Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No."
Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted that they really wanted to do academic research.
I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do anything else.
The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.
The problem is that the people who are doing it to become a professor are playing a game that is stacked against them. And if/when you lose that game you're well behind your peers in opportunity cost (see my other post).
I know several brilliant scientists (postdocs and PhD students) from my time at Princeton who had / are having a very hard time finding an academic job. At some point even the purest motivations will succumb to feeling used in these circumstances.
In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other disciplines.
Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No."
Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted that they really wanted to do academic research.
I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do anything else.
The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.