As for that survey of PhD students, I suspect you would get similarly dismal reviews of parenthood from parents of 0-5 year old children -- but of course that doesn't mean that nobody should have children! A better survey would ask PhD students how they feel about the experience well after they are done with it.

Are these people complaining about something that’s hard-but-worth-it? Or are they regretful participants in a genuinely broken system? Many signs seem to point to the latter.

Academia has a very small chance of, specifically, anything more than an extremely mediocre income. This, despite the fact that (generally speaking) some who would enter into, let alone complete, a Ph.D program would already tend towards the right said of the bell curve in that regard.

These programs often make many, if not most, people who join them miserable for years at the cost of a medium-to-large cut in lifetime earnings, all for a quickly shrinking chance at stability.

I know money isn’t everything in this life; truly, I do. I know that the pursuit of academic knowledge is noble, and in some ways a separate and valid good in its own right. It’s still a fucked-up system with serious and numerous flaws.

Life doesn’t have an A/B Test and time tends to make things golden in retrospect — so it‘s hard to compare with what you could have done instead with your only truly non-renewable resource.

I would at least not recommend making a PhD if you don‘t love academia itself.

No, you wouldn't. Parenthood of small children has many negatives but it doesn't lead to depression in approaching 50% of cases.

Depressingly, about 0.001% of employers care about these skills.

Of course. For some short-term pain, the child's labour capability provides a clear economic benefit.

What are you going to get out of your short-term PhD pain? At best a job, where you are still limited by your individual labour output. Not exactly a scalable model.

I think that the structure of pursuing research would be a great way to avoid losing a "sense of purpose" that I fear might await me when I do decide to retire. The tricky part of this is finding the right advisor and the right project in the right field.

Sheesh, HN is depressing sometimes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679234

(I'd repeat what I said before, but dang wasn't happy the last time I copy/pasted).

Either direction only works out if a bunch of things line up in your favour over a relatively long period of time. If you choose the academic path and succeed, you end up with little money and a higher credential. If you choose not the academic path, you end up with potentially more money. However, you might fail at one or both paths, so it doesn't really matter at all, and you're better off trying both if you're not so confident. I initially chose the employment path, but as that's failed miserably over that 10 years, I have no money at all to show for it, and I've dipped into school from time to time and generally like it for the most part. If I traded that block of time for just academics or just employment, I'd probably be equally depressed and anxious, just for different reasons.

I had a really easy time getting admitted to the program, was fully funded and received a scholarship. I had a lot of freedom in terms of topic and got to travel every year of the PhD, so I think the actual experience was much better than it sounds like other people have it in the linked study.

What I did see, however, was a university system that was pushing through students at what I would consider an irresponsible pace. This was especially the case with foreign students, who were fodder for the supervisors' career aspirations (the supervisors having to see through a number of students to completion per five-year period to advance). The quality of the resultant PhDs was shockingly low in some cases, but there is no incentive for good theses, just complete theses. And for a university system like Australia's, which is to a large degree reliant on exporting education, these incentives are probably far worse now than they were when I was in the midst of it in 2015-16.

The other major problem is that a PhD is, essentially, an apprenticeship for academia. In Australia, we have a apprenticeships in trades (like electrical, plumbing, etc.) in which you learn 'on the job'; you're paid poorly, you do the menial jobs, but at the end you have a career. A PhD is like that: you do almost everything a lecturer or professor does, except -- and here's the catch -- there's no job prospects whatsoever at the end. And it seems like it'll get worse. Imagine working for four years on something that you love, that you're passionate about, and that you think will change the world intellectually, to only end up being some cheap labour to get publications for others more advanced in their careers -- and then you're done, and shown the door.

I was incredibly lucky in that I got a two-year postdoc, but I had to change fields (which I wanted to do), and I ended up paying for my own post-doc doing contracted research through the university. My heart wasn't in being an academic, and the applied side appealed to me a lot -- but I imagine this would be intolerable for many candidates.

These are factors I tell anyone who is thinking of a PhD. It is a highly-specific apprenticeship for a single industry that is, in Australia, collapsing substantially as the result of its own mismanagement, poor education funding policy at the Federal level, and (of course) the pandemic. It's no wonder that PhD candidates are so discontent, in my view -- despite my having had a wonderful and very fulfilling time.

For example, if you're good in the academy thing and manage to get papers into top tier companies you will finish your PhD faster if you won't take breaks in the industry. If your PhD is on desrible topic (e.g., ML) there are plenty of academy and industry jobs waiting for you, regardless of your work experience.

Seriously, if you're really interested in maths, look into a PhD in it. It's an exciting and fulfilling field. There are decent odds you won't end up in academia, so aim for an area with practical applications or that will teach you useful skills.

My post was specific to to the USA.

> Many maths PhDs don't go into academia, and those that do earn decent money (definitely more than our equivalent of middle school teachers).

I meant during the PhD. In the USA, it's very common for math folks to teach for most of their PhD. Teaching every semester + summers is not common at all in the rest of STEM. Between the higher salary and pension (!), middle school teachers are making a lot more than PhD students. It would be a weird apples-to-oranges comparison for most phd programs, but, unlike mot phd programs, math phds spend an enormous amount of their time TAing baby math classes.

> but this doesn't match my experience or that of anyone I know.

It matches the experience of almost everyone I know

> Seriously, if you're really interested in maths, look into a PhD in it.

But also consider PhDs in other fields.

Or just take an under-paying/low-time-commitment in industry and study math on the side; in a math phd program in the usa, your College Algebra/Calc I teaching load will be almost a full-time job anyways.

But, even more than that, if you're considering a PhD, choose a mathematically-adjacent field that isn't math and pick up a co-supervisor from the math department. The only parts of math that you can't do in other departments are exactly the areas that don't match the criteria of "area with practical applications or that will teach you useful skills".