By contrast I work in a field (experimental plasma physics) where there are relatively few industrial opportunities. For grad students in my field who wish to carry on working in science once they graduate, there are few options outside of academia.
My parents are both PHDs in physics and professors etc, but I knew 15 years ago how hard it would be get a decent job in the field and didn’t pursue sciences.
So I don’t really have much sympathy for grad students who complain about having lack of opportunities.
Also, the assumption is faulty that brains are like computers and processing identical information using a non-diseased fully functioning brain should obviously give the same result regardless of age.
I'm not sure that academia is any worse than a lot of other fields and it does, potentially, have a lot of advantages.
[e.g. I co-founded a startup with someone I met in academia]
I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)
I suppose my point is that people know what the job market is like in abstract from the beginning, appreciating the actuality of it is something which requires more maturity than is present in many (most?) PhD applicants.
If you go into a drug gang, you also know going in that conditions for the lower-rung "associates" are poor.
To be less flippant: While it's better that you at least know you're getting screwed, that doesn't make fair. It is justified and worthwhile to struggle to change the conditions of employment, even if you agreed to them and knew them going in.
Maybe I am just jaded :-)
Kind of.
Even most mature academics don't really have an idea of how industry really works, let alone 22 year olds.
Yes, on some crude level, but the materiality of what that means is hard to fathom.