[shoyer]

A PhD is certainly not for everyone (or even most), but it's rather unfair to say that it does not teach any employable skills. Even PhDs who go on to work in completely unrelated fields learn how to make progress on poorly defined problems and to advance the frontier of human knowledge. And a PhD is also of course a hard prerequisite for career in academia or research.

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

[ketzo]

I don’t know. It seems quite different than parenthood.

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

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

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

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

[endymi0n]

Depends on your definition of „better“. Since decisions are always emotionally made and rationalized after the fact, this approach will fall victim to significant amounts of survivorship and post-purchase bias.

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

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

[barry-cotter]

> As for that survey of PhD students, I suspect you would get similarly dismal reviews of parenthood from parents of 0-5 year old children

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

[foldr]

> it's rather unfair to say that it does not teach any employable skills. Even PhDs who go on to work in completely unrelated fields learn how to make progress on poorly defined problems and to advance the frontier of human knowledge.

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

[randomdata]

> but of course that doesn't mean that nobody should have children!

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

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