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Comment by smallnamespace | Hacker News Reader

Some people just love games so much that they're willing to sell their souls and/or health to work on them.

That's kind of how I feel about academia right now -- seems highly irrational from a financial or job security standpoint for most people to get a grad degree and aim for tenure, yet there are still droves of people willing to make that trade.

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You are assuming that most grad students aim to be a professor, you have any data to back it up? Since that has not been my experience at all.

I don't think you need to make that assumption. Regardless of the number of grad students leaving academia, there is a huge and increasing backlog of postdocs waiting for professorship.

This is a recurring topic here, but this varies a lot by field. In many fields literally the only reason to go to grad school is to (try to) become a professor.

On the flip side, I'm pretty sure grad school is not financially rational if you intend to go to industry.

At best, you'll get a scholarship and maybe a teaching salary/stipend of ~30k over 5-6 years. In my experience, people who can do a PhD could've been making 2-3x that much in industry.

PhDs do get hired at a higher position, but you can easily get there the normal way over 5 years. IMO a lot of grad school students are just here to immigrate.

A chance to work on hard research problems; that is not possible without mentoring for most people. If everything you do in life is just money to you; then sure PhD is irrelevant and you find absurd reasons like immigration to justify it.

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