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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

If CS PhD's are an exceptional class then I think it's only by virtue of supply & demand. There are a larger # of opportunities in industry, and they often pay better.

As for students earning 3x your income, it seems like you're taking the lowest paid professors and comparing to the highest paid grads. The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k then you're probably not walking into a $200k+ job on graduation except as an extreme outlier. Those students aren't going to a school with the name recognition required to easily open doors for entry-level $200k positions.

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Many liberal arts schools pay everyone like they are liberal arts professors. So they have impossible time hiring people in valuable professional fields like CS and statistics. They still can get solid students though. Disproportionately locals and by offering scholarships. Also prior hot areas like "data science" and security indeed led to a lot of insane starting salary stories ($300k+) for merely-above-average students from meh schools with exactly the right skills. Even the median starting salaries in hot areas have been surprisingly high for a while.

> If CS PhD's are an exceptional class then I think it's only by virtue of supply & demand. There are a larger # of opportunities in industry, and they often pay better.

Well of course. What else would it be? Doesn't it always work out in life that the jobs you can get are the ones where they need you more than you need them?

> Many liberal arts schools pay everyone like they are liberal arts professors.

Presumably, you mean something like “arts and humanities” the second time you say “liberal arts”, since the liberal arts include the natural sciences (both life and physical), social sciences, mathematics (including, among other things, computer science), arts, and humanities.

You can be a "liberal arts" professor yet get paid like a professor in a professional department.

Many schools have CS under engineering which pays a lot more.

Nah, I think "liberal arts" fits the bill. Including natural sciences. In contrast to the professional colleges: Law/Business/Medicine/Engineering (which CS should be at-parity with).

Of course LACs don't have law schools or med schools or (usually) engineering colleges, so the difficulty of properly compensating CS is understandable with respect to those fields.

However, LACs do tend to have Finance/Accounting, and often pay folks in those departments better, but for whatever reason don't treat their CS faculty like their Finance faculty. My own pet theory for this market mismatch is that finance/business types tend to dominate those college's boards. LAC boards have a lot of older folks who still think of CS as code monkeying.

> it's only by virtue of supply & demand

Absolutely. I never meant to imply otherwise. Worth mentioning that this will be true for a while though.

> The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k

I have first-hand knowledge about 3 such institutions, all of which place at least one student in a position that pays >$150K every year. Perhaps shy of 3x but higher than 2x for sure. Averages tend to be around 90K (pulled down by people who choose to go to grad school).

> Those students aren't going to a school with the name recognition required to easily open doors for entry-level $200k positions.

But they do receive fantastic educations, because they are at teaching-oriented institutions and get hand-held through their pre-career years (internship placement, interviewing skills, etc. are all coached 1:1).

The basic issue is that administrators at lower-tier institutions haven't yet flipped the switch where "CS = Finance/Accounting". They continue to hope and dream that their mathematics faculty can pick up the slack, as if it's still the 80s/early 90s and CS hasn't blossomed into its own highly specialized field.

>place at least one student in a position that pays >$150K every year.

That's pretty much what I mean by it being an outlier: it's not the norm.

>But they do receive fantastic educations, because they are at teaching-oriented...

That's hit or miss: Anyone that's highly self-motivated will do fine at most schools. One prof I had was at best disinterested. They basically summarized chapters on the chalkboard. Their apathy in answering questions went a long way towards discouraging questions in the first place. It was a shame too because their personal research was interesting: 3-dimensional computer vision. Unfortunately this was a foundation course too. I did fine, but other students that were excited about CS yet had no exposure to it before college ended up with C/D/F grades and were either setup for ever tougher times when the work got harder or simply left the program. (Computers were still expensive at that time and the dot com bubble was still building, so it was pretty common for students to arrive enthusiastic about the new tech field but completely without prior exposure to it. Maybe things are better today).

> The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k then you're probably not walking into a $200k+ job on graduation except as an extreme outlier.

Only because they're not located in the "$200k+ starting" job market. If they move to SF then they're immediately worth that much.

Thankfully the jobs are diffusing across America now.

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