I think it’s because they figure they can get a good job with just a BS degree and don’t want to spend any more time in school.
Probably true enough.
I’m in graduate school(M.S Biotechnology and Bioinformatics) now, and I knew going in that I would probably make less money then if I just stuck with the career track I was on.
It’s difficult to work under the conditions of science graduate programs. If you do a doctorate in biology/chemistry/psychology/sociology you’re paid less then an entry level research associate and work 3x as hard for 5-7 years.
I have always had my eye on the doctoral program. But even I question if it’s worth the effort and time. 5-7 years of your youth is worth unimaginable amounts.
Grad students are very cheap labor for universities. That will probably never change.
Not necessarily true. If grad student life wasn’t so ridiculously hard, you might attract some more talent.
As it stands you need to right combination if insanity(or Naivety , smarts and drive to do a Ph.D.
There are plenty of people smart enough to do a Ph.D. But most of them probably go off to do something that’ll make them more money without half the effort and destitution.
Don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I have a MBA and it was not that hard to get. But I was very good at being a student. I went for free on scholarship.
I did not do research , but I did have to take classes in 6 different areas , plus wrote a bunch of papers , and did several large group projects and I had to make a lot of presentations to classes. It took me 2 years of full time classes.
How do you do determine what the correct amount of American graduate students in science is? You say “so few”, but maybe there are too many.
True. I was in a PhD science program in my early 20’s. The classroom learning wasn’t that difficult and I loved my teaching assistantship. The research part was brutal however. My advisor as trying to make tenure at an Ivy League university and she was like Godzilla with perpetual PMS. It was made very clear that I was there to work for her 7 days a week 16 hours a day and everything else was secondary to that. I made the mistake of saying that I wanted to get married and have kids at some point in my 20’s and that just set her off. We didn’t last longer after that. I decided to leave that chain gang under the cover of darkness one night never to return.
It has nothing to do with American student’s talent or preparedness. We have many of the best in the world even in the hard sciences at the undergraduate level. It is just that PhD programs are often set up as sweat shops that only appeal to people coming from 3rd world countries. You have to give up a typical American existence to pursue one and then you end up with a degree that usually has negative monetary worth over lesser degrees. It isn’t a big mystery why talented Americans don’t flock to them and why professors are still happy to have a captive workforce thousands of miles from home who can’t just quit when they aren’t treated well enough.
For foreign grad students and postdocs, there’s a lot of great opportunity “back home” once they complete their studies here. Competition for academic positions in the US is far more brutal.
I know an Indian postdoc who is starting to look for jobs, and it seems like she has a good shot at a position at Seriously Hot Shit Indian University. If she was instead searching for a position in the US, she would face brutal competition for a position at any low-ranking state school. That’s not a slur against her at all – she’s quite brilliant and would be a great researcher and teacher – there’s just a huge glut of similarly talented and credentialed people looking for academic jobs.
Also I want to point out that in many scientific fields, you can’t get a very good job even with a BS. My biology degree got me a job as a technician where I earned 35k and had no chance for advancement without a PhD. There are some fields where you can get well-paying industry jobs with a BS, but it’s hardly a guarantee.
Why bust my ass in an academic sweat shop 5-7 years when I can get an MBA in two years or a JD in 3 years and make a six figure salary?
This. While not really science, I have a masters in engineering and frankly as a whole engineers are underpaid in my opinion. I fianlly went into project management because I couldn’t feed my family on what I made as an engineer.
Love of the field of course.
But of course when I was a student it was a lot more affordable to be cavalier about careers and earning potential. I’ve only been out of college ~15 years, but when I see modern tuitions I feel like one those old farts who were always complaining about how a carton of milk was a nickel back in the day.
On the plus side, they paid me to earn my MS in chemistry. I don’t think MBA or JD programs do that.
I should add, to late for editing, that it is also of course a matter of tradeoffs. In my time I would have rather slit my wrists than study business or accounting so I could make more $$$. Not a comment on those fields as valid areas of study - they just wouldn’t work well for me. For me studying business is about as interesting as watching rocks grow. Maybe less. I would have rather have spent my entry-level employed life ( or my employed life period ) as a lab monkey making a weak wage than an accounting monkey making a much better one.
But in my time I would have been making that decision based on zero accumulated college debt. I’m not sure what the calculus would be now if I knew I was coming out of school with 100k or more worth of the Sword of Damocles hanging over me.
MBA’s don’t have a reputation for being particularly rigorous. That aside, two year professional MAs (and I have one myself) are a completely different beast. They are focused on practical, job training skills and are calibrated such that if you were admitted, you are probably going to graduate as long as you apply yourself. While an MA professional degree may come with the opportunity to TA and conduct research, these are not essential components.
In a PhD, however, teaching and research will be your full time job. Usually you are generating income for the university, and yet you are paid very poorly. Your graduation will not depend on simply completing coursework, but on your research. If it isn’t going well, you could end up stuck for years with the sunk costs growing higher and higher. Coursework isn’t really a big part of a PhD. It’s something you do to help your research, but not a means to an end.
It would be nice if all the PhD students who do the teaching could actually speak decent English. Many of them can’t but then again I guess it doesn’t matter as long as they work cheap.
I had a graduate assistantship when I was working on my MS in Market Research (which largely paralleled the MBA program at my school as far as coursework). The assistantship paid for my tuition, fees, and housing, and amounted to a 20-25 hour per week position.
Littlespeedysuperbike’s annual pay as an engineer, first three years after B.S: $62,000, $65,000, $68,000.
Littlespeedysuperbike’s annual pay as a graduate student in engineering, going for his M.S: $20,500, $19,350
Littlespeedysuperbike’s probable annual pay as an engineer, after graduation: $70,000 or so.
Well, Make getting a PhD’s more attractive to Americans and that’ll change.
I’m honestly dumbfounded by the poor economics that go into american graduate schools. Grad student stipends can’t possibly be more then a few percent of a labs total budget. When I was a research technician in a week I would regularly work with reagents who’s total cost was greater then my annual salary.
if you hire someone dumb who ends up screwing up 1 weeks worth of work, you’ve already paid for another grad student. Better to pay a little more for someone who makes less bone headed mistakes.
Maybe i’m missing something fundamental, but the whole academic system seems like false economy to me.
I’d die in an MBA program, plus there’s no reason for me to do it. And lots of people are in that position; they need a master’s, but an MBA isn’t it.
Ditto for law school. I entertained the possibility when I was getting ready to graduate from college, but when I looked into it, I found out that it wasn’t worth amassing six figures in debt when I’m not in a position to take on the workload to make the six-figure salary. I was looking at working for the state or federal government, where jobs are drying up as it is. Totally not worth it.