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Comment by frakt0x90 | Hacker News Reader

To some extent. My wife is about to finish her PhD. She's not even a top-level publishing academic and the amount of work she's had to put in for next to no pay (sometimes literally no pay) is insane. Hard work is great and but there is such a thing as too hard and I would argue academia takes advantage of some of the hardest working and most qualified people in the country (I'm in the US).

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I don't know, it's a little bit different from the other side of the lectern. As a professor, I am mindful of keeping a work-life balance in my classroom. I try not to over-assign homework, and I'm mindful that students have lives outside of the classroom, so I'm flexible with deadlines and other minutia.

Even still, I'll have students emailing me for more work. They want to do research, get involved in competitions, write a paper, do independent studies. Every semester I have to approve overloads for students who want to take more classes. Individual institutions aren't forcing these students (who are often the most qualified of the qualified) to take on all this extra work. It's more like, the whole system is a race to the top for them. It's hard to disentangle that drive from industry and the economic system and blame it just on academia. After all, why do they want to take these extra classes? To be better job applicants.

This sounds a bit like what is discussed in the book "The Meritocracy Trap".

The idea being a hyper-competitive environment creates pyrrhic victories where even the winners are less well off. Your last sentence leaves the impression that those students aren't doing it for love of the work but only as a means to an end.

The US does this in every instance where passion is involved. Passionate people, especially those who are passionate about their work, are more easily convinced to take less pay because they are "passionate" and want to see their work come to fruition.

Exploitation of youthful passion for profit is basically the centerpiece of how America beats its workers into submission and slowly breaks down their expectations for anything good in the workplace. The worse condition the workers are willing to accept, the more profit to be made off of their labor.

// The US does this in every instance where passion is involved

I don't think there's a conspiracy. High performers in "passion" fields are sought after and make bank (Tom Cruise vs starving actor, eg)

The problem is the oversupply of middling talent. If I needed a random average actor for something, there are thousands of them fighting for the job, so it doesn't pay much. If I need Tom Cruise I am going to pay a lot.

The passion lense is useless. Doctors are passionate. Engineers are passionate.

The difference is the bar to entry. Getting into and graduating med school is very hard. Very few people, relatively, have an MD so they are in demand. And failure is clean - if you didn't make it to medschool, you go do something else. You don't spend the rest of your life as an "aspiring physician"

There's no such filter for acting etc so lots of people flood the field, don't get a natural weed-out and thus spend the rest of their life competing with each other for mediocre opportunities. And we just don't have a shortage of actors.

The US system is provides a practical signal. If you aren't making it on your "passion field", at some point the money signals that you can contribute better to society elsewhere.

I think there's some validity to this perspective, but it oversimplifies the systemic effects. MDs, for example, are artificially constrained by the AMA in the number of doctors needed by society. It's been likened to a cartel that acts to keep doctor pay high by artificially limiting supply. Let the "bar to entry" be constrained by merit, not by a cabal. Likewise, most engineers aren't capital "E" engineers in the legal sense. Most work under an exemption to be able to call themselves engineers. Most don't even realize it - they are, to a certain extent, 'aspiring' engineers (legally, at least).

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