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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On January 24 2017 06:19 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. I've known post-docs with as low as 15k a year who are also trying to raise a family. Its absolutely awful. What's worse is that most post-docs can barely fight for anything once they graduate since they had such low comp for so long that they get stuck with only 90k when they get out if they fight hard enough.
What in the world. $15k? Where? In what field? No sympathies for a women's studies post-doc, but this blows my mind even in that situation.
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Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn has appeared to back away from claims it is preparing to build a $7bn factory in the US.
News of the plant, which could create some 30,000 to 50,000 American manufacturing jobs, first surfaced last year after a meeting between now President Donald Trump and the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese telecom and tech investment giant SoftBank.
“There is such a plan, but it is not a promise. It is a wish,” Foxconn’s chief executive officer, Terry Gou, told reporters on Sunday. Gou added that he wanted guarantees of inexpensive land and electricity before the company made its investment and warned against US protectionism, according to Reuters.
Trump promised to bring jobs to the US and repeatedly singled out Apple for its use of Chinese manufacturers – Foxconn among them – in stump speeches across the country during his campaign.
The US president has taken an aggressive stance toward China, saying the country has “stolen” American jobs. He has repeatedly threatened to impose tariffs on goods imported from the country.
But Foxconn’s Chinese holdings are vital to its interest. The company is one of Apple’s largest suppliers and China is now Apple’s largest iPhone market. Gou, the company chairman often referred to in the press as “Taiwan’s Donald Trump”, is likely to run for president of Taiwan in 2020, according to multiple reports. The executive ardently favors unifying China and Taiwan, which would further his own business interests – Foxconn owns manufacturing facilities, which have been heavily criticized for their harsh working conditions, in the city of Shenzhen in China’s Guangdong province.
Negotiations with the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer are likely to be complicated not only because of the diversity of Foxconn’s holdings but also because of Trump’s decision to scrap the complex Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with Vietnam, Japan and others – but not China – by executive order on Monday.
The decision has made China itself the leading international trade advocate in the Asia-Pacific region; President Xi Jinping told attendees at the Davos world economic forum that China would pursue “regional” agreements in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s commitment to negotiating only with individual nations.
Source
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On January 24 2017 06:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn has appeared to back away from claims it is preparing to build a $7bn factory in the US.
News of the plant, which could create some 30,000 to 50,000 American manufacturing jobs, first surfaced last year after a meeting between now President Donald Trump and the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese telecom and tech investment giant SoftBank.
“There is such a plan, but it is not a promise. It is a wish,” Foxconn’s chief executive officer, Terry Gou, told reporters on Sunday. Gou added that he wanted guarantees of inexpensive land and electricity before the company made its investment and warned against US protectionism, according to Reuters.
Trump promised to bring jobs to the US and repeatedly singled out Apple for its use of Chinese manufacturers – Foxconn among them – in stump speeches across the country during his campaign.
The US president has taken an aggressive stance toward China, saying the country has “stolen” American jobs. He has repeatedly threatened to impose tariffs on goods imported from the country.
But Foxconn’s Chinese holdings are vital to its interest. The company is one of Apple’s largest suppliers and China is now Apple’s largest iPhone market. Gou, the company chairman often referred to in the press as “Taiwan’s Donald Trump”, is likely to run for president of Taiwan in 2020, according to multiple reports. The executive ardently favors unifying China and Taiwan, which would further his own business interests – Foxconn owns manufacturing facilities, which have been heavily criticized for their harsh working conditions, in the city of Shenzhen in China’s Guangdong province.
Negotiations with the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer are likely to be complicated not only because of the diversity of Foxconn’s holdings but also because of Trump’s decision to scrap the complex Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with Vietnam, Japan and others – but not China – by executive order on Monday.
The decision has made China itself the leading international trade advocate in the Asia-Pacific region; President Xi Jinping told attendees at the Davos world economic forum that China would pursue “regional” agreements in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s commitment to negotiating only with individual nations. Source
China was applying pressure on them. this could also be an attempt for Taiwan to try to get a free trade agreement with the US.
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On January 24 2017 06:21 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:19 Thieving Magpie wrote:On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. I've known post-docs with as low as 15k a year who are also trying to raise a family. Its absolutely awful. What's worse is that most post-docs can barely fight for anything once they graduate since they had such low comp for so long that they get stuck with only 90k when they get out if they fight hard enough. What in the world. $15k? Where? In what field? No sympathies for a women's studies post-doc, but this blows my mind even in that situation.
Soil Scientist in Kansas. He was interested in a Data Scientist role in SF and when discussing compensation I asked for his current comp and my jaw had to be scraped off the floor. I had to repeat the question several times because I was hoping to god he was too stupid to understand the question--much to my dismay he was telling the truth.
He definitely got jackknifed with whatever deal he made with that program, and I made sure to push harder for him to have better comp in our offer letter to him--but damn that was a shitty realization of how fucked up some post-docs have it.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs.
My opinion is that you overstate the advantages of the PhD. While a Masters can be profitable in the long run (no guarantee that it will be if you spend a lot on costs of attendance), a PhD is almost universally a net loss. A 50% jump in earnings is optimistic at best - my experience is that some do better than others financially in the post-PhD years. Part of the problem is that it is kept unprofitable to get anything past a bachelors, sometimes Masters, for people who aren't looking for a visa. And the experience itself is often miserable - a five-plus year job with low pay and arbitrary hours.
Adjusting for intelligence, academia is probably one of the worst paying careers out there. For chemical engineering, it's made worse by the fact that a lot of the prominent chemical industries have seen substantial decline, and many work in less topical fields such as process engineering for non-chemical industries.
Sane people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Foreigners see visas for the taking. The result is a cycle of decline for local smart folk.
Not that foreigners do particularly well and "take all the good jobs" either - they often just get tossed out because they are only valued for being cheap.
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I don't think it's *quite* that bad, but almost. There's non-tangible advantages to getting a PHD in some situations. A bachelors in Biology may get you to be a lab tech where you repeat grunt work over and over, but a PHD opens the chance for a job where you get some actual agency over your work by doing things like designing experiments.
In general though the whole system is a pyramid scheme and exploitative labor. Also from what I hear a lot of professors don't really gear students up to join industry and there's an implicit assumption that people will go into academia which fuels people taking low wage post-docs and what not.
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On January 24 2017 06:21 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:19 Thieving Magpie wrote:On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. I've known post-docs with as low as 15k a year who are also trying to raise a family. Its absolutely awful. What's worse is that most post-docs can barely fight for anything once they graduate since they had such low comp for so long that they get stuck with only 90k when they get out if they fight hard enough. What in the world. $15k? Where? In what field? No sympathies for a women's studies post-doc, but this blows my mind even in that situation.
Einstein university has a 25k ish stipend for biotech phd
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Norway28628 Posts
Sure academia is underpaid when considering the skillsets of skilled academics - there's pretty much no field more intellectually demanding. But it's also just about the most enjoyable job to that same subset of people. And personally, I think it's good that people in academia, who basically have 'improve upon the knowledge of humanity' as their profession, are not primarily motivated by money.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 24 2017 06:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Sure academia is underpaid when considering the skillsets of skilled academics - there's pretty much no field more intellectually demanding. But it's also just about the most enjoyable job to that same subset of people. And personally, I think it's good that people in academia, who basically have 'improve upon the knowledge of humanity' as their profession, are not primarily motivated by money.
To some extent that is true - but there is also the fact that it shouldn't be a vow of poverty. Because shitty working conditions and low pay make you lose a lot of love for research. I know a lot of people who suffered from that fact and either jumped ship or spent many years in misery.
Also, from what I hear, in Norway they treat academics far, far better than they do in the US.
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Norway28628 Posts
I agree it shouldn't be a vow of poverty and $15k is obviously ridiculous. $30k too. But $80-90k, even accounting for student debt and not getting that pay until they're 32 or whatever, sounds totally fine with me. I have more of an issue with other professions making significantly more than that. ;p
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Well that is why there recently has been a call within academia to improve things, especially for graduate students since they have absurdly high rates of mental distress issues.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Just curious, at what level of student debt do you think does it start to become foolish, even for academics at heart, to want to do it?
And $80-90k at 32 is not even really a guaranteed outcome - it's more of a lottery outcome. Often you just get pay that is suck for a long time. IIRC the average age of receiving professorial tenure is 39 in the US.
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On January 24 2017 06:33 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. My opinion is that you overstate the advantages of the PhD. While a Masters can be profitable in the long run (no guarantee that it will be if you spend a lot on costs of attendance), a PhD is almost universally a net loss. A 50% jump in earnings is optimistic at best - my experience is that some do better than others financially in the post-PhD years. Part of the problem is that it is kept unprofitable to get anything past a bachelors, sometimes Masters, for people who aren't looking for a visa. And the experience itself is often miserable - a five-plus year job with low pay and arbitrary hours. Adjusting for intelligence, academia is probably one of the worst paying careers out there. For chemical engineering, it's made worse by the fact that a lot of the prominent chemical industries have seen substantial decline, and many work in less topical fields such as process engineering for non-chemical industries. Sane people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Foreigners see visas for the taking. The result is a cycle of decline for local smart folk. Not that foreigners do particularly well and "take all the good jobs" either - they often just get tossed out because they are only valued for being cheap.
This is not fully accurate. Its not far off the mark, but its definitely off base.
The reason Foreigners treat PhD's as Visa gateways is 2fold.
H1B's for Academia does not suffer the cap, so you can try to get a job, so its always the last ditch fail safe. Get your bachelors, try to get work. No work? Get masters. Finish masters and try to get work--no work? Get PhD. Finish PhD and try to get work; no work? Get a post doc. First Post-Doc is finishing and so you try to get work--no work? Teach. Etc...
With locals if you decide Bachelors/Masters/PhD is all you want to do and now you're done with Academia, and you can't get work--you move in with parents and keep looking for work. Foreigners don't have this luxury.
Second is statistical. H1B lotteries weigh different candidates differently with STEM PhD's weighted the most. This means getting a STEM PhD literally gives you a higher chance of getting an H1B Visa. So if you're goal is to do everything you can to give you a shot at getting H1B so you can work here and get the GC track started--then STEM PhD is the best for you.
With these pressures on foreigners (and only hardships pressuring locals) its easy to see why more foreigners end up aiming for PhDs.
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On January 24 2017 06:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Sure academia is underpaid when considering the skillsets of skilled academics - there's pretty much no field more intellectually demanding. But it's also just about the most enjoyable job to that same subset of people. And personally, I think it's good that people in academia, who basically have 'improve upon the knowledge of humanity' as their profession, are not primarily motivated by money.
Thanks 
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 24 2017 07:07 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 06:33 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. My opinion is that you overstate the advantages of the PhD. While a Masters can be profitable in the long run (no guarantee that it will be if you spend a lot on costs of attendance), a PhD is almost universally a net loss. A 50% jump in earnings is optimistic at best - my experience is that some do better than others financially in the post-PhD years. Part of the problem is that it is kept unprofitable to get anything past a bachelors, sometimes Masters, for people who aren't looking for a visa. And the experience itself is often miserable - a five-plus year job with low pay and arbitrary hours. Adjusting for intelligence, academia is probably one of the worst paying careers out there. For chemical engineering, it's made worse by the fact that a lot of the prominent chemical industries have seen substantial decline, and many work in less topical fields such as process engineering for non-chemical industries. Sane people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Foreigners see visas for the taking. The result is a cycle of decline for local smart folk. Not that foreigners do particularly well and "take all the good jobs" either - they often just get tossed out because they are only valued for being cheap. This is not fully accurate. Its not far off the mark, but its definitely off base. The reason Foreigners treat PhD's as Visa gateways is 2fold. H1B's for Academia does not suffer the cap, so you can try to get a job, so its always the last ditch fail safe. Get your bachelors, try to get work. No work? Get masters. Finish masters and try to get work--no work? Get PhD. Finish PhD and try to get work; no work? Get a post doc. First Post-Doc is finishing and so you try to get work--no work? Teach. Etc... With locals if you decide Bachelors/Masters/PhD is all you want to do and now you're done with Academia, and you can't get work--you move in with parents and keep looking for work. Foreigners don't have this luxury. Second is statistical. H1B lotteries weigh different candidates differently with STEM PhD's weighted the most. This means getting a STEM PhD literally gives you a higher chance of getting an H1B Visa. So if you're goal is to do everything you can to give you a shot at getting H1B so you can work here and get the GC track started--then STEM PhD is the best for you. With these pressures on foreigners (and only hardships pressuring locals) its easy to see why more foreigners end up aiming for PhDs.
The other issue is that the conditions of academia that are problematic for locals, as troubling as they are, are still an improvement for the foreigners from the conditions back home. So they are willing to take what locals would find to be quite poor conditions. Which harms the locals who have to compete with that.
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Norway28628 Posts
On January 24 2017 07:04 LegalLord wrote:
Just curious, at what level of student debt do you think does it start to become foolish, even for academics at heart, to want to do it?
And $80-90k at 32 is not even really a guaranteed outcome - it's more of a lottery outcome. Often you just get pay that is suck for a long time. IIRC the average age of receiving professorial tenure is 39 in the US.
What I want is for people everywhere to make enough money to live a life free of economic worries but for none to live lives full of lavish luxury. And like, I'm not dismissing that if you're a hard working academic it might feel unfair that by the time you're 42, that guy who became an electrician when he was 20 is significantly wealthier than you are, because you've probably worked just as hard as him. But I think it's far more important to 'correct the wages' of the single mom who works double waitress shifts etc, or the factory or warehouse worker dealing with stagnating wages for 30 years.. At least the academic most likely loves his job. I guess the most specific answer I can give without spending 30 minutes going through numbers of average wages etc, is that I'd like the average lifetime income to not be significantly lower than that of a median american when adjusted for student debt and time spent in education? And if it currently is significantly lower then maybe some correction would be desirable?
Like normally when I see people complain about academics not making enough, it's not actually academics making that claim - it's people who think they would've liked to work in academia, just that then they wouldn't make as much as they want to make. Same with teachers. And while I certainly think teachers are underpaid compared to their societal contribution and difficulty/stressfulness of work, I'm also really happy that teachers choose to teach because they want to teach rather than because they want to be rich.
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On January 24 2017 07:24 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 07:07 Thieving Magpie wrote:On January 24 2017 06:33 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 06:16 Mohdoo wrote:On January 24 2017 06:09 LegalLord wrote:On January 24 2017 05:58 Mohdoo wrote:
Graduate school is a weird situation. A BS in chemistry is useless, but a BS in chemical engineering is enough to get a good career rolling. Chemical engineers have little incentive to pursue graduate school, but they are rewarded well for it. People with a BS in chemistry are basically required to go to grad school if they hope to do anything besides technician work, so a much higher percentage of chemistry graduates go to grad school than chemical engineering. And looking at my school in particular, there was a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign chem-e grad students when compared to chemistry. In fact, the engineering department, in general, had a way, way higher % of foreign grad students when compared to their hard science counterparts.
So in a lot of ways, opportunities as a chem-e BS are so good that many people end up just saying "who needs grad school"? But the phd chem-e jobs still exist, so we end up relying on foreign workers. My perspective is that graduate students need to be paid much more. Having other opportunities is part of it. The other part is that the American system makes the graduate school process so miserable that many don't want to bother. A 50 percent dropout rate for PhD students should make you wonder why so many people just don't want to put up with that shit anymore. In the case of chemical engineering specifically, a graduate degree is becoming more and more necessary for good long-term career outcomes. It's a field that pays well but it's undergoing a rather fierce stagnation. I suppose we agree it is a cost:benefit thing. Someone fresh out of college with a chem-e degree can expect $60K right out of the gate and will likely go up to 80 within 5 years. Or they can make ~30K/year as a grad student and then make ~$90K/year 5 years later. You are making more 5 years out, but your integral is still less. And those 5 years were not enjoyable. For certain careers, you could argue the 5 years experience is worth more than the PhD. But there are certain chem-e jobs that really are exclusively PhD jobs. My opinion is that you overstate the advantages of the PhD. While a Masters can be profitable in the long run (no guarantee that it will be if you spend a lot on costs of attendance), a PhD is almost universally a net loss. A 50% jump in earnings is optimistic at best - my experience is that some do better than others financially in the post-PhD years. Part of the problem is that it is kept unprofitable to get anything past a bachelors, sometimes Masters, for people who aren't looking for a visa. And the experience itself is often miserable - a five-plus year job with low pay and arbitrary hours. Adjusting for intelligence, academia is probably one of the worst paying careers out there. For chemical engineering, it's made worse by the fact that a lot of the prominent chemical industries have seen substantial decline, and many work in less topical fields such as process engineering for non-chemical industries. Sane people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Foreigners see visas for the taking. The result is a cycle of decline for local smart folk. Not that foreigners do particularly well and "take all the good jobs" either - they often just get tossed out because they are only valued for being cheap. This is not fully accurate. Its not far off the mark, but its definitely off base. The reason Foreigners treat PhD's as Visa gateways is 2fold. H1B's for Academia does not suffer the cap, so you can try to get a job, so its always the last ditch fail safe. Get your bachelors, try to get work. No work? Get masters. Finish masters and try to get work--no work? Get PhD. Finish PhD and try to get work; no work? Get a post doc. First Post-Doc is finishing and so you try to get work--no work? Teach. Etc... With locals if you decide Bachelors/Masters/PhD is all you want to do and now you're done with Academia, and you can't get work--you move in with parents and keep looking for work. Foreigners don't have this luxury. Second is statistical. H1B lotteries weigh different candidates differently with STEM PhD's weighted the most. This means getting a STEM PhD literally gives you a higher chance of getting an H1B Visa. So if you're goal is to do everything you can to give you a shot at getting H1B so you can work here and get the GC track started--then STEM PhD is the best for you. With these pressures on foreigners (and only hardships pressuring locals) its easy to see why more foreigners end up aiming for PhDs. The other issue is that the conditions of academia that are problematic for locals, as troubling as they are, are still an improvement for the foreigners from the conditions back home. So they are willing to take what locals would find to be quite poor conditions. Which harms the locals who have to compete with that.
I find that this is rarely the case if ever for anything past a bachelors. But I work primarily with STEM immigrants, it might be different for non-STEM.
I find that people who are able to do this lived a fairly good life in their respective country. Not rich, but definitely a better COL lifestyle than most americans.
Think of it this way: majority of the foreigners who get into the good schools here need a lot of resources in order to (a) get the qualifications (b) physically move from china/india/etc... (c) have the lawyers needed to navigate the official visa process.
However, I do find that when both locals and immigrants are switching from post-academia or even post-doc into industry, even though we are not allowed to explicitly offer the H1B/GC as part of the comp offer--negotiations are usually a lot easier with immigrants the moment you tell them that your company is willing to work with them when it comes to H1B or future Green Cards--usually equating to them fighting with you a lot less unless they have a bunch of offers on the table.
So a part of your assessment is definitely true.
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On January 24 2017 07:31 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 07:04 LegalLord wrote:
Just curious, at what level of student debt do you think does it start to become foolish, even for academics at heart, to want to do it?
And $80-90k at 32 is not even really a guaranteed outcome - it's more of a lottery outcome. Often you just get pay that is suck for a long time. IIRC the average age of receiving professorial tenure is 39 in the US. What I want is for people everywhere to make enough money to live a life free of economic worries but for none to live lives full of lavish luxury. And like, I'm not dismissing that if you're a hard working academic it might feel unfair that by the time you're 42, that guy who became an electrician when he was 20 is significantly wealthier than you are, because you've probably worked just as hard as him. But I think it's far more important to 'correct the wages' of the single mom who works double waitress shifts etc, or the factory or warehouse worker dealing with stagnating wages for 30 years.. At least the academic most likely loves his job. I guess the most specific answer I can give without spending 30 minutes going through numbers of average wages etc, is that I'd like the average lifetime income to not be significantly lower than that of a median american when adjusted for student debt and time spent in education? And if it currently is significantly lower then maybe some correction would be desirable? Like normally when I see people complain about academics not making enough, it's not actually academics making that claim - it's people who think they would've liked to work in academia, just that then they wouldn't make as much as they want to make. Same with teachers. And while I certainly think teachers are underpaid compared to their societal contribution and difficulty/stressfulness of work, I'm also really happy that teachers choose to teach because they want to teach rather than because they want to be rich.
I would just like for it to be legally required that all compensation information be fully visible at all times. A lot of compensation issues dies when you make it transparent.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 24 2017 07:31 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2017 07:04 LegalLord wrote:
Just curious, at what level of student debt do you think does it start to become foolish, even for academics at heart, to want to do it?
And $80-90k at 32 is not even really a guaranteed outcome - it's more of a lottery outcome. Often you just get pay that is suck for a long time. IIRC the average age of receiving professorial tenure is 39 in the US. What I want is for people everywhere to make enough money to live a life free of economic worries but for none to live lives full of lavish luxury. And like, I'm not dismissing that if you're a hard working academic it might feel unfair that by the time you're 42, that guy who became an electrician when he was 20 is significantly wealthier than you are, because you've probably worked just as hard as him. But I think it's far more important to 'correct the wages' of the single mom who works double waitress shifts etc, or the factory or warehouse worker dealing with stagnating wages for 30 years.. At least the academic most likely loves his job. I guess the most specific answer I can give without spending 30 minutes going through numbers of average wages etc, is that I'd like the average lifetime income to not be significantly lower than that of a median american when adjusted for student debt and time spent in education? And if it currently is significantly lower then maybe some correction would be desirable? Like normally when I see people complain about academics not making enough, it's not actually academics making that claim - it's people who think they would've liked to work in academia, just that then they wouldn't make as much as they want to make. Same with teachers. And while I certainly think teachers are underpaid compared to their societal contribution and difficulty/stressfulness of work, I'm also really happy that teachers choose to teach because they want to teach rather than because they want to be rich.
Herein lies the problem. An $80-90k outcome within academia is generally the kind of thing that you get for being a tenured professor in a technical field. That is fine - maybe you could make more (and there are opportunities for more money as a professor), but you will do fine and have a decent job.
But that isn't a very certain outcome. Tenure track professor positions are hard to come by, with many applicants per opening, and a national search for any position. Sometimes, if you get married in grad school and both get a professor position, one has to give up academia or you have a "commuter marriage" which is as terrible as it sounds. Depending on the field, there may or may not be lots of other options for employment. If you can go work in a national lab or a corporate R&D lab if academia fails you, you are ok. If the only alternative to academia is grunt work you will have a sad life.
Loans become huge in the US by the way. You can be deeply in debt after going through your Bachelors here. It's not a necessity but it is definitely common. They are such that if your outcomes after school are positive, then it will set your personal life back a few years, and if they are negative then you will be quite fucked.
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EPT
