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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I’m surrounded by PhDs who love research, loved their time doing PhDs, and some of whom loved working at Microsoft Research. I work in computer graphics.

One good thing about a PhD is you get several years to explore a topic of interest to you in great depth. (As long has you have a decently good advisor.) Another good thing about a research PhD is that in addition to getting experience publishing papers, you go through the process of writing a book sized thesis, which is valuable experience in a lot of ways - skills transfer to publishing and reporting in any field.

On an intellectually superficial but economically important level, another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees. This is in the US at least, according to data published by the US Fed.

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another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees

This is bad statistics 101.

The confounding variable in a lot of these cases is wealth (or social class). Someone who grew up upper class and got their PhD is of course going to earn more than someone who grew up in a trailer park never graduated high school.

The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing but wasted time and a lifetime of debt that they can't discharge.

Oh this has been well studied. There’s a whole swath of papers teasing out the confounding variables, and wealth is not the only one. These papers estimate the correction factor one would need to assign a portion of causation to the degree, and a portion of causation to the inherited wealth, and basically nobody is claiming that wealth is the complete reason, and nearly all papers assign a healthy portion to the degree after controlling for wealth, for two reasons: one, because unsurprisingly 5 years spent studying actually results in learning a few things and gaining some skills that are useful to industry, and two, because industry relies on credentials, and people without PhDs cannot get research jobs, regardless of how good they are.

There’s no doubt in my mind that things are biased for the wealthy, none whatsoever. But consider patents - they have no degree requirement, and the number of patents granted to people with a bachelor’s degree or less is in the low single digit percent, it’s a landslide for people with formal research experience.

> The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing

What does “a lot” mean? Do you have a source for this claim that passes statistics 101?

This does not seem quite right to me. You do not need student loans for a PhD, rather you are paid (relatively poorly) while being a PhD student. And, anecdotally, most people in my PhD program were lower middle class, not upper class.

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