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Comment by jehb | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I understood how poor graduate student wages were until years after I was employed as one.

I had worked at a natural foods co-op for a few years between undergrad and grad school, and although my marketing role paid more than some floor jobs, I was blown away when I started as a teaching assistant and made essentially the same wage. I could make the same money grading papers as I had in the real world? No way! Then I entered the private sector again where my starting wage was twice what I made in academia. And I thought I was rich. Until a few years later when I was making multiples of my former hourly rate.

Lots of folks in these roles have no idea what their time is worth. I kick myself for being so naïve at the time.

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I was doing manual labour starting at 4 am on the weekends to make ends meet during my PhD fellowship. I'd invent creative reasons for one off consulting type projects to random faculty in the department to try and get a couple hours of casual pay because that would make the difference in bills. Seems ridiculous in hindsight now that I'm making every level pay and I'm not in a particularly lucrative field.

Academic research productivity per dollar is greatly boosted by low wages for the people who actually do the work.

Academic labs are basically indenture shops that universities and the government use to avoid paying the market price for labor. And of course the greatest profits accrue to commercial companies that apply the work that was paid for by the government and performed by underpaid grad students.

Grad school may be interesting and even fun, but it can also have very high opportunity cost, making it something of a sucker's game for many, at least financially.

The only thing worse would be trying to stay in academia and being trapped in a purgatory of postdoc and adjunct positions, never making it to the top of the pyramid scheme.

tech jobs start at $110k now. if you have two years into a degree, you can get $80k in private industry if you shop around. you have been warned.

Yea, me too. Slaved away in academia for peanuts for 6 years. Then the first job I was offered outside academia paid 8x what I was making and 3x of of the best academic positions I was being offered at the time. Never looked back.

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