Graduate students are both.

My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating them to the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

I will take a chance on a promising student straight out of undergrad who seems like they might be interesting, knowing that it will take them some time to get their feet under them.

That would be very different if they were employees.

Should we build in more protection and better benefits for graduate students, both from the perspective of them being students and employees? Absolutely. But they are students.

Many PhDs are in their late 20s/early 30s, coming from all swaths of life. They are not children. However, in the American education system they are treated as if they were. While this sentiment can have its perks, as shown in the OP, it also means PhDs do not get proper contracts, pay, benefits, or any voice.

Thankfully, I managed to maneuver myself into a position that is livable but I frequently talk to other CS PhDs from other American institutions. It is depressing to hear what people have to put up with in their degree. Sure, the PhD requires initial training, but the ramp-up is not so slow that it is necessary to be stuck in the same serf status for 5+ years.

Unfortunately, I think this is a systemic issue that is not easy to solve.

Isn't 'student' the preferable option here? I was proud to be a student when I was doing my PhD. (I said 'doctoral student' when I wanted to be more clear.) Why do you want to work for someone else, on their hours, answerable to them, doing their research and teaching their classes, instead of working on your own research?

I can't understand why you'd want to be an employee?!

Well, you are still forced to do all that. After all, you often depend on your advisor's funding or expectations. They can make or break you. You get "freedom", but with that freedom

1) you do not have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy.

2) vacations in general are not a thing (it is really important to submit that paper over Christmas).

3) health benefits and family support depend on the whims of the department, any sort of pension plan is unheard of.

4) you sometimes get paid, sometimes not (depending on whether some administrative clerk "forgets" to put you on payroll this term).

5) you are expected to find other work over three months in the summer (but at the same time must continue your research, there is that deadline we REALLY need to hit, do NOT waste your time trying to earn money).

6) as F1 student you are not permitted to find other means of income unless approved by your advisor or department. If they approve, they have to approve every single term (good luck with that).

7) you can try to pursue your own research but then you should also expect to be isolated, receiving no support or feedback from either your lab, peers, or advisor. This is one of the most common stories. Usually, these students just wither away or drop out.

These are not isolated issues, mind you. This is pretty common across the board from what I have seen. And all of these issues are tolerable, if you were at least paid a living wage. But commonly the pay you get barely covers the rent in the city you live in.

Thankfully, I am in a better position and I have an accommodating advisor, but I still think this is a depressing state of affairs.

1) I did have a contract listing hours, and the vacation policy was the academic calendar: a week in the fall, 5 weeks in the winter, a week in the spring, 3 months in the summer.

2) I didn’t experience any work whatsoever during Christmas

3) Didn’t have a pension plan, but the University did offer reasonable health benefits, and the ACA covered the rest of my family at a low premium.

4) I definitely got paid regularly through the University payroll system.

5) I was given summer contracts to continue doing paid research over the summer. This was a choice, I could have taken internships or a vacation.

6) This is more of an issue with US visas, not really something academics can control

7) I was definitely well supported by my lab, peers, and advisors when I pursued my own research goals. They were very eager to see my results.

I wouldn’t say that your bullet points really represent my institution, so “across the board” usually has a boundary at a specific department or school. I wouldn’t generalize your or my experience to all schools, as they can vary substantially.

Yeah, this is very true, and it's degenerate, because research is a 12-month job and deserves a 12-month salary.

It seems to me that academia takes advantage of extremely smart people (and delusional middling-smart people) because it knows they have nowhere else to go. If you're a legit 140+, you're at the level where corporate America becomes to become a non-option because you're just too different, if not necessarily from the other people, from what you are expected to be as a subordinate.

People here are talking about a union as in organized labor. Where you have a leadership who negotiates a contract with the university, where you're a dues paying member, where you go on strike when advisors systematically abuse students.

You aren't part of a union sadly :(

The NUS does all these things though. They have a leadership who negotiates with the university, they strike sometimes (a bit self-defeating - nobody suffers except their own education,) they take dues from you (via the university, so you don't see them.) They even campaign against politicians, and once made a concerted effort to get members of parliament unseated. That's more than most blue-collar unions do.

Except negotiate contracts, as you don't have a contract because... you're a student not labour - the crux of the issue under discussion!

But you're right I wasn't part of it - I opted out because as I say all they really achieved was running a mediocre cafe.

1. Many, many jobs don't have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy. Even for the jobs that do, there's no guarantee you'll actually be able to take your vacation, or take it when you'd like.

2. See (1). Vacations are almost always worked around projects. I grew up in an engineering environment and I can tell you that's just life in an engineering environment.

3. Many universities offer student health plans. And check your calendar - the year is 2022. Pensions don't exist anywhere - at least not for new employees.

4. I've experienced that working for a start-up too. It happens.

5. My son hasn't had a problem finding work over the summer - that's the bulk of his income. Yes, he also has to continue his research. But, working 60-80 hours per week for 3 months per year is pretty much normal at many places. Whether that should be the case or not is another issue, but I don't see the Ph.D. student getting hit particularly harder than anyone else.

6. The trick is to align your jobs with your research. My son hasn't had problems in that regard. Also, CS departments like to forge and maintain contacts in private industry. So there's research alignment and department alignment to think about.

7. Pursuing your own research that's not aligned with your department isn't smart. After all, you chose that department - weren't you into what they were researching? Hadn't you talked about what kinds of things you were interested in before they brought you on? This is a two-way street - there's things they're looking to get from you and there's things you're looking to get from them. Also, no person is an island - you're going to need help. No one is likely to help you if you're viewed as a maverick who isn't aligned with the department goals.

You are correct that the wages are barely livable. I can tell you from the experience my daughter had in pursuing a Ph.D. that the stipends for CS students are considerably higher than the stipends available for other fields in science. Plus the CS students have the opportunity to work over the Summer and make the "big bucks." Altogether you should be making $60K-$70K per year, which isn't a lot as far as CS grads go, but it's considerably better than subsistence living. That's the equivalent of making $30-$45 per hour which is a wage most Americans would find damn good, and can only dream about earning that kind of money.

All told, there's a lot you have to go through to get a Ph.D. and lots of it is politicking. That's why smart people hire Ph.D. grads - they know they're people who can work against the long odds and still come out successful. That's a desirable trait to have in the people you hire.

So yes, you can easily make double the money you're currently making, but you're never going to have the opportunity to research as you do now. Hopefully you chose your department wisely and are aligned with the kind of research they're into.

This is almost totally unique to CS students and frankly many advisors may not allow their students to skip the opportunity to do more research over the summer.

I'm not sure why you spent so much time defending the PhD system in the US which is frankly broken and borderline abusive.

C'mon - the entire U.S. employment system is broken. What I'm saying is let's not pretend it's only the Ph.D. students getting screwed over. The implication was your life would be so much better if you just went to private industry. No it won't, at least not in the U.S. I guess all that is to say employment in general in the U.S. is broken and borderline abusive (though I'd argue there's no borderline - it's abusive). But hey - I can either emigrate to another country where I have few friends and no family (the bulk of my friends an all of my family is here in the U.S.) or you suffer through their game so you can put a roof over your head and food on the table. I think it's time we acknowledge the quality of life in the U.S. isn't all it's cracked up to be. Oh sure, it could be worse - and boy, don't they always remind you about that! - but it could also be a lot better, which is something they rarely talk about. I guess I'm supposed to be happy I can carry my gun anywhere without needing a concealed carry permit. Apparently none of our other problems matter.

However, not everyone has that luxury. The list I gave is a list of problems I personally witnessed friends/colleagues go through. I also have worked a fair bit of industry, so I know that these patterns are not normal or in any way acceptable.

And yes, with clever strategizing you can find your way around being exploited. However, my point is that this should not be normal. Contractual working conditions would at least give you baseline protection.

And of course, there are always worse conditions to be in in the US (except maybe the students whose immigration status depends on the whim of their advisor) but we should hold universities to higher standards than that.

>Plus the CS students have the opportunity to work over the Summer and make the "big bucks." Altogether you should be making $60K-$70K per year, which isn't a lot as far as CS grads go, but it's considerably better than subsistence living. That's the equivalent of making $30-$45 per hour which is a wage most Americans would find damn good, and can only dream about earning that kind of money.

Just want to point out that this depends. For example, if you are an F1 student you will have to get your internship approved. This can be a lengthy, uncertain process. Some departments/advisors also expect you to not do internships at all as they prefer you to do research instead. Now 60k is also not guaranteed. In NYC universities for example, a full year of funding will net you a ~40k salary before taxes, iff you manage to acquire funding over the summer. Students are thrifty and typically find a way to finance themselves (e.g., move home, find other sources of income), but again, this should not be normal.

- working hours (often paid for 20 but working close to 40)

- paid time off (I have worked through a lot of ‘vacations’ and ‘holidays’)

- health insurance (for my whole family, not just me)

- behavioral requirements for managers (I have stories)

- retirement funding

- credit for work products (imagine being told your name isn’t on a pub because you were in training)

Health insurance, behaviours, retirement, etc I guess so.

The PhD students I knew did not managed own time. They worked when mandated by supervisor, they worked long hours and vacation meant still working. And they could not go to vacations whenever either.

There are downsides, like it being important to be able to fire low performers in employee/employer relationships. But thinking of graduate students as skilled knowledge workers makes it easier to agitate for better conditions.

Did you actually do a PhD? You ought to know that you are completely beholden to your advisor, what they want you to work on, what papers they want you to write, the classes they want you to take etc.

As an employee you actually have rights, benefits and fairer pay and are under basically identical working circumstances.

This isn't my experience.

A PhD is supposed to be your own research, not your advisor's.

Also I think the article and most of the discussion so far has been around experiences in the US' PhD system so I'm not sure experience in the UK is equivalent.

Importantly, a staff scientist position will never be. If you cannot tie your project to one of my grants, you are losing me money. For a student, that might be acceptable. For a staff scientist, it's not.

The good news is that your advisor is safe (tenured, or at least likely to make tenure) in most circumstances, so he's not going to fuck you over unless he's a truly terrible person, and 90 percent of people aren't, as opposed to the corporate world where the pressure of constantly watching your back turns that middle 80% into bad people as well. The bad news is that he does have this extortive power over you, if he wants to use it.

There's also a conflict of interest when it comes to delayed graduations. If the advisor's getting cheap or free grunt work, and delaying your graduation for another year can get him more of said work, then he has an incentive to do so. Of course, this can't be continued forever, because eventually he'll get a reputation for his students taking too long and not doing well... but in the short term, it is an option for him, and it is sometimes exercised.

This is a huge misconception. Yes, as a grad student you aren’t paid well. That doesn’t mean you are cheap for a PI. They have to pay your tuition, as well as university overhead related to your stipend. You don’t see a lot of that money in your bank account, but it is leaving the PI’s research grant nonetheless.

The most productive students are those who are about 3 years in when they are done with classes. The least productive ones are those about to graduate; they typically have a serious case of “senioritis”, and are often busy making contacts in industry and planning a career. Keeping them around makes them less productive, not more.

Professors want to graduate them to free up resources and to bolster their promotion portfolio.

Sure, most would prefer to be rich, or have their parents be rich, or having gotten a full ride or some other stipend. But that's not the norm for most PhD students. For most, the alternative to not being a PhD student employee is to leave college and become an employee employee.

It's incredibly easy to solve. Quit your PhD and encourage others to do so as well. You're being used.

I then spent some time in the Swiss system as a postdoc... night and day! I went from the "American Riviera" (UCSB) to the "Swiss Riviera" (EPFL), and so living costs were about the same. But PhD students were paid more than twice what I was paid in the US.

Also much less teaching at EPFL, but that was probably due to differences in the "type" of institution.

(And what is a riviera?!)

> And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things?

As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.

But the expectations are different. "Well, what do you want to work on?" and tailoring a four or five year program to meet those needs is something I'm very unlikely to do for a staff scientist, but something I discuss with every one of my graduate students.

I know some folks who did PhDs in non-engineering fields at state universities who had to TA every single semester, often TAing multiple classes, just to earn ~$20,000 per year.

There are a lot of problems, though. Your funding isn't guaranteed; you can be basically kicked out of the program (because very few people can afford to self-fund) for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your performance, and if this happens in your 4th or 5th year, you're fucked.

The other ugly fact is that even if you're not paying tuition, your advisor is. This means there's less money to send you to conferences or fund his lab, and it means he's under tighter financial constraints than he really should be. Your advisor gets his budget docked $80,000, and only $20,000 goes to you (the rest, to tuition). That's a bit ridiculous, especially because you're no longer taking many classes or using university resources except to do work on their behalf. There's no good reason you can't be paid $50,000 and your advisor has $30,000 more to fund his lab.

There are some very talented undergraduates with expertise in several of the above. They generally end up being the most successful PhD students, since they are immediately productive from the get-go. (Or, they work as a junior quant at Jane Street.)

>people must continue learning basic skills during PhD

Hence why they’re considered trainees, and not junior employees. Junior employees may have rudimentary skills in certain areas, but not so rudimentary that their productivity is zero (or negative!)

>and postdoc

No postdocs should still be learning basic skills. The (ostensible) purpose of a postdoc is a final step to prepare very talented PhDs for a faculty position. People who are faculty material should have mastered all relevant skills during their PhD. Sadly, the postdoc has been perverted to become a holding tank to absorb excess PhDs with no other career options, since, as the article points out, postdocs are a source of cheap experienced labor.

I’m all for treating grad students and postdocs as real employees, but we need to acknowledge that doing so would dramatically raise standards for admission, which I’m also all for.

That attitude is very bureaucratic.

Computational research is always interdisciplinary. Administrators organize universities into departments according to the needs of undergraduate curricula, but those administrative boundaries have little to do with the skills needed in research. The skills you learn during PhD are probably enough for your PhD research, but then you may need new skills when you start a new project as a postdoc. And again when you start a new project as a junior faculty member.

Postdoc is also the career stage where many people switch fields. For example, a background in X or even computational X is often insufficient for some research topics in computational X. You need to hire people who got their PhDs in CS, mathematics, or statistics, and then those people must learn X before they can contribute. And once they start contributing, they may have to learn software engineering to turn the methods they have developed into useful tools.

Do companies let junior employees work on whatever they want? Manage their time as they want? No, one of the key indicators of an employee status is that their time and work is managed by their employer.

If a junior employee works on some passion project related to their work but on their own time, do they own the intellectual property of that work? Probably not; many employers demand that all IP created by the junior employee belongs to the company.

I think this is a case of “be careful what you wish for”.

In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a level of autonomy that, these days, doesn't really exist.

There is no doubt that in the US in a lot of universities graduate students are a cheap workforce that reinforces corporate interests through research that is funded by them to sway public opinion in certain directions.

To some extent this is due to the sheer amounts of money that flow into academy and the amount of money that you need to stay competitive. So you can't piss off your patrons.

For a long time at least the fact that graduate students in europe received a steady subsidy that is enough to comfortably live and universities received fixed amounts that are not dependent on industry push allowed universities to stay independent for the longest time. Although that too is changing.

There is a fair share of critique on the latter system, but in general it allows for more independent research institutions.

Citation is needed for this subject. Large amount of research in University is funded by NSF or the Federal Government. While industrial interest also contribute significantly to research fund, it is excessive to accuses a lot of universities to be a crony in a corporate-academic-complex.

It was my understanding the vast majority of research funding in the US was either from the NSF, DARPA or similar, or the University. Corporations are a single digit percentage, no?

He tolerated all of it because I was a student and the expectations were set accordingly.

As a professor today, I take the same attitude toward my students, and I think it’s for their benefit. If they want to be treated as employees, the bar for admission becomes a lot higher, and the expectations do as well. The capacity for mistakes goes down, and the latitude and freedom afforded to them to explore their interests goes away entirely.

Employees do what they’re told when they’re told it, and they are paid accordingly. I’m not sure that’s what many PhD students actually want when they say they want to be treated as employees.

They are trainees or apprentices. Our job as supervisors is to show them how the thing is done, and then provide them conditions to do it themselves. Like with any trainee, it is true that productivity is initially not great, because they need training and experience.

Apprenticeships are sometimes looked down upon because they tend to be associated with professions considered unglamorous, but that’s what a PhD is.

They have a student status with the implicit acknowledgment that they would not be as productive as accomplished professionals but their job is not to study as in high school or undergrad, it’s to learn the job by doing it supervised.

University of Amsterdam for example:

"Included Benefits:

University of Amsterdam PhD candidates are fully-funded for four years and earn competitive salaries. The salary will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel, and will range from €2,325 to €2,972 (salary scale P) gross per month. This is excl. 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end of year bonus. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

Additional comprehensive benefits include paid vacation, sick leave, disability insurance, maternity and parental leave and pension contribution. The mandatory Dutch health insurance is not included, but is very affordable (~€100 per month). Relocation costs (within reason) will also be reimbursed."

The EU is in many ways worse. You have the same problem except that your PhD is worth much less.

PhD students in the EU make less than students in the US! And virtually all of them in the US get full benefits.

You just said good salary, and listed University of Amsterdam as offering 27900-35000 per year.

At UNC, minimums are: bio $33k, chemistry $28k, CS $25k. And North Carolina is far cheaper than Amsterdam.

PhDs in the EU live often in much more expensive areas and make less than PhD students in the US.

This is debatable.

>PhD students in the EU make less than students in the US! And virtually all of them in the US get full benefits.

This is completely false. The absolute highest stipends in the US are at places like Stanford or Columbia and even then only reach something like 45000 per year and both Palo Alto and NYC are much more expensive than Amsterdam. They also do not receive anywhere near the same benefits as in UVA.

>You just said good salary, and listed University of Amsterdam as offering 27900-35000 per year.

With +16% in bonuses, paid vacations, paid sick days, etc. With bonus the salary is 32364-40600 Which is more than 90% of US stipends.

>At UNC, minimums are: bio $33k, chemistry $28k, CS $25k. And North Carolina is far cheaper than Amsterdam.

Also false. I encourage you to do the math for yourself but Amsterdam is about as expensive to live in as Chapel Hill.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Also the stipends in Netherlands are more or less the same across the country so at Utrecht, Maastricht, Leiden etc. which are much less expensive than Amsterdam.

>PhDs in the EU live often in much more expensive areas and make less than PhD students in the US.

This just isn't supported by the data.

> This is completely false.

Then you don't know the US system. As evidenced by the fact that you say:

> With +16% in bonuses, paid vacations, paid sick days, etc. With bonus the salary is 32364-40600 Which is more than 90% of US stipends.

Every PhD student at every university I've ever seen has paid vacation, paid sick days, etc. Conference travel all around the world, at levels that EU universities can't match. As a PhD student my program basically paid for vacations in: China, 4 different EU countries, 5-6 different US states + Hawaii + Alaska, Japan, etc. There are plenty of bonuses and perks.

> The absolute highest stipends in the US ... They also do not receive anywhere near the same benefits as in UVA.

I'm at one of these places. In terms of benefits, we far outstrip the EU. The flexibility we have to spend money on travel, equipment, perks, is incomparable.

But let's take a step back. You started by saying that this problem is solved in the EU and now you backtracked to arguing about +/-10% salary. Big deal.

The EU is expensive, it pays poorly. You want to argue the US is a little worse. But your statement that this problem is solved in the EU couldn't be further from the truth.

I've been in it, stipends in my department were ~$18,000 per year with medical insurance and some funding for conference travel. No Vacation days, no sick days, nothing else.

>I'm at one of these places. In terms of benefits, we far outstrip the EU. The flexibility we have to spend money on travel, equipment, perks, is incomparable.

Columbia: No paid time off, no sick days: https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/compens...

Find me Stanford's list of benefits showing they offer paid vacation.

>But let's take a step back. You started by saying that this problem is solved in the EU and now you backtracked to arguing about +/-10% salary. Big deal.

I didn't backtrack at all. You're the one ignoring the fact that Amsterdam is the same cost as Chapel Hill but offers up to 15k more in salary and much better benefits and there's an even bigger delta in cheaper Dutch cities.

So you can make up numbers all you want and pretend that conference travel is somehow better than Bonuses, PTO, Sick days and Pension plans but no one buys that.

Fun fact, your own page shows that the the minimum at Columbia is higher than the max at University of Amsterdam!

The idea that EU PhD students are paid better than US PhD students is just as absurd now, as it was when you stated it first.

> No paid time off, no sick days

There's a lot of confusion here. People look at lists like this and they assume they are comparable to their EU counterparts. In the EU the university tends to be king and sets the rules for departments. In the US departments are far more autonomous and many things are more informal. The university sets lower bounds that departments add to.

All you need to do is look at the department website: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/education/phd/policies/ CS PhD students at Columbia get two weeks vacation + 11 federal holidays. There you go!

> Find me Stanford's list of benefits showing they offer paid vacation.

Ok.. all you need to do is open the grad student handbook. https://adminguide.stanford.edu/chapter-10/subchapter-2/poli...

But again. You need to drop your narrow EU bureaucratic view of things. I have never applied to vacation as a grad student. Never, among my 50+ grad students so far as a single grad student applied for vacation. Not one of them has ever applied for vacation time. Grad students just tell me "Hey, I'll be gone these 3 weeks." And I say "Enjoy". That's it. Same with sick leave.

You cannot interpret US rules from the EU point of view. It's nonsense.

> I didn't backtrack at all. You're the one ignoring the fact that Amsterdam is the same cost as Chapel Hill but offers up to 15k more in salary and much better benefits and there's an even bigger delta in cheaper Dutch cities.

You have no idea about the cost of housing in UCN vs Amsterdam. Or what cheap means.

You can rent, right now, a 2 bedroom / 2 bath with a pool for $1100-1200 in Chapel Hill that's an easy walking distance to the university. That's without searching and at literally the worst time of the year to rent anything in a college town. And that's walking distance. If you want to drive to stay in a "smaller town" you can pay $800 for a 2 bedroom.

The US is far more sparsely settled than Western Europe. Cheap small towns here are far far cheaper.

> So you can make up numbers all you want and pretend that conference travel is somehow better than Bonuses, PTO, Sick days and Pension plans but no one buys that.

Your own numbers completely refute your story. And even the simplest Google search shows that perks in the US are actually far better than perks in the EU. That vacations are good, conference travel is not "business travel" in the US, that you get paid time off, etc.

But you don't want to look even at the evidence you find. You want to believe what you believe. I'm out!

Yeah sure, as a boss, you're going to keep insisting you're One of the Good Ones whenever someone sticks up for your workers to have formal rights.

My university abolished its Graduate School staff after Katrina. Pray tell, what lower bounds again?

>Fun fact, your own page shows that the the minimum at Columbia is higher than the max at University of Amsterdam!

NYC is far more expensive than Amsterdam. Salary at UVA is higher than the majority of US stipends. Period. This isn't debatable. It's probably higher than stipends at almost every Public university in the US and many Private ones outside the Ivy+ group.

>Grad students just tell me "Hey, I'll be gone these 3 weeks." And I say "Enjoy". That's it. Same with sick leave.

It's unfortunate that your Stockholm syndrome has led you to beliefs like having guaranteed PTO is not as good as hoping your advisor lets you take a break.

>You have no idea about the cost of housing in UCN vs Amsterdam. Or what cheap means.

Take your pick of sources. You're just pulling numbers out of thin air.

https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/raleigh...

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

>Your own numbers completely refute your story. And even the simplest Google search shows that perks in the US are actually far better than perks in the EU. That vacations are good, conference travel is not "business travel" in the US, that you get paid time off, etc.

Maybe get your eyes checked?

Pretty sure 40,000 is higher than 25,000 but maybe I'm wrong there. Your idea of what constitutes perks is some kind of hellish capitalist nightmare.

Conference travel and short-term research visits have nothing to do with vacation. They are just business travel, where you rarely have enough time to do anything interesting.

I did my PhD in Finland and finished about a decade ago. During that time, I made business trips to Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark (x2), Germany, Italy (x2), Turkey, and the US. I also had the time and money to travel on my own, and I visited Iceland (x2), Kenya, Morocco, Nepal, Peru, and Tanzania, in addition to 6 or 7 trips to various European countries. Some of my friends didn't travel as much, but they bought a house, because doing a PhD was a middle-class job.

Also, this branch of the discussion was not about the EU but about "much of Europe". That usually refers to the West/North European countries that remained free after WW2. Large parts of Europe suffered under communism and other totalitarian governments during the Cold War, and their standard of living is still lower because of that.

That's the European view for sure. In the US it's perfectly normal for PhD students to take a week off at the conference destination and enjoy. While the university pays for all of the flights, and the stipend paid during the conference is enough to cover the expenses of the vacation.

> I did my PhD in Finland and finished about a decade ago. During that time, I made business trips ...

Except that I got to take 1-2 weeks off at those places after every conference. As do many US PhD students.

> Also, this branch of the discussion was not about the EU but about "much of Europe". That usually refers to the West/North European countries that remained free after WW2

Sure. The example given was that of University of Amsterdam. Where students are not better off than in the US, and in many ways are much worse off (job-wise).

I've lived in four countries during my academic career: Finland, Chile, UK, and US (California). The standard of living for grad students was generally the highest in Chile. Cost of living was low, and academic jobs in good universities had relatively high status, which was reflected in salaries. Finnish grad students had lower domestic purchasing power, but they could afford internationally priced things like tech and travel better. With two incomes, buying a house and having kids was also a perfectly reasonable life choice as a grad student. Life in the UK was more austere: the salaries were lower, the cost of living was higher, and the regulations were stricter.

Today in California, grad students live in poverty. Their standard of living reminds me of undergrads in Finland, except that they can't afford to rent a whole apartment. Only the ones with a decent side gig (such as consulting) can afford something resembling the lifestyle of Finnish grad students 10-15 years ago.

Who needs benefits like affording to live in a home when you can have Conference Travel instead! Woo!

I’ve been both at a UC and a private Southern university and I’ve never seen this.

The dental plan was indeed appallingly bad.

They can't be the primary workhorses and also not research employees.

Aren't PhD students working long hours already? I really dont see where is the supposed additional slack they are having.

> I will take a chance on a promising student straight out of undergrad who seems like they might be interesting, knowing that it will take them some time to get their feet under them. That would be very different if they were employees.

That is called junior.

They are - but I rarely impose my preferences for when they work, don't check to see if they've accrued enough vacation time, etc.

There's also slack that's not just "hours worked". A PhD student going down an intellectually stimulating but ultimately tangental rabbit hole that doesn't tie itself to a grant aim but might spawn a side project is something I'd encourage. I would not do the same for a staff scientist.

Depends highly on the field. I knew some materials science PhD students who were relatively well-funded to work in the lab (~$35k per year), but often spent nights and weekends baby sitting experiments. But there was no undergraduate materials science program, so no teaching!

I was in the mathematics department where most people worked as teaching assistants for $22k per year (summer work available) but otherwise did as they pleased. I would maybe meet with my adviser for a few minutes per week? And after you've taught calculus five times, you can kind of coast.

If find this sentence borderline offensive, and for many reasons.

I'll just lay out the most prominent one: don't you miss doing actual work yourself?

But I also take my responsibility to keep my lab - including both staff scientists and graduate students - funded rather seriously.

And to literally answer your question - you don't need any kind of prior degree at all to start a PhD. I was recently investigating getting a gifted engineer onto a PhD programme without an undergraduate, and it was possible.

It matters a lot whom you have impressed with your skills, your knowledge and your dedication, it goes without saying, and by how much. Like in chrisseaton's comment above, they were investigating about a "gifted engineer" and I'm guessing they would have written a strong letter of recommendation for that candidate.

So it may not be possible for everybody in practice, but in theory, it's possible.

To clarify, you had "one" of what? :)

I still had some restrictions (e.g. I had to publish on the schedule determined by publication deadlines, even if I wasn't quite ready) but even so, the freedom I enjoyed just doesn't compare to any kind of job I had before.

I studied AI and I think it would go great with entomology. A double PhD in AI and entomology, maybe with a third one in robotics... At the very least that would give me a unique background, now wouldn't it?

Ah, but ars longa, vita brevis...

Why are you asking?

The Anglo-Saxon tradition is one of disorganised irreverence.

(Also, those countries tend to have shorter PhDs. So it's not exactly wasted time.)

... my positive experiences were all stated goals that department purposely worked really hard to bring about. I rate my experience a strong 9+ out of 10 and would do it again.

I do know other folks who had horrible, abusive PhD experiences at other universities. But that is the fault of the university for not creating a good environment.

Of course, I think this is super dependent on the subfield and advisor. Based on our department surveys, ML / AI / Graphics students rated the lowest in satisfaction, happiness, and highest in hours worked per week. While, Theory, HCI, and Systems are overall pretty happy and have regular working hours.

EDIT: In response to other threads, my pay is also very comfortable. I can take vacations, eat out, and afford a nice studio apartment. Free health insurance as well.

In Europe and Asia you take a bachelor, then a masters degree. Both as university students. A masters opens the door to apply for a Ph.D.

In Denmark, for example, a Ph.D. is commonly a job position, with a limited contract. Union governed, pay, pension. You apply for a position when one is announced, just like many other jobs. Literally you see things like: "University X, department Y are looking to fill a Ph.D. position in Z. Applicants must have these qualifications ..."

I made the mistake of applying for a PhD track and failed to get in, as those are super competitive. Now I feel as if I cannot ask for new letters of recommendation to try to get a masters. Its a shame, as I would love to go to graduate school one day.

I was offered the chance to be a non-matriculated student with the option of becoming a regular student after 1 quarter, but that is expensive. Once I pay off my car I think I will try to take that offer.

Whatever the faculty wants happens.

I feel us computer scientists and computer science students are in the best field in this regard. There are so many interesting CS jobs where you can both get a competitive salary and engage your brain -- often even in relation to what you worked on as a MSc/PhD student.

This is an inherent, intractable problem with many careers that are also passions. There will always be a contingent of people willing to put in extremely long, brutal hours because they genuinely love what they’re doing. This disadvantages, if not entirely disqualifies people who simply want a regular 9-5 job in said career, since they will invariably be less successful than people for whom the career is their passion and thus push themselves because they genuinely enjoy it.

As an extreme example, consider Olympic athletes. Often for little-to-no pay, they put their bodies through long, grueling training regimens that make backbreaking sweatshop labor look easy by comparison. It is simply impossible to be a “casual” Olympic athlete.

I know a junior PI who pledged when they started their lab to maintain a culture of healthy work/life balance. That ended up going nowhere, since most of their trainees worked hard anyway because they genuinely enjoyed it. After hiring a couple trainees who were not so passionate about their work and produced very little by comparison (and caused the lab to not get funded for a major grant in the process), the PI made it a point to only hire passionate trainees, and so the cycle was complete.

This is the heartbreaking part. It's like the bullied child becoming the bully: it happened to me so it's gonna happen to you.

The status quo continues unchanged, despite strongly negative experiences, because nobody is empowered to make change. Quite the opposite.

I was under the impression these athletes get lucrative sponsorships from private companies, at least for the more high-profile sports.

At the same time, there's also reason for cautious optimism. In the German system, for instance, PhD students are paid (mind you, it's an academic salary, which is not a lot but a first year PhD student with a full time contract already makes more money than the median German salaried worker) and new graduate school regulations are supposed to crack down on advisers abusing the system.

Yes, not everything is perfect, and there's a bunch of people in academia that are trying hard to keep the status quo, but things are shifting slightly.

The most worrisome trend, also mentioned in the article, is that there are just so many highly qualified academics. If the trend I see in machine learning continues, the next generation of PhD students will require multiple publications before being admitted to a job... That's highly problematic in more than one way.

Just to put numbers on this: PhD students earn roughly 4300€ per month (before taxes and insurance), resulting in something like 2600€ take-home pay. This is for a “full-time” position (quotes because all positions are full-time, it is only the pay that is reduced). In CS full-time positions are common, in most other fields they are not.

If you want to look up details, search for E13 TV-L.

Sometimes paid. In engineering and CS you might be able to land a full position, but for example in physics you can call yourself lucky if you get a half position -- with the same amount of work, obviously. Many must apply for scholarships, which is comparable to a half position but has the downside of not paying into unemployment insurance.

In the humanities, my understanding is that PhD students are not paid at all.

Also, the opening quote is unfortunate, in that it probably contradicts the article and makes many false assertions (while Dyson Freeman might be forgiven for thinking at the ripe age of 90 that a PhD is a harmful choice for "a woman who pretends to do research she is not well-suited for, only to get a paper that means nothing", I don't think it's something that can be used as a serious argument by people in academia today...).

Finally, the whole article is extremely reductive, focusing only on negative aspects, without touching any positives; i.e. it's effectively a 'rant' rather than a nuanced analysis.

However, the biggest beef I have with it is the whole "therefore the phd needs to be abolished" conclusion, which is a complete non-sequitur, and effectively the "Politician's fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism). No, PhDs do not need to be abolished. They do need to be upgraded to come with some protections, but that's a very different argument. At the moment, there are very few protections, and most if not all career training beyond the immediate scope of the relevant research simply comes down to supervisors' good will. However, talking about abolishing the institution because it's "broken" is no less a serious proposition than overthrowing governments and leaving countries into chaos because governments are "broken".

Or could the “because” be that you find the work deeply intellectually stimulating to the point where it’s hard to step away? I guess maybe that crowd isn’t writing about it, since they’re off doing, you know, science. This is my problem with the monthly “down with PhDs!” screed that shows up on the front page of HN. There is a huge anti-survivor bias.

They do... but the thing is the work for themselves, which I think is a different kind of hard work.

> and in the end only few of them attain their goal of becoming a professor

Is that the goal?

They work for professors who sometimes care that they eventually get a PhD and sometimes don’t care if they live or die.

I love hard work, but not if it’s paired with a toxic environment where I’m going to be working like a slave for a decade and maybe will never achieve anything close to the impact I thought I’d have.

> goal?

Not sure, but if not what is the goal? To be in a research lab forever as an assistant or to do your own research? The latter requires power and position, like a professorship.

I think we need to break this mindset. It’s your research. Not your professors. By the end, your professor probably doesn’t really understand it anymore because you’ve pushed the envelope beyond them.

> but if not what is the goal?

Go into industry.

As a student. Yes? How would they stop you?

> Is that the goal?

I have seen only a small slice of all the theoretical computer science PhD students in my parts of the world (Central and Western Europe) but almost universally they passionately loved their work (both research and teaching) and would prefer to do it in the future.

"Becoming a professor" is one of the easiest ways to continue doing what you are doing, so I would say yes, it is a goal.

Like I have said elsewhere also, we are blessed to have many industry jobs in CS which are quite mentally challenging, and so for us it does not need to be the only choice. But still, a permanent academic position offers many things that the industry cannot -- hence a goal for many.

Doctors? Residency

IT? Support or DevOps

Lawyers? “Partner track”

Our current education system at all levels is fundamentally broken in many ways. We don’t even agree on what education is for- most people think it’s for preparing you for work but many people think that it’s for training you to be well-rounded or to inculcate cultural mores and values or to propagate ideology.

In general, to prepare people for work (to enable them to self-support and to be net benefit for society rather than net cost) you need some basic education (reading, arithmetic, etc) and then some skill training.

I think all sorts of careers would benefit from having apprenticeships that incorporate whatever mix of classroom training and practice, but there are several problems:

1. Most businesses don’t want to bear the costs of training employees, and don’t care to be vested in their success in that way. They’d rather pick drop-in rock stars, compensate them as little as necessary to attract and retain them, and cut them loose the second their performance starts to drop.

2. Gatekeeping - the people who would train apprentices might feel threatened by apprentices, mostly because who wants to compete for their own job, so why not limit the number of entrants and either assimilate or eliminate ones that could pose competitive threats. many organizations, eg the AMA (American Medical Association), cosmetologists, moving companies(!) capture government licensing mechanisms and either limit entry to the field or impose ridiculous burdens of effort and cost for entry.

3. Power dynamics. TFA discussed this at length, but many people happily exploit those under their power for labor, sex, or money.

So the bottom line is that we’re screwed; there’s so much entrenched interest at every single level, and so much negative human nature involved, that there will never be some kind of systemic solution.

It's not all bad. Sure, the whole graduation ceremony is an elitist clown-show with a weird dress-code, but it was fun.

But perhaps I was lucky.

Imho it might be the only time in your career when you are truly, 100% your own boss. You own your PhD thesis. While your professor/advisors give input and feedback you ultimately decide what goes in there and what not. You have the freedom to explore anything you deem as relevant and there are no customers/co-workers/VCs etc who tell you otherwise.

My limited world view saw that nearly all grad students had to work on the projects that their PI got funding for. Their own research was never financially possible unless they got significant funding from outside their lab. Even my SO, who got grad school fully paid for by a smaller government agency, couldn't work on individual research and had to do what the PI said.

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

A more accurate description would be that you are your advisor's slave.

"Are you a doctor yet son?" "No ma, but I've got three publications in Frontiers of Cell, Memory, and Sports Management."

The contents suggest that author's title is hyperbolic and they know it, as the author is [clearly] calling for dismantling/restructuring/etc of the whole structure and pipeline by laying out each of the faults point by point.

I worked a bit and want to return for a PhD in CS. I took some courses at a nearby (and good) institution and did well (for fun). I want to continue taking graduate courses and and get involved in research before I apply for PhD programs (since I been out of school for a while).

Curious to hear from older students their experiences or from professors on thoughts about older students (say late 30s/early 40s) and whether there are job opportunities in industry for folks in this age range upon completion (in say applied areas).

I’m doing it because I really want to do research and enjoy hard theoretical problems outside the scope of your regular SWE job.

I strongly suggest reading the "How to Survive your Doctorate" [1]. It goes into social, financial and office politics side of doing a PhD. You might think that it's something you can avoid, but it's not. It's a book I wish I've read before going down the PhD route.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Jane-Matthiesen/dp/0335234445

- It's a full-time job. Unless you're really brilliant, or your current position has a huge overlap with the research you want to work on, expect to drop your current position.

- You have a steady income at this point, so you're not in a rush. Be patient and research where to apply.

- If you can use your position to first network with your future advisor, do it. Can you set-up some small collaboration relevant to your current position? Even better. Trust can get you a long way, and lift any doubts.

- Your strong card is that you will probably need much less "babysitting" than a younger student. Play that well.

- Writing is essential part of the PhD. If you already have strong technical writing skills, that's a huge advantage.

- Find a PhD that involves the least amount of exams possible. It's fine to attend courses if you find the topic relevant to your research, but being forced through an exam routine may not sit very well if you're already in your mid-30s.

- Post-PhD industry job opportunities typically arise through (paid!) industry internships. Make sure to complete 1-2 of them, even if that will add to your PhD time.

It's been very difficult to do both school and work simultaneously. It helps that I enjoy learning the material and have had some truly outstanding professors. The biggest challenges for me have been (in no particular order):

- Group assignments with unmotivated or unethical students. In 3 separate instances, I caught a student in my group attempting to submit blatantly plagiarized work (simple GitHub search to find the duplicate code). Other times I would be the only person to write any code that actually worked.

- Seemingly pointless bureaucracy, like a form certifying that I completed all my coursework which needs approval by 5 people and a minimum of 4 weeks processing time. As far as I can tell, this form only asserts that I passed >90 hours of coursework, which is already in my transcript.

- Not enough one-on-one time with my advisor.

- Not enough guidance on the publishing process. I have collected anecdotes from some professors and snippets from my advisor, but I would have appreciated some formal training. I would have gladly swapped some independent study credit hours for a course about academic publishing.

On the plus side:

- COVID restrictions forcing classes to be online really helped with logistics.

- I used to have imposter syndrome pretty bad. But comparing my work to that of other PhD students across a broad range of topics has proven to me that I'm at least better than average for this university. Maybe I am a big fish in a small pond, but some of those peers have FAANG jobs now. So maybe I'm actually getting pretty good at this stuff.

PhD students should be employees with all of the protections this gives them. They should have unions (I have been both at union and non-union shops, you want to be in a graduate student union). PhD students should benefit from the combination of protections given to students and to employees.

Students should get paid a living wage. The problem today is that NIH, NSF, DARPA and others refuse to give us funds to pay students reasonably. I cannot write an NIH grant to pay a PhD student reasonably. Literally. My grant will be rejected because I'm paying too much. I can't pay postdocs what they are worth either for the same reason.

For better pay, you need to lobby Congress to beat NIH, NSF, DARPA and others with a big stick until they stop this system of abuse.

If you want to end advisor abuse it's simple: PhD students should not be tied to advisors. Under a system where your funding depends on one person, you always suffer from a power imbalance. PhD students should be free agents. When you join, the university promises you 6 years of funding and checks in every 2 years. Go nuts.

As for the thesis? Even in STEM a thesis is important. But, what a thesis is has changed. Today you often staple together 5-10 papers that you published. That's great!

PhD overproduction?! Nonsense! We don't have nearly enough PhDs. The demand for PhDs in industry is huge across many fields. It's true that in some fields there is too much supply, but there's also an oversupply of people of those majors in general anyway, that's not an issue with the PhD.

PhDs are critical for the development of humanity. It's a system that takes a smart person and turns them into a capable smart person who can find hard new problems and solve them.

There is absolutely no reason why we can't unionize all PhD students, immunize them from advisor influence, and pay them a living wage.

... is it really? CS is as far as I know one of the fields with the highest demand and even there the jobs that actually need a phd are pretty rare. As far as I can tell it's possibly only ML where there's a good amount of jobs that essentially require a phd.

Yes. Although, I don't blame you for being misled by terrible articles about the situation.

Historically, departments look at PhDs that go to industry as having pursued "alternate careers" that the only real goal is to stay in academia at all costs. So they talk about them as being failures. Although, that couldn't be further from the truth.

STEM PhDs have huge demand. Bio PhDs, CS, Math PhDs, engineering, etc.

How you value PhDs also matters. In many fields, a PhD will not net you more money. It will net you a much more interesting job though. In some fields, like ML, it will net you both more money and a more interesting job.

But. There is vast vast oversupply of non-STEM PhDs. These departments need to be shut down or completely reformed to stop screwing over their students.

That said, PhD students (and researchers) are still poorly paid (though PhD stipends are being raised over the next few years), and though France has a legal 35 hour work week, informal pressure of academia means that tends to be thrown out the window.

There are legal requirements on graduate schools that help protect students from abusive advisors or other abuse within their laboratories, of course since the research world is small, it remains to see how effective they can be.

I don't understand this point of view. Why do you want to be an employee, working for someone else, with all the obligations and restrictions of that... rather than a student free to pursue what you want and to do it in your own way.

If you want to be an employee and to be told what to research, then become a research engineer, don't do a PhD. That's an existing research career that's open to you.

Did I have an unusually permissive advisor or something? My advisor didn’t control my leave - it was up to me to manage my time.

You indeed have a nice advisor. Some advisors are hard people who manage their student's time at 3am on a Saturday. Or who insist on 14 hour days. Students under these people (let's face it, they're not working with them, they're under them) have no good options.

I know many such students. Some universities are particularly prone to such behavior from faculty. I warn all of my undergrad students to go visit labs at 7-8pm and see how happy people are to be there before accepting an offer.

I guess the current situation really depends on supervisor, so it would be nice if there are laws for students' basic right.

In any case it shouldn't be up to whether you had a permissive advisor or not, PhD students like everyone deserve time off, and without legal protections that always gets abused.

* Full employee status, including pension benefits. You're still underpaid of course, compared to market rates. This also addresses issues like parental leave and holidays.

* PhD contracts are fixed-term, 1+3 years. If you are given a third fixed-term contract, you are entitled (by law) to convert your contract to indefinite term. This makes it hard to keep around students for longer than needed as cheap workers.

* The typical format for a STEM PhD thesis is "story chapter" + peer-reviewed publications in verbatim. Which means you can spend more time on research instead on an exercise in futility.

* PhD defense is purely ceremonial and timed. OFC, you can still be made look like a fool.

There was too much pressure for funding and I was excluded from a lot of good research because I was "paying my own way". They offered me a 13,000/year stipend if I was an RA + teaching summer classes. I could not take this because even with my wife's salary we would not be able to pay rent. In addition, with taxes, healthcare, and other small university fees removed I'd net around $10,000. The only benefit was getting ~$6,000/year in classes but that wasn't a huge sell for me.

I wish universities would pay more. The selection process for a PhD deserves justification for a living wage (~45,000/year or better). I would abandon my day job in a heart beat to go back if they offered me this despite it being astronomically less than I make today. I wanted to be a professor so bad but the cards life dealt me had me needing a job since I was a kid, and healthcare for just as long. I just never had the opportunity, and when I tried the system was so broken I could not navigate it. There seems to be far more opportunity for H1Bs, who are capable of making such sacrifices. The vast majority of my cohort in school were foreign-born visa students which also made me sad for the state of my country.

That's not to say there aren't abuses and inefficiencies in Science doctoral programs. Just that "Abolish the PhD" is the wrong rallying cry.

What should be abolished are 97 percent of postdoc positions. Postdocs used to be a rare, prestigious opportunity to do something different one might not want to do for one's whole life, like work for IAS in Princeton or for the government doing cryptography. What they became is something else entirely: another stupid rung on the ladder, an excuse to dangle the carrot of tenure (which isn't "lifetime job security" as academic detractors like to claim, but merely the presence of due process, as opposed to arbitrary whim, around personnel decisions) for longer.

While my postdoctoral mentor lamented the decline of the traditional dissertation, most programs even express their graduation requirements in terms of N Papers, in STEM fields.

Current minimum wage for these seem to be 491200 NOK, or roughly $50k / year. Obviously not a whole lot compared to being a salaried professional with Masters Degree...but also much more than the usual student loan / stipend here in Norway, which is 128877 NOK / $13.2k

Even weirder, my law degree is what technically qualifies me to teach graduate students in an IT program (maybe not THAT weird, I do teach legal research and Info Policy...but also web design/admin/programming)

I did my PhD (and an MSc before that) in EU, as a PhD I was paid an above average salary and it even provided me enough time to work as a consultant in parallel where I was able to get a few patents - which also look good from "academic perspective"

my phd advisor didn't really care at all as long as I was producing papers that got accepted to conferences / journals and he was a co-author even though he literally never even talked to me about any of the topics of my research, so basically zero supervision as long as I produced "academic results"

I finished my PhD in 3 years (normally it should have taken more) and went straight to running my startup

would I have done it again? sure

can it be done better? sure - science and all the institutions around it are just "processes" that the collective mankind came up with over last few centuries, there will always be outliers that do not fit in, I never did fit in myself, but i sucked it up and made the best out of it, and that is what i believe the greatest thing that phd thought me - persistence under extreme pressure, and i still do that to this day - the pressure is much higher than it was back then because the stakes are much higher, but phd was the first step - breaking the barriers showing that even I can push the boundaries of what is considered possible

if money are an issue - just do a phd in EU, here I never heard of an unpaid phd position

Academia is a fucking joke.

i know a lot of guys that were not able to finish phd or even basic bachelor degrees because they were too "proud" to adapt and believed they do not need to adapt and can live a good enough life without it

personally, in my organization i would never hire a person without at least a MSc for a non-research position and without a Phd for a research position - because to me the degree signifies they can adapt and will do what is necessary to accomplish the goals and won't quit on me when they will be pushed out of their comfort zone

1. You learn that you know nothing, even for the slimmest slice of science

2. You learn that a search on the internet, twitter whatever will not help

3. You learn that you have to put the work to start understanding

4. You learn how to learn in depth

5. You learn how cope with failure and yes how to learn from it

That's it.

The return on investment for a PhD student in Computer Science to society must be absolutely ridiculous.

Are you sure? Most of them produce a bunch of either theoretical papers with little hope of ever being applied (e.g. guys squabbling about second decimal point of the constant in theoretical computational complexity of some algorithm), or, if they're in an applied field, their papers are heavily gamified to beat state of the art in some meaningless way (or just fake the results). Most of it is useless BS and I'd say is actually worsening the society, because journals and conferences are now filled with useless cruft which make finding the actual valuable contributions very hard.

Best decision I've made in my entire life.

Academia is a meat grinder. Choose not to throw yourself in.

We need more basic research, I personally think it's underfunded and that's the reason that graduates are underpaid. Research in the sciences can be extremely expensive just buying equipment and supplies.

On top of that, we have universities taking massive chunks of the research funding for their own pockets to fund admin and other departments

One route to making things more affordable could be more nonprofits working as research supply companies instead of profiteering corporations.

Either way, most of the education seems to happen when you're locked away in your dorm room. I could have honestly done that studying anywhere with a bit of peace and quiet.

Motivation and likeminded students who put in effort for years.

Programming happens to be very addictive but this is rarely the case in other types of work.