[chriskanan]

As a scientist, I'd say this claim doesn't hold true for many scientific disciplines. I know scientists working in biopharma earning over $1M per year.

That said, I do think the salary mentioned is accurate as a starting salary in academia for a research faculty position (tenure track starting salary in USA is ~50% higher though), but academia pays much worse than industry. You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.

[lotsofpulp]

Probability distributions are the difference.

There are people earning $200k, $500k, and $1M+ in many fields.

The probability of getting there (and quality of life while getting there and after you get there), are the important bits of information.

For example, if you have to grind out my whole 20s (some of the best years for the human body) doing dissertations and working 80+ hour weeks for near minimum wage (per hour worked), only for a 10% chance to make it to $200k per year or more, maybe it is not worth it.

Especially if other options exist that provide much higher probabilities of attaining an income you want with similar levels of dedication.

[chriskanan]

Unfortunately, in the USA that's true across PhDs and MDs. It requires about 10-15 years post high school to make more than a living wage.

At least for everyone I know, they all ended up with comfortable salaries after finishing their PhDs. Most people spend our best years spending the majority of our time working, and at least for me, scientific research makes it not feel like work. Not everything is about money and a professor can live well in many places on a $90K salary, speaking from past experience.

The biggest cost is probably the impact it has on trying to have a family since one doesn't typically have much salary or time until around age 35 with the typical trajectory.

[lotsofpulp]

While the ROI on MD has gone down quite a bit, it is not as volatile as PhD. The floor for MDs is quite a bit higher, and the path to high income is well defined (less random to achieve it if you go through the steps).

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2022-compensation-overvie...

[rdtwo]

Yeah that can be an issue since you basically only have 2-3 years left to have kids if you want them and are a woman.

Also 90k ain’t what it used to be. It’s probably equivalent to 60k 3-4 years ago.

[JamesianP]

grad school wasn't a grind in my experience. Definitely easier and more fun than a real job, apart from the sparse high-stress deadlines of course. I think that's generally the norm in the US (except in chemistry I hear?)

[btrettel]

> You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.

The "autonomy" is a facade in many instances. Professors have to do what can be funded. For a lot of professors that means doing what's trendy or what panders to moneyed interests rather than what they'd actually like to do and what would be more valuable.

Read chapter 4, titled "Assignable Curiosity", in the book Disciplined Minds for more detail.

https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

(Note: There's a lot I disagree with in this book, but I think this particular chapter is accurate.)

[chriskanan]

This is true if you need large amounts of resources ($) to achieve your research goals. At least for me, I have not found this to be true.

However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.

[btrettel]

> This is true if you need large amounts of resources ($) to achieve your research goals.

My experience is that the quoted situation is the exception in US academia. Despite paying a pittance, graduate students are expensive enough to make professors dependent on the approval of funders. And that's where the loss of autonomy comes from.

It seems to me that certain parts of academia that are more funded by teaching like pure math may be more immune to this, but STEM broadly seems accurately described by the chapter I recommended.

> However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.

I agree with what you said, aside from that I don't think you have full autonomy over your research objectives. If you think you control your own research objectives, I recommend reading the chapter I mentioned. As far as I can tell, your interests are well aligned with what's supported. I looked you up, and was not surprised to see that you work in deep learning, one of the most supported and hyped fields around today. People (like myself) whose interests aren't aligned with what's supported often find academia to be quite hostile. The relative research autonomy you feel is real, but if you decide to move outside of deep learning, you may no longer find the same sense of research autonomy.

[insightcheck]

> “You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.”

I heard otherwise from a staff scientist at a university in biological sciences, though I’m not sure how representative his view is. He said that non-professors lack research autonomy, and even then, there are limitations of what one can fund due to grants (though I’m not sure how accurate this is, as I used to assume that academic grants generally had fairly flexible conditions for using the funding).

[ProjectArcturis]

This is all accurate. There is flexibility in funding, but if you use your grant money for a completely different project than you proposed, you better hit an absolute home run or you won't get any more grants.

[jbsimpson]

You also have to factor in how terrible post-doc pay and job security is, just to have a shot at getting on the tenure track. In the US it's half of that 80k number in bio research.

[counters]

We also need to dispel the myth that tenure track academic roles are the only jobs for scientists. In my field, one can have a wonderful, decently-paying career working in some of the most desirable places in the US if they go the national lab route. There's also a thriving private sector which will just get bigger. This doesn't even factor in the exit ramp careers if, late in the game, a student realizes that "science" isn't quite what they want to do for their 9-5 - e.g., trading in all of those hundreds or thousands of hours grinding data analyses for their Masters/PhD for a career in data science or software engineering.

We should make sure that folks understand a modern career in science may look, from a salary and QoL perspective, quite like a doctor or other professional. High-stress, relatively low-pay, challenging from your late teens to late twenties, then a rapid increase in earning power and opportunity into your early thirties.

[insightcheck]

I completely agree, but I think most people who arrive at this perspective only reach this view after spending time in industry or adjacent to people working there.

A lot of the focus on tenure track jobs comes from professors and academics who dedicate their life almost solely in academic environments (so in their view, it’s a rather unhealthy attitude of academic tenure or bust). I’m not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps a work-study private sector summer internship could be an encouraged part of certain PhD, to widen perspectives and help both students and professors better understand the possibilities out there, which someone can be motivated to strive for, rather than settle for.

[counters]

Absolutely. There have always been domains where industry roles have been just as sought after as academic ones - think Computer Science broadly, and all the opportunities one has with a PhD there. Other domains have been slow to catch on to this, but it seems like there has been an inflection point over the past 10 years where we're just so grossly overproducing PhDs in so many domains relative to academic jobs that there is mounting pressure on degree programs to revamp their training/prep for "alternative" career paths.

Myself and colleagues are definitely trying to encourage our alma mater to have more support for externships other opportunities in industry. I think things will continue to change - for the better, for early career scientists - over the next 5-10 years. If only because there is a workforce crisis in my field where skills like AI and software engineering are in extremely high demand, but even 3-4 years ago we actively discouraged PhD students from pursuing this type of work!

[siver_john]

In my time as a PhD student (granted still there currently just at the finishing things up stage) I was actually part of founding an organization for students to basically do this. We invited speakers from different fields and had them talk about "alternative" career paths considering the current system basically assumes you want to become a professor. We also included a workshop every year where we would build in career skills and have professionals come and speak. You learn very quickly that there is an incredible range of activities one can do with a PhD.