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Part of that's due to incentives; like a corporation, universities don't primarily think institutionally about what's in your best interests. Hence you also rarely find companies happy that you left to take a better job, though you might find some individual managers who're supportive of a decision to move on. For universities, people who leave PhD programs earlyish are a particular negative, because at least in the US, typically universities subsidize the masters portion of your education if you enter into a PhD program, out of research funds or departmental TA funds, whereas students who enter explicitly intending to get a masters have to pay tuition, and don't usually receive a stipend (though a few can land TAships). What they expect in return is that later in your PhD you'll publish a bunch of papers which bring them some prestige, help out on grant applications, etc. So if you enter a PhD program, stay for 2 years for the coursework/masters portion, and then leave, from the university's perspective it's like you're really a masters student who somehow tricked them into treating you as a PhD student for 2 years, and got away without paying tuition--- but without staying long enough to produce the expected ROI in publications. It also hurts the graduation-rate statistics in some ways of calculating them, and as education is getting more metrics/assessment heavy, that can matter too. At least, that's from an administrative/bean-counter perspective; from a cultural perspective among researchers themselves, attitudes are more varied and have more complicated reasons. In areas where industrial partnerships are important, I think the reaction is often fairly positive, because a former student now working at a large company is a good connection for a lab to have. Some of the negative reactions I think are just due to people not conceiving that other people could have different preferences/aptitudes. You can also find the reverse, where e.g. the attitudes if you left a startup after two years to pursue grad school can range from confused to "you're throwing away a golden opportunity" type views, to outright derisive ("couldn't make it in the real world"). Unfortunately I think it's pretty common for people to be pretty invested in what they did as the definition of success (whether it's research or entrepreneurship or whatever), and to generalize that to thinking that people who quit that route and try another one are therefore failures. |