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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Very high salaries indeed. What I find particularly interesting is that the PhD's clearly have absolutely no incentive of staying in academia. I wonder how bad an effect this has on academia..

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There's certainly no financial incentive for a Ph.D. graduate to remain in academia. That said, there is no financial incentive to do a Ph.D. in the first place. My understanding is that the opportunity cost (salary you didn't earn while doing your Ph.D.) is larger than the total expected extra earnings over your lifetime. My understanding is that by contrast a Masters degree is a good investment.

There are other reasons to stay in academia --- mostly to do with lifestyle. You have a lot more freedom to work on whatever interests you than in many other career paths.

There is certainly incentive to get a Ph.D. in many other studies (where the comparable industry salaries are much lower). Archaeology, East Asian Studies, etc.

> What I find particularly interesting is that the PhD's clearly have absolutely no incentive of staying in academia.

That's not clear.

The total net worth of Stanford's CS professors is a couple of billion dollars. Yes, Billion.

Then again, they have incredible "deal flow".

CS PhDs might get paid this much in academia/research labs. This agrees with the lower proportion of folks who get stock options with their jobs (i.e. academic jobs don't come with options but research lab jobs sometimes do).

That's a bit extreme. No financial incentive perhaps. I had a handful of professors in bschool who were widely known to be multimillionaires.

It's bschool.

So what? The inherent assumption is that graduating PhD have "absolutely no incentive" to remain in academia. I think multimillionaire profs are proof that it is just possible that people choose to teach for reasons entirely unrelated to pay.

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