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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Simpsons grad student sketch is different kind of funny for different people. For most people it's funny because it's exaggeration, for others it's funny because it's so close to reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I

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On more serious note, grad student working for next to nothing serves similar function as unpaid internships in companies and politics. Some positions are designed to help young people coming from wealthy families without explicitly shutting anyone out.

If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.

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Except, in the case of big tech, Internships pay six figures.
There are other perks of being a grad student than just the pay though...

: sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.

Of course, not everyone can work in big tech.

Then what's stopping unpaid interns to take big tech internship?

For one thing most tech internships want you to contribute to the business. Unpaid internships that involve doing real work are illegal in many industries/locations.

In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.

Nothing, except that:

a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn

b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money

If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?

> If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.

I'm having trouble parsing that

“If you have a trust fund, then a career in fields such as politics, academia, law, or finance is much easier.”

Only kids from wealthy families can afford to move to say DC or NY and spend a year there on an unpaid internship. So that becomes a selection criteria to exclude those from poor and middle classes from advancing in those domains.

The same is true for entry-level media jobs. Paying $40-$50k in NYC... you can be sure kids without generational wealth & parents financial assistance choose other paths.

It must be awful to have to settle for the 50th percentile income in an area as a brand new worker.

This is definitely untrue. There are plenty of young people willing to save roughly no money for the early years of their 20s by trying to make it in the big city in a flashy career. I know several who don't get any financial support from their parents (and certainly don't have generational wealth). The most you can say is that people who have parents that _require_ financial support aren't able to take this path, but that's a significantly smaller group.

IF [ you have a trust fund ] THEN a career in {politics, acadamia, law, or finance} is much easier than getting a PhD.

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