The True Cost of a PhD: Giving Up a Family for Academia

In 2012, CBS noted the bleak future that awaited PhD graduates. From 2005 to 2009, American universities graduated 100,000 new PhDs but only created 16,000 new professorships. The average PhD student spends 8 years in graduate school and turns 33 years old before they graduate.

Unfortunately, the outlook for PhDs hasn’t improved since 2012. More and more, doctoral students sacrifice family, wealth, and their mental health to earn a degree with terrible job prospects.

In the United States, PhD students work as researchers, teaching assistants, and instructors as they study. In return, they earn a cash stipend, which varies and can be anywhere from $17,100 for a chemistry student at Clark University in Atlanta to $42,000 for a civil and environmental engineering student at Stanford University.

The size of the stipend can determine whether a student can start or support a family. Graduate students are at the stage of their life when the average person would start a family, and postdocs are at the stage where it might be their last chance to have kids. Pursuing a PhD will have an outsized impact on whether a grad student achieves their basic life goals.

Yet despite the difficult choices made for a PhD, the PhD students who spoke with this author were optimistic about the future. They enjoy the student camaraderie and relish the opportunity to study material that interests them. They also don’t mind the long hours and low pay. The lifestyle of a PhD student remains attractive.

Among current students, international students were happier and more willing to talk than tightlipped American students. On average, STEM students seemed more pleased with their situation and open to talk than humanities students—which isn’t surprising. For many international students, the stipend is more than what they could earn in their home countries and STEM PhDs typically are better supported than the humanities.

Apoo Apoorv, a second-year PhD STEM student at Rice University, said he was happy with his situation. “I got here with the mindset, ‘I’ll do the best I can,’” he said. “I’m not spending a penny. If I don’t get a job, it’s fine.”

Speaking for graduate students, he said, “you’re happy at least in a well-funded university.” Apoo’s $30,000 annual stipend is comfortable compared to his options if he had stayed in India.

Nguyen, a first-year PhD student at the University of Houston, echoed Apoo. Coming from Vietnam, Nguyen was satisfied with his stipend and happy to pursue his passion for chemistry.

Though the money can be better for some international students than back home, “nobody pursues graduate school for the money,” said Santiago, a PhD student in chemical engineering who also works as a bartender. The main draw, he said, was the freedom in research afforded to grad students. They get to pursue any aspect of their discipline on their own schedule.

The freedom for research, though, often means giving up a family.

“A wealthy spouse helps,” Santiago said, but, “purely on the basis of the stipend, starting a family is not often possible.” Even with two stipends, Santiago said it is very difficult to start a family. Many students worry about missing milestones. However, he pointed out that the situation for PhD students is the same for other students earning an advanced degree. Would-be doctors and lawyers face similar choices.

Medical school, for example, lasts four years and costs $35,000-$60,000 a year. To avoid debt, some medical students obtain an MD-PhD, working as lab assistants for up to 4 years to get their education funded.

“I mean, come on, medical school is extremely stressful,” said Peter, an MD-PhD who works in remote-patient monitoring. “You’re also, in America, extremely leveraged. You’re borrowing a tremendous amount of money. You don’t have any income at all.”

At least with medical school, Peter said, the job prospects are better. New doctors begin making $60,000 and their salary increases by $20,000 a year during residency. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “almost all graduates of domestic medical schools are matched to residencies (their first jobs as physicians) immediately after graduating,” and the median income is $208,000 a year. Academia is much more difficult, financially.

Peter echoed Santiago about the strain medical school puts on family formation. “I agree one hundred percent,” he said. “It’s really hard; it’s really hard for the families; it’s really hard for the kids.”

Given the length of medical school and residency requirements, and the debt incurred, a doctor might be in their mid-30s before they’re financially secure enough to have kids.

To make medical school more attractive to women who want a family and a degree, Peter said some programs have offered to freeze eggs for potential doctors. While some major corporations offer this benefit, this appears to be a new development for hospitals.

For women, earning a PhD and starting a family might be harder than earning a medical degree. According to an article by sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger, the main reason women drop out of STEM is because they believe an academic career is incompatible with a family:

About 30 percent of the women—and 20 percent of the men—we surveyed at the massive ten-campus University of California system turn away from their goal of becoming a professor at a major research university. “I could not have come to graduate school more motivated to be a research-oriented professor,” one woman told us. “Now I feel that can only be a career possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children.”

For women and men who press on for a PhD despite the sacrifice, their chances of getting hired are low. As The Atlantic detailed:

The job market for those with advanced degrees is clearly tightening, according to the NSF study, with many more PhDs in all fields reporting no definite job commitments in 2014 compared to 2004. Nearly 40 percent of the Ph.D.s surveyed in 2014 hadn’t lined up a job—whether in the private industry or academia—at the time of graduation.

For those who do find employment, most will end up as non-tenured faculty. Over the last several decades, the proportion of tenure-track faculty has steadily declined, and non-tenure track faculty now make up more than 75 percent of the profession.

For non-tenured faculty, pay varies greatly. Visiting professors are hired on a full-time basis and earn an average salary of $55,000 a year, according to Glassdoor. But for adjuncts, who are hired and paid on a course-by-course basis, they earn a median salary of $35,000 a year.

Colleges have no easy solutions. Students enter graduate school with a deep passion for the material and a burning desire to learn. It’s hard to tell someone to give up their dreams, but few PhD graduates will secure their dream job in academia.

Medical schools avoid the problem of oversupply by limiting the number of medical schools and class sizes. By restricting supply, doctors keep their salaries high. PhD programs, in contrast, are only restrained by state approval and regional accreditation. So long as universities can find graduate students to sign up, they can award PhDs regardless of how many graduates find a job in academia.

Ultimately, colleges and universities must find a way to allow those pursuing academic careers to obtain the basic goods that most people seek in life: marriage, a family, and a career to support themselves. The price of pursuing a life of the mind shouldn’t be the rest of one’s life.

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UK: Girls are skipping school to avoid sharing gender neutral toilets with boys after being left to feel unsafe and ashamed

Gender-neutral toilets in schools have left girls feeling unsafe and even put their health at risk, parents and teachers have warned. Girls who are menstruating are so anxious about sharing facilities with boys that some are staying at home for fear of being made to feel 'period shame'.

With a growing number of both primary and secondary schools installing unisex toilets, some girls are risking infections by refusing to urinate all day. Others are so fearful they have stopped drinking liquids at school.

Parents and teaching staff have told The Mail on Sunday that female pupils feel deeply uncomfortable or even unsafe sharing toilets with male students.

The trend for single-sex toilets is driven by the wish to be more inclusive of children who identify as transgender and wish to use the same facilities as the opposite sex.

But last night, doctors and politicians called on schools to halt the move towards unisex toilets to prevent any further harm to female pupils.

GP Tessa Katz said holding in urine for prolonged periods on a regular basis could increase the risk of girls suffering urinary and bladder infections.

'The psychological effects of girls not feeling safe enough to use mixed-sex toilets is also concerning,' Dr Katz said.

At the same time, the rise in gender-neutral toilets has sparked a backlash among parents, many of whom say they were not consulted before the change was made at their children's schools.

The latest row involves Deanesfield Primary School in South Ruislip, West London, where parents launched a petition last month against the introduction of unisex toilets.

One angry mother, who has daughters aged four and eight at the school, said: 'The cubicles were open at the bottom and top so older pupils can easily climb up the toilets and peer over.'

Stephanie Davies-Arai, from the parent campaign group Transgender Trend, said schools were being misinformed by 'trans activist' organisations that they were breaking equality laws if they did not make toilets unisex. She said there were clear exemptions under the current equality laws that meant it was perfectly legal to have single-sex toilets.

A spokesman for Deanesfield said: 'We will continue to support parents with any individual worries or concerns they have.'

Tory MP David Davies, who has backed feminist claims that transgender rights are overriding those of women, said: 'If girls are not comfortable sharing toilets with boys then schools should make provision for them, rather than saying girls have got a problem.'

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Australian academics spending big in search for racism

Leftists boost themselves up in a most childish way -- by running down other people.  That those they criticize are in fact innocent of any wrongdoing or even wrong thoughts does not seem to matter to them

And when it comes to academics the process is magnified.  Because of their great learning in one tiny field of knowledge, they feel that they are much wiser and superior to the average Joe. So, improbable though it is, the whole population can then be found to be at fault

Solid evidence that Australians are NOT systematically racist is the high rate of intermarriage between ordinary Anglo-Australians and East Asians.  I see young Asian ladies on the arm of Caucasian men all the time in my local shopping centre

These "anti-racists" live in a delusory little world of their own.  Their self-image as noble rescuers is what it is all about


If you were not already convinced that Australia’s humanities departments have truly lost their way, the latest research project from the faculty of arts and social sciences at the University of Sydney should get you over the line.

Resurgent Racism is the seventh “flagship” theme of FutureFix, a program devised by academics at the university to show taxpaying Australians their money is being put to good use. Resurgent Racism will “address the emergence of new forms of racism manifesting as national populism and far-right extremism”. Researchers will “seek to explain the logics of emboldened white rac­ism in Western liberal democracies”, which they predict “will be applicable to majoritarian racism elsewhere”. These self-appointed sages have looked into the crystal ball and have seen a future blighted by white supremacists.

But we can be pulled back from the brink of this dystopian nightmare if the team at the faculty of arts and sciences is permitted to spend taxpayers’ dollars, and the next few years, “mapping the changes of racism, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and white supremacism” in Australia.

That Islam is a religion, not a race, seems not to matter because a great many academics have shifted from focusing on what is real to what is not — in this case an imagined crisis of endemic racism. They are knee-deep in the quagmire of identity politics, that most dangerous and divisive of ideas that insists on distinguishing individuals by their differences rather than by their similarities.

Like so many in the humanities, they view the world through a Manichean lens, in which everything can be explained as a struggle between the forces of good (light) and evil (darkness). Everything they think about, write about and talk about in their capacity as historians, sociologists or political scientists must support the belief that Western civilisation is a white male patriarchy that wields power over, and oppresses, women and racial minorities.

Last year, Sydney University invited American professor, author and “renowned anti-racism educator” Robin DiAngelo so she could tell all the white people attending the launch of What Does It Mean to be White? Developing White Racial Literacy just how terribly, but perhaps not irredeemably, racist they were. According to DiAngelo, white people live in a racially insular bubble that renders them quivering wrecks when it comes to talking about race, a phenomenon she calls “White Fragility”. “Why does race seem to be the hardest word for white people?” she asked.

If she were to take a closer, impar­tial look at the Australian university sector, she would encounter many white people who have no problem at all with the word. Many academics are not only not afraid to talk about race but they talk about it so incessantly that if it weren’t for gender — the other great preoccupation of 21st-century academe — it would verge on monomania.

Of the 30-odd staff employed at the uni’s department of history, for example, 10 make a point of mentioning race or racism as a research interest. When Greg Sheridan criticised the Australian National University for rejecting the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, one Sydney University professor, Dirk Moses, compared Sheridan to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Since 2002, the department has received almost $9m from the Australian Research Council to fund 18 historical studies research projects that focus on racism, in one form or another. These included The Construction of Race and Racial Identity at the Antip­odes of Empire, 1788-1840 (costing $231,000); Southern Racial Concepts: Comparative Histories and Contemporary Legacies ($2.4m); Immigration Restriction and the Racial state, c. 1880 to the Present ($359,000); Enterprising Women, Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1770-1820 (‘$323,000); and The Racial Century ($94,000).

The Resurgent Racism squad comprises, among others, former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, seen by some to have encouraged complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission following publication of a 2016 cartoon by Bill Leak in this newspaper. Last year Soutphommasane gave the keynote address at the university’s National Centre for Cultural Competence, launched in 2013 to the tune of $5.6m of taxpayers’ money. It claims its mission is to “roll out cultural com­pe­tence across the university and broader local national and international community”, but in real­ity it is a concerted effort to con­vince us Anglo-Celtic white culture is bad.

When vice-chancellor Michael Spence suggested questioning the existence of Chinese influence on his campus was akin to the White Australia policy, he was simply ensuring next year’s income. Last year the university pocketed $884m in international student fees, a generous portion from Chinese students.

The Resurgent Racism team is spending taxpayers’ money to tell Australians how racist we are. It is evidence the racism industry is flourishing on our university campuses, which are no longer in the business of producing objective and impartial scholarship that will edify, inspire and educate future generations of Australians.

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