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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

Academia has always seemed like a colossal joke to me. You pay a lot of money, give up a lot of opportunities to advance in life that are offered to everyone else, have no skills relevant to working in any industry related to your field of study, forced to give up family and community, will probably end up marrying someone who is also from Academia, all so you can have three little letters next to your name.

Ain't worth it, man.

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That’s one view. Another view is that getting paid (or even having a career) to study philosophy or art history or a similar topic is better than just about any job out there, no matter how little the pay or how many hoops you have to jump through.

For reference, I have a degree in philosophy but ultimately decided not to go for a PhD.

I'm a professor in computer science, so things are probably quite different than in other academic fields. There are some clear downsides to academia (lower salary, always looking for funding, limited geography, lots and lots of meetings), but there are also many positive aspects too.

These include: (a) teaching can be really fun, in terms of inspiring the next generation and opening their minds to new topics, (b) no one tells us what to do, we can work on what we personally think is important (though funding that is a separate question), (c) we're considered experts that can be called on by journalists, government agencies, patent lawyers, and immigration lawyers to help out, (d) we can do consulting to help with tech transfer and to learn more about industry problems, (e) thanks to Bayh-Dole act in USA we can also commercialize the technologies we develop.

Again, computer science is quite different, in that there are a lot more industry jobs available, a lot more money sloshing around compared to other fields, and less of a need to do multiple postdocs.

Also, don't underestimate the value of teaching. Not only is it a great value to society as a whole, but it can be highly intrinsically rewarding. I have a large stack of thank you cards and small gifts from students over the many years, and still occasionally get fun emails from students sending me new examples to use in class or stories of how they're applying what they learned.

So yes, there are a lot of tradeoffs involved with academia. But for me personally, I feel that I've made a positive difference in many people's lives, through my teaching, my research, and my advocacy, in ways that I wouldn't have been able to elsewhere.

That’s how status and externalities work. People choose academia for the non-monetary compensation. They want to work in a field that feels deeply meaningful to them. And they want the status that comes with being a professor.

During my last year in college, my programming languages professor (he was one of two CS professors I had who wasn't a complete boob) asked to have a meeting with me some afternoon. He pitched me on joining his graduate program since I was doing well in his class. I said I was hoping to do something with my skills that people would actually use, and his only response was some university team in another state helped contribute something to the USB mass storage spec. Uhhh no thanks. Left that meeting without another thought. I'm sure academia works for some people, but I wanted nothing more than to be as far away from that environment as possible.

I read an article a little while ago where someone recounted their academic career in Physics. What really hit home was his retelling of a class in undergrad where his professor (paraphrased here), "What you learn here really isn't physics, and most of you in this class aren't smart enough to learn physics." He got his PhD in physics, so it wasn't just him giving up. Everything I look at seems to add up to that statement across multiple disciplines. We place such an emphasis on academia which really teaches almost nothing useful to a career, etc. to the majority of people. I don't use my degree at all.

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