To be fair, I doubt most people are in it for "fame and fortune." That being said, most of us interested in such matters need to balance the need to eat and lead a reasonably normal material life with our interests in ideas, research, and teaching. Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.
If you go into contemporary academia with the expectation that you will not get a TT job, or a TT job in a desirable place to live, at the end, then perhaps you are doing it right.
Right now there are simply far more PhDs than TT jobs. That means a large number of PhDs cannot get the jobs for which they are being trained. People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."
>People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."
A lot of the PhD's in pure sciences in the US are from foreign countries, especially India and China. Actually, foreign students dominate in most engineering/natural science departments of US universities. So, I guess most American kids do realize that its not a valuable decision to pursue a PhD.
Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.
Amen. It's kind of amazing what academics put up with.
Take relocation. I'm 31 and while I'm at the top in terms of talent, I've made some mistakes and I'm probably only upper-middle in terms of tech career success, and I would simply not take a job, with a cross-country move, that didn't offer a full relocation package. Yet academics who are at much higher quantiles of success in their industry (just to have a TT job is 85th or higher, these days) are happy just to have a salary, because their low self-confidence ("impostor syndrome") is used against them to the point where they think it's egregious just to ask for basically decent treatment.
The author of this piece didn't ignore this point, though. He commented on how even if you're in it for the intellectual gratification you're still very limited:
> If I'm not going to grad school because of job opportunities, what other reasons are there? Pursuing my interests? As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy.
If you aren't paid well, and you're not well respected, and there is no great job waiting for you at the end of the tunnel, and you can't even work on what you're most interested in, I can't really blame anybody for leaving.
I think that sums up why so many people hate being in academia. They go into it for the wrong reasons. I've seen many people make this mistake.