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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

The quoted line is a good point, but your take on it is completely wrong, I believe. The main point in college is to get a degree. You don't spend approximately $150,000 in order to "not have regrets later on". You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within.

Don't forget that PhD student in most departments get paid a stipend; they aren't accruing debt during their graduate career.

(For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)

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"You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within."

I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity. Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market.

I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we base our research on what the economy needs.

Yup ... money isn't everything (for everyone). I knew at least two people in grad school who had sold their startups for decent but not exorbitant paydays and then had come to grad school for personal satisfaction and other non-monetary reasons.

Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job. The same should be true about school as well as Uni.

I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I thought I would make a lot of money.

Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from perceived practical value.

>Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job.

I couldn't agree with you more, but unfortunately I didn't feel this way as an undergrad. While I did enjoy the field of engineering, I was ready to be a "big boy" and start chipping away at my student loans with a real income. Soon after starting my job I was blown away by the level of knowledge of my co-workers and it motivated me to push myself to learn more...about anything! I didn't come from a CS background so I didn't know much about programming or hacking, but I was always fascinated with electronics and technology so I decided to learn how to program. I didn't want to feel like a one trick pony. If I could do undergrad all over again I would have taken more classes that were far out of my realm, possibly even a dual major. I feel like I'm playing catch up, but I'm glad I realized it while I'm only a year out of college and not half-way through my career.

I agree. The problem is that the price of college is so high now that you'll be financially ruined if you get a degree that doesn't increase your income. That, and the fact that most non-college-required jobs pay so little, if you're going to have a reasonable lifestyle, you need a career-focused degree.

I concur, though it's important to note the STEM bias in statements like "[most PhD Students] get paid a stipend". I can assure you my friend studying the history of Eastern European Political-Economic Thought is not receiving a stipend.

Further, for a large fraction of STEM PhD students the stipend only slightly dulls the loss from opportunity cost. A PhD-worthy CS undergraduate in particular is looking at 60-100k/year starting income plus raises in industry vs 20-25k/year PhD stipend. Over five years that's easily around 150k foregone post-tax (assuming for accounting purposes that the increased income would not translate to increased consumption).

It certainly is easier to get a stipend for a PhD in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean they don't exist outside of it. I have several friends doing PhDs right now in subjects including English and Philosophy who are getting full stipends. Furthermore, I had a professor in college who told me (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, so take it with a grain of salt) that an unfunded PhD probably wasn't one worth doing...

Any decent humanities program will fully fund its PhD students. In exchange, those students are tasked with teaching a majority of the courses in a given term (composition, first- and second-year languages, etc.). Or, if they aren't teaching their own courses, they're doing the grunt work for the larger lectures.

I have no specific information on the humanities side aside from anecdotes and personal experience, so I'd be interested if you could elaborate. Is it perhaps possible that most of the students that are accepted are fully funded, but that there are far fewer positions and so de facto there are far fewer opportunities for humanities students? Also, my specific example of a friend in Eastern European Political Economic Thought was at an Ivy League school, where he has a tuition waiver but no stipend (so one could call that "fully funded, but unpaid").

Just to elaborate on my limited view of the funding landscape, in STEM disciplines I can name 5-10 major public funding organizations easily (NSF, DARPA, DOE, ONR, AFOSR, NASA, ARL, DHS off the top of my head). My uninformed guess is that there are not nearly as many organizations for humanities, and that they are not nearly as well funded, but that's just based on my hypothesized motivations for the funding (military industrial complex, communists/terrorists/whateverists etc.).

If you have any light to shed on the subject, I'd be interested :-)

Sorry for not seeing this before!

To the first part of your question: You're absolutely correct, good humanities PhD programs typically admit only 10-15 students per year, all of them fully funded. My question about your friend would be what program was he in (schools in themselves aren't indicative of much)? It sounds like it might be a niche program. I'd be stunned if an Ivy had unfunded PhDs in English, History, Philosophy, etc.

The thing about humanities programs is that they're funded de facto because graduate students do most of the teaching. If you look at the class schedule for a given term, for example, you're likely to see more basic writing classes than all other English classes combined (or math classes, or...). This is because writing is the only class in the US system that virtually every college student will have to take. The result is ample funding for humanities PhDs and, in many cases, MAs.

Don't get me wrong, though. Humanities PhDs face a whole host of other problems later on, like poor job prospects, mediocre pay, and politicking like you thought only existed in the Dune novels!

You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within.

Not for me. I could have probably made just as much money by now had I left with a Master's in CS back in 2005. I got a PhD because I thought research was more fun than straight development, and a PhD is the research merit badge.

> $150,000

Does everybody go to private universities or something? Because in-state is still under $10,000/year in most places.

That's not the only reason either, if you can pay the cost back later & it's a field you're interested in it will broaden your horizons

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