I have never not wanted to be a scientist.
As a kid, I would copy down—by hand—the entirety of encyclopedia entries about animals. In fifth grade, I was regularly running natural history experiments (see photo). By senior year of high school, I was determined to earn, “PhDs in Biology and Ecology” (see embarrassing photo).
That goal might sound ambitious, but not outlandish to most folks, especially those currently in academia. But where I come from, it was in league with aspirations to become an NFL footballer, a rockstar, or lottery jackpot winner—life outcomes that, while theoretically possible, were implausible to the point of fantasy.
I come from a low-income family. Neither of my parents went to college. So, a college education, let alone graduate school, was not an expectation. Much the opposite. The fact that I went to college at all was a universal alignment of serendipity. If it hadn’t been for some friends explaining the process, a recycled plastic frisbee, and my dad’s meager life insurance after his overdose in my junior year, I certainly would not have gone to college.
Nevertheless, I managed to make that dream of a doctorate—from Yale, no less—come true. I even had my dream post-doc lined up with an amazing set of mentors and collaborators.
Then I decided to walk away.
That decision was the hardest, but simultaneously, the most obvious decision point of my entire life. Judging from the whinging about a lack of post-docs on science Twitter, it seems like others are taking a long hard look at the prospects of life in the academy and deciding to opt out as well.
For others at the decision point, here are some things to consider:
Hands-down, academics have the greatest disjunct between an overly inflated concept of self-worth yet accept horribly low monetary valuation of their worth. The average doctorate stipend in the US is somewhere between $15k and $30k. That’s less than California’s minimum wage going to lots of folks who already have Master’s degrees.
This paltry payout is enabled because most academics are heavily subsidized by their parents throughout grad school and afterward. Morgan et al. (2021) showed that among academics, those with more educated parents received more support and encouragement. This translates to significant wealth gaps between first-gen grads and their peers. A Pew study from last year showed that even among college graduates, first-gen households had lower income (-27%) and much less wealth (-38%) than those whose parents were also college grads. Much of this effect is driven by the fact that kids with wealthy parents incur less or no debt for their education, setting them up for positive wealth–instead of negative wealth–going into graduate school and beyond. In addition to debt avoidance, wealthy parents also confer direct cash subsidies like down-payments for houses and inheritance. All of this means that folks with wealthy parents can accept lower wages.
And it turns out that folks who don’t really have to worry about the monetary benefits of a job are more likely to gravitate to jobs with lower than expected pay, but greater non-monetary benefits like prestige or job security.
Academia is the perfect trifecta of high prestige, high security (with tenure) and low pay. In fact, post-secondary education ranked first in Boar and Lashkari’s (2022) assessment of career intrinsic quality. Folks how receive less than about $50K from their parents (i.e. about the average most academics’ parents give them for a down-payment on a house or to pay for college) are more likely to chose jobs with negative intrinsic quality.
This is compounded by another reason that poor kids are so uncommon in the academy: your parent’s income is the single largest predictor of your early college attainment, far above any other demographic variable (Chetty et al., 2018).
The fact that most folks with PhDs come from wealthy parents with graduate degrees creates a vicious feedback cycle that drives down salaries from graduate student stipends through faculty salaries.
Those low doctoral salaries establish an abysmally low first tier in academic salary ladder. The average salary for a post-doc in the US is $47.5k. (It can be even less appealing internationally. I was offered a European post-doc that would have been < $35K after exchange rate and taxes).
The NSF post-doc salary I turned down would have been $56k, the suggested amount from NSF. For most newly graduated docs, a salary increase to $55k seems enormous to someone who just spent 5 years working 60 hours a week for $30K. But $55K is a paltry salary for someone with a PhD. Consider that the average salary for a professional clown in the US is nearly $50k, and let that subtle irony sink in.
The story outside of academia is much different. Doctorate degrees are actually worth something. And you don’t even have to sell your soul to industry. I got offers for conservation NGO positions for twice my post-doc salary and I interviewed with environmental funding organizations hiring at salaries three to five times my post-doc. I had a career in non-profit leadership before graduate school, so I was probably seeing the high end that the environmental NGO field had to offer. But conservation work is low-paying in general. Other fields have a much higher ceiling.
Right now, the field of data science is booming. Given that even the most field-oriented biologist likely spends most of their days staring at an R terminal doing statistics, every biologist is an experienced and competitive data scientist, de facto. Even in the data science field, you don’t have trade in your morals for your salary. NGOs are also hiring PhDs for data science roles. In fact, the position I ultimately abandoned academia for is with an education non-profit.
I think a lot of academics really want to help make the world a better place through their research. But, the fact that you can make double or triple the salary while doing far more immediately impactful good leaves almost nothing left on the scale in favor of academia.
In my role: I work remotely, have outstanding work-life balance, and a clear promotional track. Compare that to a post-doc where I’d be trying to wrap up unfinished papers from my doctorate on top of a heavy workload, in a temporary position, where the next career step involves competing with over 300 of my peers for a position half-way across the country that pays only slightly more than the people paid to watch Netflix all day.
One of the few benefits that academia can uniquely offer is the promise of tenure. Setting aside the fact that chasing tenure is simply prolonging one’s time chasing a carrot on a stick, tenured positions are dwindling every year. And the chance of transitioning from a post-doc into a tenure track position is abysmal and getting worse. Only about 10% of post-docs end up in tenured roles.
One overlooked downside of academia is that in addition to poor pay, the pay-off is delayed. Sure, in those rare cases you might end up with a six-figure, tenured professorship, but that reward is deferred well past the most important years of capital growth.
For instance, doctoral students and postdoc salaries make it basically impossible to save any money (especially for folks with student loans). As an example, I was making $40k in a full time NGO job right out of undergrad. From that income band, getting paid $33k while getting a PhD seemed like a good bet, given the eventual salary advantage of a degree. However, that calculus neglects to consider the life-timing of savings. The advantage of an extra $7k per year in your early 20s has disproportionate outcomes compared to the same amount later in life.
Consider this, the maximum allowable annual contribution to a Roth Retirement Account is $6k. If the paltry pay of grad stipends and postdocs prevents you from contributing to a Roth IRA for 7 years after undergrad, that mere $42k in lost pay compounds to a loss of nearly half a million dollars by retirement ($484k). (Do the calculations yourself: NerdWallet calculator)
And that’s just the cost of deferred retirement savings. The other engine of wealth accumulation in the US is home equity. Did you know: graduate stipends are not considered eligible income when applying for home loans. And don’t expect to wait until a post-doc, either. You need to be in a position for at least two years for it to be eligible income.*
(*There is a caveat that if you have a signed agreement of continued stipend for at least two years, your stipend could be eligible. But that means that you’d have to buy a house at the beginning of your PhD, when most folks can’t afford a down payment (unless you have wealthy parents to float you down-payment. Or unless you have parents who will gift you $300k in cash to buy your house, like one of my colleagues at Yale).
Ultimately, I’m not saying that a career in academia is a poor life-decision. I’m just saying that a career in academia is a poor life decision if you’re from a poor family.
Folks with external subsidies (even minorly) have the liberty to make decision to follow the dream of academia in a way that those of us who have to generate our own income cannot. Academia runs on those external subsidies. If your family can’t float you during your unpaid summer internships, or loan you cash to pay for the conference that you may or may not get reimbursed for 8 months later, or cover the down payment on your eventual house, … etc., you are going to end up way behind in life.
Unfortunately, this reality remains unseen by those currently in the academy. Academics love to worry about inequality, but because most of them are from upper-middle class to rich families, they manage to overlook the enormous impact of wealth inequality in academia. (Hell, most academic institutions actively avoid even collecting the data that would illuminate this reality).
In the end, overlooking the consequence of wealth subsidies leads mentors to encourage any student who shows an interest to pursue academic careers because they confuse what they wish to be true: “The academy is open to all” with what is, in fact, true: “Academia is a terribly unwise career for folks from poor families.”
I contend that mentors should feel ethically compelled to lay out the Sisyphean asymmetry to mentees from low-income backgrounds. If that makes you uncomfortable, the answer is to fix the system, not to mislead mentees with unexamined ‘luxury beliefs.’
Until that system gets fixed, more of us trailer home alumni will keep unhappily walking away from our dream.
[Updated 2022 Sept. 09 with some recent, relevant research papers]
[Updated 2022 Dec. 10 with information from this Pew report]