[beagle3]

For some people, buying a BMW is more than procuring a means of transportation, and they value it much higher than just buying a car. But I have never seen anyone come to defend those of them who got into unsustainable debt because of that (of which there are many, but not really a big part of the BMW owners in general).

Some Ph.Ds are actively doing research, very few of them are contributing to the world. Most Ph.Ds do not.(Many tenured professors with long publication lists do not either, for that matter).

I'm not against doing a Ph.D - far from it. But it's important to face reality - most academic work (Ph.D included) does not actually advance humanity, not even small sections of it. Only a very small part of academic research does.

The same goes for art. Some artists inspire millions. Most people who do art do not - many do it because they enjoy it, even if they suck horribly at it (and are often willfully ignorant of how bad they suck at it). Most people would consider it foolish for someone to go into huge debt to practice art, especially if there's no indication it would be able to support them. Yet, somehow, even though academic studies are roughly equivalent in that sense, they enjoy some halo of "nonfoolishness".