Sure, it might make sense for a few. A very select few.
I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.
The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.
In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.
I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.
That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.
You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.
The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.
Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.
One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.
I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.
You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.
Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.
This makes sense to me from a range of perspectives. A simple example of this --too simple, yes-- is when I hired an EE out of Intel. I was looking for someone to take on a range of responsibilities. He claimed he could do what I needed. After hiring him I started to realize he had been "creative" in the profile he painted for me. It turns out he had only worked on power supplies at Intel. And by that I don't mean full product cycle. He designed them. On paper. Never even ordered a single part. Never laid out a PCB, etc. It was bad. I ended-up having to be "Professor Martin" and teaching him a bunch of stuff. Not a good outcome. Great guy, just didn't work out in the end.
In sharp contrast to this, I worked with people in the motion picture industry who were nothing less than amazing. One guy had a degree in music, he had studied to be an opera singer. He self-taught software and hardware development, mechanics and all kinds of other things. He ended-up building and owning on of the most well-known visual and special effects companies in Hollywood. The people he hired had similar eclectic backgrounds.
It was very interesting and revealing. This experience definitely opened my eyes and mind and, honestly, made me less of an elitist dick when hiring people. I could not care less what degrees someone brings through the door. I have learned this has no relationship whatsoever with creativity and raw job performance. What you are looking for is the ability to learn and what they have done in the last n years. That's it. A non-asshole who is driven to learn difficult things can run circles around almost any degree. Frankly, part of it might be that they have to in order to survive.
Of course, there are regulated industries where you have to hire degrees due to liability exposure. Medical is an simple example of this. Self driving cars might be another. If you sued and the lawyers discover critical staff doesn't have university degrees it could be a royal mess (or, at the very least, cost a ton more money to defend technical decisions).
In other words, there's an industry-dependent bias that might favor one or the other.
Lots of apathy and intentional malevolence creating friction in this regard. Knowledge is power.
With CA/NYC/CO/WA all requiring job listings to show pay range data, it should be a reasonable project to assign.
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Household_budgeting
But I just mean making a spreadsheet calculating income/expense/savings by year until you are age 100. Of course, assumptions have to be made about inflation, investment earnings, payrates, and benefits.
I think it’s best to think that (for the majority) our very moment of our life is contingent on the historical forces of the world, and there is no stable-enough historical tendency that we can exploit to calculate out our whole life trajectories.
The purpose is not to pinpoint whole life trajectories. Obviously predictions decades into the future are a crapshoot. But it does not cost anything to copy paste the formula down that many rows.
The purpose is to establish upper and lower bounds and adjust expectations properly. In the context of this thread, it does seem reasonable for a high schooler to be able to predict some spectrum of their quality of life if they were to pursue a PhD in <x> field.
Finding a partner, buying a home, having children, etc all happens within 10 to 20 years of high school. They can take their student loans, amortize them, and calculate if $70k/$100k/$120k/$250k per year will buy them the future they want. And they may decide that a PhD in whatever has too low of a probability of allowing them to achieve other goals they have, such as having kids or living in a certain region or owning a certain type of home.
And it goes beyond money. Kids should be taught to research or ask people what their day to day, month to month, year to year is like. A 16 year that wants to research medicine should get data from a 25/30/35 year old about what to expect, such as hours worked per week, vacation time, where the jobs are, job security, etc.
Anyways, I think planning decades into the future to get what you want with a spreadsheet is only possible from a petit-bourgeois "middle-class" standpoint. From David Graeber's paper "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" [0], he talks about what that mentality is:
> What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)
And guess what, that middle class is shrinking (since the things that welfare capitalism has promised are starting to not be true anymore, like if you work hard enough you can buy a house and start a family...) Many people in first-world countries have already been woken out from that fantasy.
[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4....
But I do not think Graeber's quote is applicable here. The exercise of planning future cash flow can help you increase the quality of the bets you place (and/or adjust your expectations). Singular choices have no guaranteed results, but the sum total of choices can be influenced by gathering information about the world and keeping your models updated, allowing you to make choices where the odds are more favorable to you.
out of several hundred or really thousands of years, its only been several short decades where everyone else was unobjectively convinced that academia was relevant for them, and now we are reverting to the mean
it is coincidence that jobs failed to find a way to sort job seekers except by gatekeeping with higher education. higher education did not adapt to this purpose, and doesn't need to and never will need to. the utility of the working class needing higher education will have more diminishing returns, whereas literacy will have less diminishing returns.
Or you could struggle, go through tons of stress, have no time to give to friends (and lose touch with friends), no time for a relationship, etc. etc.
Not to mention the financial opportunity cost
Personally I struggled, had tons of stress, no time for relationships, and all that. But it was also an intense time of personal development. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how to work hard and get stuff done.
I used to tell people that if you don’t regret starting your PhD when you’re halfway through, then you’re not doing it right. I’ve since moderated that stance - a lot - but there’s still something to be said for so-called “character building experiences” even though they suck at the time.
If anything, its shocking that someone does not realize that's just a part of growing up.
However I think where you go in industry matters a lot. Doing a PhD at a serious program is more like starting a startup than like writing CRUD apps at a megacorp. More like going to the SEAL teams than being a supply clerk.
But that's not unique to a PhD. That's growing up.
Opportunities to push yourself all the way to the limit don’t come around every day. Nor do a bunch of smart, experienced people who are willing to give you brutally honest feedback.