Mdthbs

I don’t have experience in industry myself, but know several people who do (and have made the transition from industry to academia and vice versa).

Broadly speaking, getting a CS PhD in the USA with the intent of switching to industry after will result in about $500k in lost wages. This is accounting for about 5 years of PhD salary vs programming salary, raises, bonuses etc. The jobs that necessitate a PhD in industry are few and far between, and are highly competitive. Thus, starting a PhD with industry in mind, and assuming you’ll get that job is, statistically speaking, unrealistic. There are still many good reasons to still do it!

1. It’s a fun and fulfilling endeavor that offers you a chance to think freely about things you care about for 5 years!




2. If you are entrepreneurial then I know some people who start companies based in their PhD work.




3. If your undergraduate degree isn’t in computer science then your PhD can be treated as a semi vocational degree (though granted a masters will do as well)




4. If you’re interested in moving to the USA then a PhD offers a path to permanent residence.




5. You like research and want to leave the door open to academia. In that case a PhD is a must.

Getting a PhD is not financially irresponsible.

Your career earnings may be less, or may be more, than without a PhD. Whether this is the case depends on too many factors to be answerable without details. It shouldn't matter too much.

If you earn enough to finance the present and future life of yourself and your dependents, then you are not being financially irresponsible.

With a PhD, you can perfectly well finance the present and future life of yourself and your dependents, therefore getting a PhD is not financially irresponsible¹. A PhD is not a recipe for unemployment and homelessness.

Examples of financially irresponsible behaviour

• Getting a loan and spending it on consumer electronics, vacations, expensive cars, or gambling.


• Spending your salary in the pub as soon as you get it, leaving your kids go hungry and failing to pay the bills.


• Spending savings, inheritance, or lottery winnings within a few years without having a stable job.

Examples of financially responsible behaviour

...or at least examples of behaviour that are not, by themselves, financially irresonsible:

• Getting a job that earns less (but enough) but makes you happier than otherwise.


• Getting a PhD and enjoy life or a research career while still earning enough to pay the rent ones entire life.


• Declining a promotion+raise because one doesn't want to perform the duties or have the responsibilities associated with the new role.


• Making a career as an artist earning very little, but correspondingly spending very little, in a country with a strong social safety net and quality free public healthcare and education (including tertiary education).

I earn more than I need (in a position that requires a PhD) and I have no clue what I would do with the money if I earned much more. I still have plenty of savings from the salary I earned as a PhD student. Plenty for my needs and wants. Nobody should need €100k+ per year except in places where real estate prices are extremely high (many people may want more, though), but in those places highly skilled people should be able to find jobs that pay enough to pay the rent too — including if you have a PhD — or one can look for a job elsewhere.

¹^{I don't have data on PhDs in all fields and I don't know how much, for example, a humanities PhD may earn; but I would be surprised if a PhD increases the risk of poverty compared to a humanities BA or MA. In this case, it of course makes a difference where you do your PhD.}

Your assumptions are questionable

Let's take a literal look at the assumptions you make there.

A) Land you in a relatively low level position to start.

The appropriate point of comparison is not at the point of "start" determined by the decision to get a PhD, but at some fixed point of time - for example, the time when you'd start working after getting a PhD. By that time the equivalent bachelor's student would have had something like five years of experience, raises and promotions - and if they'd put in as much learning and work as a PhD program requires, I'd expect that position to be comparable or better than what a PhD graduate can get as their first job offer.

B) You will eventually hit a ceiling past which you cannot rise.

This is simply not true. The majority of career paths (except regulated professions e.g. medicine and law) do not require an advanced degree even in cases when one might be helpful, and someone starting with a bachelors degree generally can progress to the very top either through work experience, or by getting a masters later in life while working.

This question can't be answered without the details. How much do Bachelor's degree holders earn in your field / locality? How much do PhD degree holders earn? What jobs are enabled by a PhD that someone with just a Bachelor's degree cannot do? It's certainly possible that people with PhDs earn more, but remember you also invest time into the PhD that you won't get back, and because of exponential growth in savings/debt, this can mean you're better off starting to work immediately.

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can run calculations such as this (which is for a different situation, but the same concepts apply) to find out whether it's indeed financially irresponsible. Without the answers, this question is also unanswerable.

Example of how variable the answer to this question can be:

The research shows that Bachelor, Masters and PhD graduates in Humanities — who studied History, Geography Philosophy or Politics — all end up on the same salary, suggesting Masters and PhD students did not see a return on their investment.

In fact, PhD graduates in these subjects earn less on average — £40,000 ($58,000) — than Masters students, who earn £44,000 ($64,000).

Physics, Chemistry, Life Sciences and Healthcare PhD’s also don’t do much to raise pay, with just a £4,000 ($5,800) difference.

Conversely, PhD or Doctorates in Maths, Computer Sciences, Law, and Psychology graduates earn much more than those who only did Masters in the subjects.

PhDs in Mathematics and Statistics earn twice as Bachelor degrees alone — £112,000 ($162,000) — with 78% of PhDs graduates working in the financial and consulting industries.

If you're thinking of doing a PhD, do yourself a favor and study the job market before committing to the PhD.

While the comments of user Patricia Shanahan are instructive, I'll try to give a bit more perspective.

A PhD is training to do research. In most fields it is theoretical research, and in a few (applied math) it is applied research. Many large companies (IBM, Google, ...) have quite large research divisions. Some of them do theoretical research but the trend has been (last 20 years or more) toward product focused applied research. But the people that hold positions in these divisions need to know how to do research and so a PhD is the more appropriate training.

A person who enters such a company with only a BS or MS has had much less, if any, real research training so would typically be hired into another division - product development, say, likely at a lower salary. A PhD would find the work there to be pretty boring in most cases (startup companies excepted, I suppose), but it would feel "about right" for a BS holder.

Depending on the company there may be a ceiling or not. Most companies try to make it possible for promising employees to move up, so the chance is often there, but in order to do it you need to get the skills to do the required research. That may require additional education, not just "on the job learning". And a person who is trying to move up will always be competing with others (recent PhDs) who already have the skills that are needed at the moment. And you not only have to do the current job but learn how to do the next one.

None of this relates to your headline question, however. If you study six or so years for a doctorate, making essentially no money beyond bare essentials, it takes a while to make up for that financially even if you then start at a higher salary. And then there may be student debt, as well.

But people who get PhDs and similar are seldom driven primarily by money. Such people are more likely to be willing to sacrifice a bit so as to follow the lure of mathematics or science, or whatever. Ideas. But a lot of people, fiction writers, say, value other things more than money. If you can follow your dreams and get paid for it, that may be enough. It is why a lot of people want to be academics, actually.

The answer is very straightfoward: A PhD is an apprenticeship towards becoming a researcher. It's not furthering a general education, but rather job training for a specific career path. This career path is not on the route towards becoming an industry worker, which focuses much more on using well-understood techniques to solve well-understood problems than it does on expanding the boundaries of human knowledge. (Both are very respectable careers to have, they're just different things.)

As a result, if you want to go into industry after having completed your PhD, you're asking a company to hire you after you've spent 4+ years of your life doing something else entirely. The person who spent those four years in industry is a safer bet, and also has 4 years of raises, promotions, and job experience under their belt for exactly the kind of work they're competing with you for.

If you know you want to go into industry for certain, get your bachelor's or maybe your master's and then land your first job. If you want to go into research, get your PhD. Don't get a PhD just for the prestige if it doesn't take you down the career path you want.

As a software engineer who has worked for Fortune 100 tech companies, I can assure you that the lack of an advanced degree is no impediment to securing lucrative employment. I say this as someone who not only lacked a Ph.D and MS, but even a BS degree! In fact, you may be shocked to learn how much interns with no discernible experience besides a few years of schooling can earn at a FAANG or similar. At no point in my career did a boss or anyone else suggest: "Your path to promotion is limited by your education/schooling/degrees." On the contrary, I regularly participated in the hiring process and found that candidates with advanced degrees were, on average, no better than those with a BS or simply a lot of practice.

If your goal is to obtain one of the few positions that actually requires a Ph.D, then I don't have much to say about that. But the software engineering sector in general prizes youth, not education. Software companies are eager to snatch up fresh-faced college grads because they will work long hours, learn new technologies quickly, let go of obsolete technologies equally quickly (or better, agitate for change), and absorb the company culture without so much bickering about work/life balance. As you can imagine, someone who spent 5 years in academia is not actually going to look so competitive or attractive, relatively speaking. I would go so far as to say that if you bother to get a Ph.D, then it would be "financially irresponsible" to pursue any positions that don't require such an advanced degree, because of the compromises and trade-offs entailed by that choice.

Of course, you can succeed in technology at any age, but age discrimination is real and not going away any time soon. Software engineers are increasingly becoming like new automobiles--your value declines dramatically the moment you step off campus.

In the past, now or in future?!

With currently declining number of stock corporations, world population growth converging, machine learning algorithms replacing high-qualified academics in medical diagnostics, finance mathematics, law... you should also internalize into your decision making how future-proof your education based on a bachelor or master degree is. Having a relatively good and demanded but specialist degree now might turn out a professional dead end in 10-20 years with the exponential progress rate in technology.

A PhD diversifies your knowledge and job risk, qualifies you to teach yourself new things and to solve bigger problems autonomously as well as asking new important questions concerning research and industry applications. PhD students often look too much on the title itself which will give you often no salary bonus and lose out of eyes or don't know what they learn on the way to earning the title. During academia you can meet and work with very different people and make very different experiences in comparison to industry.

While doing a PhD later is still an option and many master graduates often choose a PhD sometimes because the job-market is overloaded with applicants in a economical regression, I wouldn't start a PhD in your 40s. Then I think your financial losses will be much bigger than doing it after bachelor/master or in your 30s. But working in industry a few years before doing a PhD is an option I would always consider if you are not sure to pursue an academica career.

Unless you have people who depend on you as a source of income due to inability to support themselves financially and broken economic systems that don't address this, there is simply no such thing as "financial irresponsibility". It may be financially disadvantageous to you to get a PhD, but you're not wronging anyone else by doing it. You're well within your rights and reasonable, non-antisocial behavior to make use of academic opportunities because you think it will make your life better/happier/whatever or because you think doing so will bring benefit to others or to the sum of human knowledge.

There is an implicit assumption in the question which (at least in the US, and with a CS degree path) is completely false. That is that you must follow a sequential path: BS -> MS -> PhD -> employment (whether in industry or academia). It's perfectly possible to do BS, lucrative employment while working on MS, more lucrative employment, work on PhD because all that lucrative employment (and a lack of extravagant habits) you don't really need any more money (or at least not much), and can pursue things that interest you.