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Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
271–280 of 485 posts
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#272From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…
The only difference between a PhD and a hobby is money, or the presumption of it indirectly (certain jobs, etc) Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that. If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.
If you want to be reductionist, the only difference between eating at a restaurant and cooking at home is money (and also that they’re fundamentally different things). That doesn’t mean that people do one or the other for purely financial reasons.
Also is it still a PhD by your definition if you pay tuition? Or only if you’re paid a stipend?
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
In STEM, PhDs are probably not terrible financial outcomes in general (in that they probably mostly avoid a huge amount of student loan debt and may offer a leg-up for some commercial opportunities), but they also may be sub-optimal financially in many cases relative to just landing a job out of academia earlier.
Ya you may be right, at least in terms of expense, but I'm also considering the external cost vs reward even if debt is zero. A woman struck up a conversation with me yesterday at a cafe and we got to chatting. She had already had two careers, first in film, then teaching film, and now starting a PhD in philosophy, which I think is fantastic. But... she's a retired grey hair who owns her home, and the topic of whethe…
Getting a PhD in retirement is great if that's what floats your boat. (I know someone who basically did and another who did as sort of a mid-life crisis.) I don't think I'd have any interest because of all the BS associated with getting a credential. It does provide some structure around an activity. But I just can't personally imagine having that much structure unless I had a real objective in mind.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#274because higher education is too expensive to consider it
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#275From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…
Life is expensive. I feel like you have to nail it financially to simply have a good life. It is not about the Ferraris.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#276I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but: 1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks. 2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high q…
What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters? Everyone I talk to seems to say a Masters in CompSci is useless, and that you may as well do a PhD instead.
It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read a biography of Musk, you'll find that he did not hoard wealth. At each step in his rise, he bet essentially all of his fortune on the next step. After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure. Neither was investing in rockets. At one point,…
Reading a biography mostly informed me about the lack of general empathy, remorse, sympathy. Only regret came forward a little (and only once). > be crazy enough to bet it all Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much. As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is…
> Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.
You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.
Besides, Elon's dad at one point invested in Elon's company. Elon was already a success in business by then. From $20,000, he became the richest man in the world. All by luck! Pretty amazing!
Me, I could scrape up $20,000. Could I turn it into the richest man in the world? Nope. I would never have taken the risks Musk did. Nor do I have his work ethic. Nor am I as smart as he is. So I'm not envious of him.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#278There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison. Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to…
This is exactly why I decided to go do a PhD from industry.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read a biography of Musk, you'll find that he did not hoard wealth. At each step in his rise, he bet essentially all of his fortune on the next step. After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure. Neither was investing in rockets. At one point,…
Reading a biography mostly informed me about the lack of general empathy, remorse, sympathy. Only regret came forward a little (and only once). > be crazy enough to bet it all Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much. As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is…
> Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.
I’m no fan of Musk, but he clearly isn’t guilty of the hoarding aspect, as WalterBright pointed out.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#280As a software engineer, PhD is worth it if you know what you are getting into. Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. It's a long journey but it's worth it if you know what you are doing.
> Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career.
While we all can agree to that, reducing the PhD to just the new MSc comments is a bit worrisome.
But then take a look at so many ML PhD theses and one can truly see this is the case. So much unregulated garbage on ICML, NeurIPS as well.