necessitate earning a graduate degree.

This may be true for lower-tier and middle-of-the-pack graduate programs but at the higher end, if anything, the opposite is true. There's an arms race among the candidates to get the best grades in the hardest classes, to get the best research experience, best letters of recommendations, perfect or near-perfect GRE scores and often GRE subject scores.

Getting a good job sounds almost blissfully easy in comparison.

A little nitpicking about GRE, it really doesn't seem to matter anymore. There is a wave of schools making it optional, and often outright banning it from submission.

Anecdotally, I have a near perfect-perfect GRE score (334/340, perfect score in quantitative), with at least avg position on other criteria (I think). I failed to get even interviews in many mid-tier US universities last year.

A member of my family got a "you know the only thing you can do with this is teach, right?" undergrad degree from a prestigious liberal arts school. And then she followed it up with a master's at a prestigious school. And now she's a teacher. Thankfully she didn't go into debt over it.

Yes, I know it's just an anecdote.

I had the opposite view -- graduate studies in math rarely result in tenure; industry is a nice fallback for mathematicians with programming chops.

It's a fallback in both directions.

If you were studying creative writing and planning to go into advertising, but you graduated during a big recession and no-one was hiring? A few years of grad school might be more fun than a few years working retail, especially if mom and dad will help pay for it.

If you've finished your PhD in STEM and it didn't inspire you to follow the long path to tenure? You might fall back to industry; with luck you'll make so much money it hardly counts as falling back.

If your goal is money, industry is a nice fallback. If your goal is purity of intellectual pursuit... offerings in industry can be rather dismal.

True - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback!

But your PhD won't just expose you to pure intellectual pursuits. You'll also see the downsides to academia. Pressure to publish or perish; anti-intellectual pressures to salami-slice your results, trade citations with friends and overstate the complexity of your work; the stilted language and awful writing of many papers; the need to go around cap in hand pursuing funding; the expectation to provide free labour to multinational publishing companies; the constant threat your competitors are fabricating or p-hacking results; and the risk you'll spend a decade 'paying your dues' in postdocs without ever earning tenure.

> True - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback!

Sadly, this is not really the case. The job supply doesn't come anywhere close to the demand of (incredibly smart and well qualified) graduates. The vast majority who choose to stay end up as sessional instructors, with little to no hope of attaining tenure. And with each passing year as a sessional instructor, your chance of becoming a "real" professor drops substantially.

Mathematicians don't get up to p-hacking, thankfully, and while some of your issues are present, you're missing a lot of the actual issues if you manage to get on a tenure track: time on committees, shitty department politics, whiny undergrads who don't want to be in the classes they've signed up for... yeah, there's a lot of problems. But, even with all that, I'd take it over a lot of the jobs I was qualified for before uni.

I pivoted a Physics undergrad into an accelerated CS masters and my employability spiked accordingly.

Really I only did the masters because I realized I should have done a CS undergrad but didn’t want to spend 4 more years and even more 10s of K.

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