why do you consider it wasted? spending 6 years learning some cool stuff seems like a good life to me.
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.
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.