[tankerslay]

I'm not sympathetic to the gripe that there's no "proper career guidance" in grad school. If you want a ready-made career track, you should not be in a PhD program.

Yes, academia is competitive, and unforgiving, and harbors a lot of eccentric and even ugly personalities. But the fact that it is "all about the discipline" is part of the appeal. And society cannot afford to sustain young people at such a high level of intellectual freedom with anything more than a "basic income" at best. Most of the things that make academia difficult are part and parcel to what makes it special.

The biggest change I would potentially advocate is an email to all first-year students letting them know that if they just want to take classes for a few years, get a cushy job, and drive a Lexus, they should be in medical school instead.

[rxhernandez]

If people who got their PhDs in Physics from places like CalTech feel like they're at a complete loss as to how someone like me who only has a BS in Physics and Electrical Engineering manages to make 1.5x-4.0x what they make my first job out of college, then there is something seriously wrong with the system. I've worked alongside several PhD physicists/engineers to know this isn't an uncommon theme.

I've also had my mentors strongly discourage me from doing a PhD in Physics, despite my ability, because of how overly saturated academia is with physicists and how I will have lost money to the order of half a million or more while returning to the same exact salary and salary cap after the PhD is finished.

[speedplane]

PhDs were not designed to maximize return on investment. They were designed to encourage students into research with a trophy of a doctorate and societal respect.

Anyone who thinks that a PhD is the fastest way to riches needs to have their head examines (by a PhD).

[tankerslay]

>how someone like me who only has a BS in Physics and Electrical Engineering manages to make 1.5x-4.0x what they make my first job out of college, then there is something seriously wrong with the system.

This is largely what I would expect. A PhD (actually, anything after the Master's) isn't really about acquiring new technical skills. It's about learning to put into practice the basic values that sustain the discipline, which in science consist largely of 1) a fanatical obsession with figuring out what the data is really telling you, 2) relentlessly questioning your hypotheses and entertaining alternative explanations, and 3) rooting out the various cognitive nooks and crannies wherein lie the temptations to fool yourself or others.

For most technical jobs, these kinds of habits are not really germane to what you are being asked to do. Hence many businesses are quite reluctant to hire people with PhDs at all. The ones they do pick up will tend to agree that their PhD was a "waste of time."

[watwut]

PhD is meant as training to be scientist. Even people who complain about salaries knew up front it is not something designed to earn you a lot of money. They are people who value science and academic success more then money, at least when they are starting.