Everyone starts a PhD with love for knowledge, the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation. People under-estimate how bad is the PhD/postdoc pay and how long they need to sustain it. They are better off with a Masters and having a good career and then spending spare time on pursuing knowledge.
Lots of phd are hired by industry. 3-5 years for the degree and 0-2 years post-doc’ing and you’re set for low-mid 6 figure income. Yeah, you’ll have to move from time to time, but people need “new discoveries”. And as a point of reference, getting a significant drug to market 3 months early is worth billions. People who can do that are gold. And sometimes, you save people’s lives.
The people who’ve been working in the mRNA fields did ok. Successful tech CEO’s might have more money but Nobel laureates are, just maybe, more useful.
> Successful tech CEO’s might have more money but Nobel laureates
While we're at it, let's get kids thinking about how valuable it would be to win a gold medal in the Olympics when deciding if they should make sports the #1 priority in their life/career.
> Everyone starts a PhD with love for knowledge, the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation
This describes almost no one I knew when I was in grad school. It probably helped that I picked a school that paid well and was in a LCOL area. That's the advice I would give those pursuing a PhD.
You can choose to put off kids till you have a PhD. Plenty of people can get a PhD before 28.
It doesn't stop with PhD. You need multiple postdocs to get an academic job by when you are well into the thirties. If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.
> It doesn't stop with PhD. You need multiple postdocs to get an academic job by when you are well into the thirties
Not true in many fields, and by the time most people have postdocs, they're makibg decent enough money that they don't need to keep their lives on hold.
> If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.
I don't know what to say to this, other than that you have very strong opinions and I can't tell what you're basing them on -- or whether you're basing them on anything more than the strange belief that study is useless and school makes people poor.
I got one at 24 with 11+4+4 years of schooling. Most had it by 26-27 with a year or two more schooling in there somewhere. But an organic chemist prof told me that one has to run n reactions to get out. You can spend the time to do 2/day or you can complain how long grad school is.
This isn't true, especially in stem and the sciences.
> They are better off with a Masters and having a good career and then spending spare time on pursuing knowledge.
In most places I'm aware of, a terminal master's degree or a master's degree program is a degree mill and a racket, costing tens of thousands for a course ofstudy that's too short to teach students much anything useful, let alone provide real knowledge or understanding.
Every single person I know who has a stem PhD is doing interesting, cutting-edge work, and almost everybody they work with has a PhD, too. The kids with a BS in CS, by contrast, almost never wind up with jobs in those settings. They almost never get jobs at Microsoft Research. They don't get paid to think.
> the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation
Again, this simply isn't true. This wasn't my experience or the experience of anybody I went to school with or met when I was in acadenia. PhD programs in the US are funded and usually pay poorly in absolute terns but well enough. And grad-student insurance is usually quite good if you're in the US.
A PhD from a good program opens doors and pays for itself many times over, sometimes materially, sometimes in ways that are difficult to quantify.
