Because who wants to be an assistant professor making $60k/yr or god forbid an adjunct making $30k/yr when you can work for a startup making $150k or FAANG making $400k or more?
In other words, what's the actual, practical need for a person (or a smaller nuclear family) in the US to actually earn $400k a year?
Similar to the US, university-employed PhDs definitely tend to make less than many industry professionals in my country as well. Then again, it is nonetheless a very acceptable standard of living. As civil servants, life is very stable (as compared to e.g. one-person companies), and they are by no means poor. Most importantly, though, a doctorate program will very probably train you into a better, more analytical thinker (I've seen very few examples of the contrary).
For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?
It really depends where in US. $60k/yr in NYC or SF or Seattle will be hard -- you'll need to get housemates to share the costs of housing. But $60k/yr is some small town in Vermont or Montana is comfortable in my guesstimate.
Does comfortable mean being able to find specialist doctors? Or even just enough doctors? Being able to eat a variety of fruits/vegetables year round? Constant supply of avocados? Being able to live near family? How secure is one's income, or how many possible buyers are there for what you are selling? How are the schools for one's kids? Will the school community be of acceptable quality?
Of course, these answers will vary person to person.
One thing to keep in mind is that you might $100k+ in student loan debt by the time you actually get your phd. So for that reason you go for the higher paying job.
The lowest salary offer I got on my faculty job search, with an apology re: salary bias against folks without clinical degrees, was half again what's quoted there.
There's certainly an argument to take a pay cut to do a PhD if you enjoy doing it.
The thing is - go ask real PhD students 2 years into their PhD whether they're enjoying themselves. Given the 50% drop-out rate, you can probably guess what the answers will be...
If you believe this is accurate 60k is doable, 30k is not.
I doubt you could do 38,169 without a roomate.
But yes, you make less as a professor than you do in industry.
Well first of all the front page of HN with tons of companies laying off massive amount of their workforce is one reason. Professors have insane job security.
Another reason is that professors only have to work 8 months of the year. Quoted figures for professor salaries are for 9 month contracts. Your quoted figures are too low by 2-3x. Only the smallest no-name colleges pay $60k, and there’s no point in being an adjunct in cs with so many instructor openings at top schools.
To make up the difference in salary, I’ve established my own consulting firm and I do tech consulting. So I have the best of both worlds: stable salaried employment and I’m my own boss.
Speaking of being my own boss, I really don’t have one. The chair isn’t really a supervisor, and while I have accountability, how I teach and what I do day to day is determined by me.
Work life balance is really nice. Some days I’ll go in at 11:00 and be done by 4. Today I won’t be going in at all and I’ll work from home for 30 minutes and be done for today.
The rest of the time I spend on “research”, which is just my open source passion project. Most hackers are trying to figure out how to work on their own open source project full time, this is how I’ve done it.
Before being a professor it was impossible to get people to contribute. Now I have dozens of students who make contributions, and every year there is a fresh group who wants to get involved.
Also I’ve got access to alternative funding sources not available to people who aren’t professors. Yes, you may have a 400k salary at FAANG, but I’ve got a $4M government grant that I use as fun money to buy my own hardware for my own flights of fancy. Literally whatever I want to do, not what some FAANG CEO like Musk or Zuckerberg wants me to do.
Anyway, I like it, and I’ll never these kinds of job perks are hard to put a price on.