A little of column A and a little of column B. There is prestige in getting a PhD. There is also access and unique networking opportunities.
On the purely financial side, many top students work internships during the summers and make 40 or 50 thousand dollars during that time in addition to their academic stipend.
The payout is very, very long term and honestly you probably don't come out ahead.
Starting your career 10 years earlier (effectively) and immediately progressing in your career probably gets you further. Especially if you look towards management, which is where the money is (usually, million dollar AI research salaries is a new thing).
I don't think this is always true. AI research big payouts aren't even a new thing. It was common 10 years ago for big name professors to get hired by Google etc. and bring the whole lab with them.
Also a PHD is not 10 years long? You start your career 4-5 years after a typical BS in CS
Well, the big money is in becoming a leader in a field before it's hot - making the big payoffs very speculative.
In the mid 2000s, natural language modelling was a joke and the best performing ML systems for sentiment analysis would lose in benchmarks to emoji counters. Today, people with a PhD in ML language modelling and years of experience delivering projects in industry are finding the PhD in ML really pays off.
But what about someone who spent the mid 2000s working on formal methods for static analysis? Or a compiler responding to the challenges created by Intel's Itanium architecture? Or trying to fit FPGA accelerator boards into the niche CUDA fills today?
Well, honestly their career's probably still going fine, they're a smart person and there's been many years of high demand for competent programmers. But industry isn't beating their door down; the beneficial effects of the PhD will be a lot less obvious.
Honestly a lot of PhDs go to people from cultures that prize education; and to people from upper-middle-class backgrounds who've been brought up to do well in school, follow their passions, no need to worry too much about money.
PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.
They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through grants.
The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed to ensure compliance with grant terms.
>PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.
In America the students at the undergraduate and masters levels pay to pursue their degrees, while the PhDs are paid by the school. As these students do not directly generate revenue, the PhD programs will be first on the chopping block and the admin who make the 'tough decisions' to keep the ship afloat will be off at their next jobs by the time the chickens come home to roost.
PhD students are typically only paid by the university if they provide labor in the form of being a teaching assistant for undergrads, guiding lab sessions and grading assignments and exams. Alternatively they're paid through their advisor's grants, in which case the student brings in revenue in the form of the large overhead cut the uni takes.
The alternative would be hiring dedicated employees to help with grading and lab sessions, and they won't tolerate the $30k/yr a PhD student does. This would have immediate impacts too, as there's no way a lone professor can keep up with grading for the class sizes in early undergrad.
This seems to be the default defense - Is there no fraud/fat/waste etc in this thing which is being harmed?
It sounds like people don't understand bureaucracy is always imperfect. If it was perfect then you don't need to create another agency called DOGE while having Congressional Budget Office and do exactly the same things.
The question should be is there fraud/fat/waste which has a meaningful impact? If not then it changing it wouldn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that anecdotal evidence rules supreme and there are enemies every where.
"Data doesn't support a meaningful impact? I saw it with my own eyes so it should be true and the person reporting the data must have Democrat agenda"
The sources of university funding and spending on administration has been broken for a long time.
What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors.
What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the money is going, where the biggest growth in spending is going.
You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing. Start with the top 25 university presidents who all earn a slightly rounded up 2 million a year and more.
…and money to go to conferences and summer schools, and money for software licenses (especially in applied programs), and department funds to bring visiting academics, and the following things that get lumped under administration: money for grad student food pantries and childcare because funding streams for PhDs don’t provide for good salaries outright, and job advising centers because the math job market is a crapshoot, and free student health clinics for psychological and physical health because doing a PhD in any condition is rough…
Who pays for all that? Usually it's not the students or even private funders / donors. Most of the money comes from one level of the government or another, and it comes with all kinds of regulations and requirements. Complying with that requires a lot of specialized administrative staff.
Most of the time, when you hear a politician saying that universities should / should not do X, they are effectively saying that universities should spend more on administration.
Universities with a residential campus have a lot of staff in functions unrelated to the academic mission, such as student housing, food services, healthcare, or sports facilities. If they have to compete for students instead of most people just automatically choosing the nearest university, focusing on these tends to make them more competitive. And while student amenities are not particularly important to PhD students, they are important to the university if it also educates undergraduates.
Then there is the organization chart. In a traditional university, the faculty senate (or another similar body) is in charge and all administrators are subordinate to it. But the modern world prefers centralized organizations, with administrators at the top. And whoever is in charge also determines the priorities of the organization.
There are extreme downsides - for many colleges athletics is a money-maker. So is administering IP. There's is also lots of real estate, which appreciates value, but needs maintenance.
The big reason for all the extras is that it makes the school known, in a very big and important way. They host conferences, have archives that receive donations, give out awards.
Donors give all sorts of weird tasks - and funding to achieve them.
Modern colleges are so many different things.
There is a subset of colleges that adopt the "keep it simple" approach, but they often run into lots of trouble. The big problem is without doing tons of stuff, people forget they exist.
It's a bit like drug companies advertising at the super bowl. They hate doing it, but don't have a choice.
Cut the top 20 salaries in half and fire 10% of the staff who are not directly involved in academics (must teach, learn, or research) for starters. Sever any major athletics organization (i.e. football, basketball, etc) into a separate legal entity with something like a license fee to the university based on team revenue as a percentage so funds flow exclusively in one direction.
University admin work expands to the available workforce and I've heard first person accounts from long time senior university staff about admin employees who literally didn't do anything of any conceivable consequence.
I mean actually breakdown exactly where the spending is going and then show the cuts.
You can say “cut salaries in half” about any industry. You could say it about software engineers. But just because you say that doesn’t mean it’ll work out well for the industry. Non-minimum wage salaries should be market driven. I doubt you could just cut salaries in half and keep a reasonable work force.
This is insightful. Which programs will the new tech make profitable (be it cash, psychic/emotional, or some other form) to write?
The Keynesian bogeyman of the deflationary spiral ignores intertemporal effects. Cell phones and laptops are getting cheaper all the time, but no one drops into an infinite wait because of time-preference. In the context of producing software becoming cheaper, people at a definite point value having a usable system today over a marginally cheaper version tomorrow.
The role of the entrepreneur is predicting future states of the market and deploying present capital accordingly. Beck is advocating a game-theory optimal strategy.
Judgment is a skill improved through reps. Sturgeon’s law (ninety percent of everything is crap) combined with vibe code spewage will create lots of volume quickly. What this does not accelerate is the process of learning from how bad choices ripple through the system lifecycle.
“This time will be different!” announce the proponents. Watch now, class, as the economic calculation problem works out as predicted in yet another instance.
The majority of New Mexico is either not employed or only barely employed enough to count towards employment participation. The states employment participation rate is like 58%.
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
markets have criticism too. this is why we have nothing, neither roads nor businesses, and are currently hallucinating this conversation while scratching at the ground with sticks.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
Well, for the next century we'll keep pretending kids don't matter. We've done it for the past 50 years, already. Let's see how far that gets us as a species.
It’s there as a relief valve. LAX has some of the busiest airspace in the world. ATC grants services to VFR traffic on a workload permitting basis. When ATC is too busy separating IFR traffic, which is their higher priority, it allows pilots an option that confines them to a certain area and altitudes.
For details, take a look at the Los Angeles Special Flight Rules Area[0] on the Los Angeles TAC. It gives a narrow set of exceptions. Note the specific assigned altitudes that depend on direction of travel. Also notice that the other VFR transition routes do require ATC clearance.
While we’re trading anecdotes, I’m a CFI and have never encountered or even heard of a student being able to land an airplane decently (which I’m using in a relaxed sense, not strictly checkride-ready) based solely on sim experience.
Maybe your claim is more along lines of landing an airplane is easy in general. I’ve been flying for 10+ years and still have the occasional one that makes me think That landing really sucked. Let’s grant that you started making decent landings on your first flight lesson or two, and if so, you are in a tiny minority. The Gleim private pilot syllabus has first solo at Flight Lesson 11, which will be at 15 flight hours or more into training. Even then, I’m only soloing students on calm days with plenty of ceiling and visibility.
We had a DPE here in north Alabama who liked to talk candidates who were still wearing foggles all the way to the runway on their final landing of the practical test. He probably could have coached a brand new compliant student to a successful landing, but he had 40k+ hours in his logbook and gave more than ten thousand checkride approvals (not just attempts).
Although filing a VFR flight plan is an excellent idea so that someone is looking for you in case you don’t show up at your destination, it is optional. ATC receives IFR flight plans only; VFR flight plans go to Search and Rescue.
It didn’t roll off the factory floor in 1958 with a moving map GPS. A common retrofit is a Garmin 430 that has a 2D bird’s eye view of airspace lateral boundaries. ForeFlight runs on iPhones and iPads; other electronic flight bag software runs on either iOS or Android devices. But you have to know what you’re looking at and what the rules are for different classes of airspace. In Class C or D, you only have to establish two-way contact, but Class B requires explicit clearance.
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