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The Disappearing American Grad Student

nytimes.com

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Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#61

Post by slimshady94 »

tyoma wrote: post #38

The monetary value proposition of grad school simply isn't very good if you're a US citizen. There is non-monetary value (like advancing human knowledge) that makes grad school worth it for some, but the pay is low. Imagine you just graduated from a quality undergrad with high grades and strong recommendations from your professors. Maybe you had an internship or two or spent a summer doing research. Maybe you even ha…

For foreign citizens, option 2 is pretty much a no-brainer because a US green card implies societal respect, relatively high income and subsequently marriage proposals from their home country.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#62

Post by [deleted] »

chrisseaton wrote: post #59
aaron-lebo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff I mentioned was true for both masters students and PhDs (they were in the same classes), but it may vary by field.

PhD students don’t take ‘classes’ - they do their own independent research. It’s a research degree. If someone else can teach you a class on it then it’s clearly not cutting edge enough to do a PhD on!

[deleted]

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#63

Post by aaron-lebo »

chrisseaton wrote: post #59
aaron-lebo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff I mentioned was true for both masters students and PhDs (they were in the same classes), but it may vary by field.

PhD students don’t take ‘classes’ - they do their own independent research. It’s a research degree. If someone else can teach you a class on it then it’s clearly not cutting edge enough to do a PhD on!

Class hours are a substantial requirement of many phd programs. You can't do independent research without knowing what's come before. :)

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#64

Post by adrianN »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #60
tyoma wrote: post #38

The monetary value proposition of grad school simply isn't very good if you're a US citizen. There is non-monetary value (like advancing human knowledge) that makes grad school worth it for some, but the pay is low. Imagine you just graduated from a quality undergrad with high grades and strong recommendations from your professors. Maybe you had an internship or two or spent a summer doing research. Maybe you even ha…

Why not go for Option 2, but do your post-grad part time while working? It might take 10 years instead of 6, but by then you'd have 10 years work experience, capital, etc.

It's hard to find part time jobs that still pay reasonably well and help you advance your career.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#65

Post by smallnamespace »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #60
tyoma wrote: post #38

The monetary value proposition of grad school simply isn't very good if you're a US citizen. There is non-monetary value (like advancing human knowledge) that makes grad school worth it for some, but the pay is low. Imagine you just graduated from a quality undergrad with high grades and strong recommendations from your professors. Maybe you had an internship or two or spent a summer doing research. Maybe you even ha…

Why not go for Option 2, but do your post-grad part time while working? It might take 10 years instead of 6, but by then you'd have 10 years work experience, capital, etc.

If you're single and planning to stay that way, taking an extra 4 years is ok.

If you plan or want to have a family, not so much. Doubly so if you're a woman -- pregnancy risks start ramping past the early-mid 30s.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#66

Post by wickberg »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #60
tyoma wrote: post #38

The monetary value proposition of grad school simply isn't very good if you're a US citizen. There is non-monetary value (like advancing human knowledge) that makes grad school worth it for some, but the pay is low. Imagine you just graduated from a quality undergrad with high grades and strong recommendations from your professors. Maybe you had an internship or two or spent a summer doing research. Maybe you even ha…

Why not go for Option 2, but do your post-grad part time while working? It might take 10 years instead of 6, but by then you'd have 10 years work experience, capital, etc.

Part time PhD's are rare - most professors need their grad students to be working on their grant-related research projects as RAs. That work is then used as the basis for your dissertation. As a part time PhD student you'd need to either have your own research planned out (and separate from the professor's grant-related work) which also implies you're likely to be paying out of pocket for tuition. Or find a professor who was willing to accept a slower pace of work on something that's presumably backed by a grant, which is pretty unlikely as the funding agency is usually holding them to strict deadlines.

Part-time Masters degrees are more common (and what I did myself), but come with similar trade-offs and usually need to be paid for by yourself or by your employer. And as you're not committing to being a part of a professor's research group for the next 5+ years, it's harder to find a good match for an advisor and a good thesis.

Co-terminal degrees (B.S. + M.S. all at once, with an extra year after undergrad to do your thesis) mitigate this, but you're going to be out of pocket for that extra year of tuition on top of the bachelor's.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#67

Post by chrisseaton »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #63
chrisseaton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD students don’t take ‘classes’ - they do their own independent research. It’s a research degree. If someone else can teach you a class on it then it’s clearly not cutting edge enough to do a PhD on!

Class hours are a substantial requirement of many phd programs. You can't do independent research without knowing what's come before. :)

You learn about what's come before by reading papers and reproducing experiments.

I can't imagine how a class for PhD students works - everyone has such focused research topics that how can you find something relevant to teach to more than one person at a time?

When I did my PhD on optimising dynamic programming languages I would guess there were maybe ten other students in the entire world doing something vaguely similar at the same time. How do you do a class for that in one institution?

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#68

Post by dingo_bat »

screye wrote: post #51
ironchef253 wrote: post #30

A few things: Grad students from foreign countries are not crippled with debt. They get affordable educations and can afford to be in school longer in America. Comparable American students have been consumed by debt and must get real jobs to pay it off. If undergrads were paying $7K / year for those degrees instead of $50k, things would be very different. Second, universities who are rich from plundering their underg…

$100k for grad school is not affordable for an Asian when annual family income is $5-10k and interest rates on loans are 15%.

Those families are probably not the ones sending their kids. Only those who can afford it go.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#69

Post by flossball »

I remember 20 some years ago... that I had asked a few grad students about their GPA and GRE scores before applying. I remember having a decent recommendation, gpa .5 higher than a couple of guys, and OK GRE. Didn't get into the masters program. As a supposedly privileged white guy, I think there is much more to it. I think the schools prefer foreign students as they will take the shit pay and long hours much like H1B slavery.

Re: The Disappearing American Grad Student

#70

Post by frozenport »

sungx105 wrote: post #58
tyoma wrote: post #38

The monetary value proposition of grad school simply isn't very good if you're a US citizen. There is non-monetary value (like advancing human knowledge) that makes grad school worth it for some, but the pay is low. Imagine you just graduated from a quality undergrad with high grades and strong recommendations from your professors. Maybe you had an internship or two or spent a summer doing research. Maybe you even ha…

Your option 1 is incomplete. It should read more closely to: You go to grad school and spend ~6 years working extremely long hours at nearly minimum wage with no benefits. You then spend 2-3 years on a postdoc still with relatively low compensation. There still are far too few academic positions available. You now either become an adjunct (and get caught in that vicious cycle) or you do another postdoc. Repeat ad nau…

Or after graduating, get an industry job supervised by one of your undergrads (happened to a friend).
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