Who's more likely to have physical and intellectual freedom:
1) A recent PhD with $40,000 to his name
2) A Google engineer who graduated from undergrad at the same time and has $400,000 to her name
1) A recent PhD with $40,000 to his name
2) A Google engineer who graduated from undergrad at the same time and has $400,000 to her name
1) Most engineers do not work at Google, and 2) I have plenty of friends who do/did, and, guess what?: They still write code all day! Most of which does not do neat things like drive cars, but rather: increases AdWord click-through rates! Or: manages address book contacts. Fun!
I don't care how much free pizza and foosball you offer me, nothing can match the freedom of pursuing my own interests.
How many MTV or NYC Google engineers have $400k to their name after 5 years, as opposed to $4,000 and a bunch of money torched on rent? Google pays well, but not as well as you seem to think.
I'd say that (2) wins, if only because someone who sticks with Google for 5 years is probably one who made Real Googler and now has a fair amount of freedom. Google is pretty nice once you're above the Real Googler Line.
But that's aside from the actual point. It's not even about what the Googler does after they've done 5 years. That kind of money is enough to do whatever the hell you want to kind of money. You want to read papers all day? You can do it full time and pay yourself a graduate student's stipend for life, without having to worry about pleasing the dictates of your advisor, academic fads, TAing, and internal politics. Even the lucky students who become professors still have to apply for funding and teach students, on top of producing popular research to get tenure: with route 2), you never have to apply for funding, and you can choose how much time you want to devote to teaching and what kind of teaching you want to do.
It's fair to quibble with the actual numbers, but the point is that money buys you a hell of a lot. The fact that someone might not save, or pathologically continue slaving away at the corporate behemoth they hate once they've saved enough, doesn't change that possibility.
Now admittedly, $20k/year is a hell of a lot to be able to save for normal Americans! But at the end of five years it leaves you with $100k of savings, not $250k. In the Boston area where I was, you couldn't even put a down-payment on a house with that little money. It was basically just lots and lots of beer money.
On the other hand, if you know a magical company in a magical land, perhaps adorned with pastel ponies, at which I can make enough money with a low enough cost of living to retire after five or ten years to become a self-funded gentleman scientist, I'll certainly take that over graduate school. I just don't think it actually exists, as you can probably tell by the sarcasm.