
The True Cost of a PhD: Giving Up a Family for Academia - EndXA
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/10/the-true-cost-of-a-phd-giving-up-a-family-for-academia/
======
rubidium
“colleges and universities must find a way to allow those pursuing academic
careers to obtain the basic goods that most people seek in life: marriage, a
family, and a career to support themselves. The price of pursuing a life of
the mind shouldn’t be the rest of one’s life.”

Wait, why is this the universities problem? If too many people want to get
phds than our society can support, then less people should get phds. That or
they’ll get stuck in the current academic grind.

Any PhD student should be well aware of the career difficulty that follows,
particularly if they want to be a professor. There’s no lack of articles like
this one pointing out that fact.

I got my PhD but went in well aware that I don’t want to go thru the ringer
trying to be a professor. I’d love to be one, but not willing to sacrifice so
much to be one.

So I choose to do industry from the start. The PhD wasn’t the most financially
advantageous move but I loved it for the 6 years I was there and wouldn’t
trade it for the “sunk cost”.

~~~
gwd
> Wait, why is this the universities problem? If too many people want to get
> phds than our society can support than less people should get phds. That or
> they’ll get stuck in the current academic grind. Any PhD student should be
> well aware of the career difficulty that follows, particularly if they want
> to be a professor. There’s no lack of articles like this one pointing out
> that fact.

But I think there very much is a systemic effect that _everyone_ is missing
because it happens so slowly.

Fundamentally, if the number of academic positions remains constant, then each
professor only needs to train one PhD student looking to enter academia _in
their entire career_.

OK, maybe 1.1 to deal with deaths or other sorts of natural attrition. But
think about that for a minute, and then think about how many PhD students a
typical professor actually trains in their career. That level of "production"
is OK when the number of academic positions are expanding at a similar rate.
But they're not expanding at any where near the same rate these days; instead,
there are longer and longer "holding patterns".

And this introduces a pattern where the "holding patterns" get longer and
longer, but people don't really notice. Professors who got their PhDs in the
70's didn't do any post-docs, or maybe only a year or two. Professors who got
their PhDs in the 80's or 90's did a few years, but not many. PhDs _getting
jobs_ now in some fields can expect to have post-docs for a decade; but people
_getting PhDs_ now will have even longer waits.

So PhD students "should be well aware", but 1) the people advising them almost
certainly had a much easier time than the people currently in the pipeline,
and 2) it will almost certainly be much worse by the time they actually want
to get a job. Add to that that it would be nearly impossible to perform modern
academic research without the army of PhD students and postdocs being paid
slave wages, so there's very little incentive to give students a realistic
picture of what their chances actually are.

So yes, it _should_ be up to universities and research institutions to set up
a sustainable system.

~~~
rubidium
Two counterpoints:

1) There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor. So
the number is a lot higher than 1.1.

2) I can only see it as naive on the part of students to think they can become
one unless they’re able to be in the top ~5% of grad students and then work
incredibly hard for 10 years. We should be telling everyone this. And
encouraging professor aspiration only for PhDs with the heart for this. If we
did that then the universities would work things out. But expecting the
universities to fix the problem is backwards because they have zero incentive
to.

~~~
gwd
> There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor.

Sure; that's why I said, "PhD student looking to enter academia". CS PhDs for
the most part go into industry (as I did). But if you're a CS prof, you should
basically default to telling all of your students _except maybe three in your
entire career_ to plan to go to industry. The same thing should hold for
physics/chemistry/biology/history/whatever profs: if you have more than one
PhD student _per decade_ going on to get a post-doc, you're failing your
mentorship duties.

~~~
klipt
> But if you're a CS prof, you should basically default to telling all of your
> students except maybe three in your entire career to plan to go to industry.

Except it's not like 3 PhD students from $topschool become $topschool
professors while 3 students from $randomschool become $randomschool
professors.

What happens is the top students from top schools become top schools
professors. The middling students from top schools become professors at random
schools. The students from random schools are unlikely to become professors
anywhere.

So if you're an MIT professor you can encourage more students into academia.
If you're a random school professor, you should encourage them all into
industry.

------
ktpsns
This topic is difficult to address in general and world wide. What I can say
is: My wife and I graduated in Germany, we both had a net salary/scholarship
beyond 1200€/m, so we could easily afford anything baby-related. This would
even have been possible with only a single salary -- having a baby is not
expensive if you don't follow your urgent need for a house or car. In a German
city, one can raise a kid in a single room apartment and study half time --
and this does not meet the national (or my subjective) definition of
"poverty".

The actual problem is time. Having a baby, I felt the lack of time every day
and night. I could not do as much for science as I wanted to. That definitely
reflects in the grades and scientific publications.

~~~
analog31
Did you have access to health care? In the US, having a baby while in graduate
school was profoundly risky from a financial standpoint, and there was a
strong bias against women who had kids. I knew families that were bankrupted.
Also, they had to completely drain their finances in order to qualify for some
forms of public assistance.

~~~
shantly
As far as I know, it's quite uncommon an _any_ OECD state other than the US to
be without quite good coverage for health care bills and medical bankruptcy is
even less common—I hesitate to write "unheard of" because I'm sure there are
some exceptions somewhere, but it fits the colloquial use of "unheard of",
certainly.

~~~
johncearls
It would be "unheard of" in the United States for a Ph.D. student in a normal
program to not have good health insurance and the birth paid for. The stipend
in the US is ridiculously low, and I can see having trouble affording to take
care of a baby, but it is not going to be the medical costs that get you.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Do universities pay for health insurance for PhD students? In my experience,
an uneventful birth costs $3k to $5k, with insurance, and it all depends on if
the pregnancy costs occur in the same calendar year to avoid resetting the out
of pocket maximum limit.

------
euix
The only reason to pursue a PhD is interest in the subject matter. You don't
have to have all consuming passion and love but you have to be genuinely
interested. Those who do it because their parents have phds or their
colleagues, or they want "dr" in front of their name, in other words, for
vanity, prestige or to further their career usually never do well. Either
because they start at a later point in their lives, lack the dedication or
drive to go beyond the call of duty. A phd is always about doing 110% of what
is expected.

In my field (physics), the expectation is to finish a phd within 6 years of
completing your undergrad. If you have a good project or work hard 5 years is
doable, 7 if you are a good student but got unlucky. This means the average
age out of graduate school is between 26-31, depending on what country you
received your undergraduate in. That is more then enough time to still start a
career or work on other life goals. It's when you take longer then this
timeline that things start to go wrong, for both futures in academia and
industry and your life and mental health in general.

A mediocre phd is worse then not doing a phd and there are plenty of those
around but those who do well (not exceptional geniuses by any means!), a phd
will open many doors even if you do not pursue a further academic career.

------
majos
Man, seemingly every week on HN there’s an article attacking PhDs as monastic
pyramid schemes for the foreign, financially gullible, and unemployable.

As a 5th-year computer science PhD student (graduating next semester!) I think
this characterization is unfair.

With summer internships, I have made about 40k per year over my PhD, which was
more than enough for anything I wanted. I only had to TA for one year. The
jobs available to me now are much more interesting than the ones available to
me 5 years ago. With the help of a great advisor, a few other hosts and
mentors, and fellow grad students and postdocs, I’ve learned a lot about (and
now, made some contributions I’m proud of) to a couple of areas of research.
As someone who enjoys research, that has been a very rewarding process.

This is not a universal truth. Things might be much worse if I had dependents,
had a bad stipend, had a bad advisor, or did not like research. But in my case
I had none of these complications, and I’m glad I did a PhD — not just to have
the credential, but to have had the fun experience, grown, and now have a
research future I’m pretty excited about.

~~~
barry-cotter
Your experience is atypical for Ph.D. students though not out of the ordinary
for CS Ph.D. students. There are other fields that are similarly well situated
like Economics, with plentiful internship opportunities and great options
after the Ph.D. that aren’t academia.

Even for you in CS and the others in fields where the average position is ok a
Ph.D. is a pretty bad bet monetarily but if the consumption value is high
enough, great, it’s worth it even if you never even wanted to be an academic.
But you gave up a lot in forgone earnings and in work experience and if you’re
lucky you’ll make it up in a decade. The work experience might be a wash
depending on the field you end up in. The forgone earnings will not be a wash.

If you’d decided to do a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature there would have been
no internships, a poor stipend, wild competition for academic jobs and no real
demand for your skills and expertise outside academia.

If a Ph.D. was worth it for the consumption value for you that’s great and
it’s fantastic that there exist fields that have similar teaching demand,
stipends and exit opportunities. But the Ph.D. hate is to tell people

 _Are there any jobs in this field or demand for its graduates? If not it will
be bad. Stay away._

~~~
geebee
My impression is that a PhD in CS can be beneficial in industry, but the
benefits generally derive more from the kind of work you get to do, not in the
salary you earn. Some positions available "only" to PhD holders may allow you
to bypass many of the unpleasantries in software engineering (technical
whiteboard exams, SCRUM, limited autonomy, deadline pressures), but they don't
necessarily pay more. And if you do go for the SWE position, a PhD won't keep
you from having to go through the SWE hiring gauntlet.

I say this based mainly on personal experience and some browsing of positions
and salaries with limited data. I'm a onetime doctoral student who left with a
MS and went over to Sun Labs for a bit. Salary-wise, the newly minted PhDs
didn't really earn much more than the newly minted MS students[1] - and almost
certainly less if you compared them with MS holders who had spent the last 5
years working. But I did get put in giant due diligence projects where I had
to recreate and verify ever SQL query in a giant operational software system,
while the PhD researchers pursued more interesting projects with greater
autonomy.

And if you're the sort who will burn out and decay to poor performance if
you're bored, it could make a difference. We can compare MS to PhD generally
across a population, but we can't really compare them for the same person.
Fortunately for me, I actually like digging into long, complex, chaotic data
pipelines, and if you find you enjoy something high impact and complicated
that bores people, well then, that's not a bad way to get paid. But if you
don't like it, that's a recipe for misery.

I believe, strongly, that we greatly overproduce PhDs, even in employable
categories like CS (mainly because I think many of these CS PhDs would have
found equally if not more fulfilling work at a potentially higher salary
without the long years in grad school). Some people just need to do the PhD
style work if they're going to succeed in life, and for them, more time in
grad school combined with no clear _financial_ advantage may hide a number of
benefits they get from these jobs.

[1] one aside - salaries were notably lower for engineers and scientists in
tech companies back then. This was back in the 1999/2000 - I was a grad
student at Berkeley, and I was shocked by how much lower all engineering
starting salaries were, at the MS and PhD level, than salaries out of the law
and business schools, especially since the companies that were responsible for
this pay disparity were lobbying congress fiercely to do something about this
critical shortage of US citizens studying graduate engineering and science. My
impression is that this gap has closed considerably since then.

------
dr_coffee
"At least with medical school, Peter said, the job prospects are better. New
doctors begin making $60,000 and their salary increases by $20,000 a year
during residency."

Actually not true. A resident's salary might increase by $20k between the
start and end of their training (esp for intensive 7-8 surgical programs), but
most programs only increase salary by $3,000 per year. In the following
tables, PGY stands for post-graduate year, and extends from residency into
fellowship if you choose to do one. Usually the salaries are the same for all
residents, regardless of whether you are training to be a neurosurgeon or a
psychiatrist.

[https://med.virginia.edu/gme/program-resources/salary-
benefi...](https://med.virginia.edu/gme/program-resources/salary-benefits/)

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/emergencymedicine/em-
residen...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/emergencymedicine/em-
residency/benefits/index.html)

~~~
jcranberry
I read that and immediately thought 'that'll be news to my surgical resident
friend'.

------
pxhb
This is an interesting article, but I feel like it only vaguely addresses the
root of the problem of grad school in the US(in my opinion). The root problem
is that your grad school experience is highly dependent on what university you
go to and who your advisor is.

I recently finished my PhD in physics from a top university earlier this year.
During my time there, I was paid enough to live comfortably (~35k/year) and
had amazing free health care. My advisor was great for the most part, and I
had amazing opportunities and experiences that I would not have had otherwise.

On the otherhand, there are other grad students who have terrible advisors
and/or at institutions with less resources and opportunities.

------
chrisseaton
> American universities graduated 100,000 new PhDs but only created 16,000 new
> professorships

Here we go again - this weird idea that the only purpose for doing a PhD is to
become a professor.

~~~
buboard
It's the one job that _requires_ a phd so it's not weird

~~~
chrisseaton
I don't think that's really an absolute requirement - there are full
professors without PhDs.

------
jusob
I wanted to share my experience. I was a foreign student doing a Master in the
US, with several other schoolmates. 3 of them decided to pursue a PhD after
their master. We all understood that a Master is done in 2 years, a PhD in 3
years. So they all completed their PhD in 3 years, not a month more. But I met
many students, in the same field, some with the same advisors, who were 5+
years into their PhD with no end in sight. I think a lot of it came from the
state of mind. My friends had a very specific time lime to finish their PhD in
3 years and they followed it, pushed their advisors when needed, etc. There
was never any doubt that they would be done after 3 years. Whereas others
started an open-ended journey with no clear goals.

------
josh_fyi
"Solve for the equilibrium": Only the tiniest fraction of superstars, those
with nothing better to do, and foreigners from poor countries will go for a
PhD. Beyond that, the talented will avoid the PhD.

------
maxaf
This article and the sad reality it portrays reminded me of Episode 16 of
Timesuck: “Is we getting dumberest?”[0] The most obvious conclusion to be
drawn is that the brightest and most educated members of our species are
incapable of producing offspring because our society does not support them
economically. Throw another reason into the “why we’re getting dumber” bucket.

[0]:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUXDfvBZ7o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUXDfvBZ7o)

------
merlinsbrain
The comparison of pay between what PhD students get in the US vs other
countries is plain silly. It’s apples to oranges, the cost of living can be an
order of magnitude different, which is not mentioned even once, favoring the
absolute number comparison as a good thing.

Beyond this the article talks about low stipends, while an important topic of
conversation - nothing new.

------
buboard
I dont see a problem with that. Too many people in research - market needs
correction.

------
RickJWagner
I would love to have a PhD, and the associated prestige. I like academics and
would probably enjoy the classes.

I looked into it a few years back, I was absolutely stunned at the amount of
institutional butt-kissery that was associated with it. That, and the fact
that most of the PhD programmers I know are not any different from the average
has convinced me to stay put.

~~~
chrisseaton
> enjoy the classes

But you don't really do 'classes' as a PhD student. At that point you should
be the world expert in your subject so who would be teaching you :)

~~~
barry-cotter
> But you don't really do 'classes' as a PhD student.

In the US almost all programmes begin with a two year long Ph.D. student
period at the end of which, assuming you pass your qualifying exams you can
drop out with a Master’s. Once those are done you absolutely must focus on
research though if you haven’t started on it already you’re behind. After the
Master’s you’re a Ph.D. candidate. Somewhere in this period, if you’re doing
it right you’re very likely to become the world’s leading expert on your
particular, extremely narrow field. Then, or while becoming that expert you
write up your thesis, defend it and get the degree.

In the UK it’s still possible to go directly from Bachelor’s to Ph.D.
candidate and be done in three years but the trend is away from this, at least
in the exact and social sciences.

