[sbarbarian]

I deferred joining a Bio lab out of undergrad after being pulled aside during my acceptance visit and given an 'academia life 101' from a postdoc. There were too many bio PhDs, too few academic positions, and too few opportunities in the business sector to have a lucrative and fulfilling career. Unless I was very lucky - according to this postdoc - I was making a poor decision. He advised me to go to industry a few years then reconsider.

I never looked back, and I often reflect on his intervention.

It saddens me greatly that many of my friends still in Bio have lived this prediction, while meanwhile academica's administrative staff counts (and salaries) balloon. For all the promise to human economy, bio is still astoundingly complex, difficult to monetize, and hard to justify increased budgets for. On the flip side, as essential to our planet and culture as understanding esoteric biological knowledge is (e.g. deep-sea fish behavior), nobody is willing to fund it at the scale needed before much of it disappears forever thanks to climate change.

Not sure how the wage issue can be solved, but more sources of funding towards hard research for research's sake (i.e. fact-finding in-vivo science) seems like it could help. So too, could forcing schools to obviously pay more by reducing the amount of admitted students. Less labor supply could give some leverage to often powerless grad students.