Why not go for it s2000magician? “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” - Einstein
My bros a prof on the tenure track right now. He has great leisure time and awesome work life balance. My girl has a phd but decided to venture away from academia. She has a great work life balance, albeit not as good compared with my brothers, but earns far more money.
I think tenure will soon be taken away and thus that comfort once enjoyed by academia may be at risk.
Because professor salaries are are squeezed to make room in the budget for other things, like luxury dorm buildings for students, and super gym complexes, etc…
how much do private school profs make? 130k?
That’s probably where full professors sit after about 15 years post-PhD (so 20 years after starting). If you are a business school professor or in an industry where the private sector might hire you away, it’s easier to get to a number like that and probably takes less time.
If you can sell your time as a consultant, which profs in certain disciplines can do, you can push that comp up, and that’s clearly how a lot of the very top academics do it. However, you generally have to be at a top brand name university to do that with any regularity.
So those numbers are nice, given the work-life balance, but they also aren’t representative of what people who start down the Ph.D. path experience, since you need 1) to be a full professor with tenure (so many years of experience, and fewer and fewer slots opening for it), and 2) to be at one of the top name brand universities.
It’s a bit like telling college seniors that the great thing about finance is that when you get to be a managing director, you’ll get bonuses on the order of $1MM and up.
Depends on location, major and the school. An accounting adjunct professor at my school makes 200k and he’s not even tenured. It all depends on the market and what you can get in the industry, schools would have to offer you something comparable for you to teach instead of working for the private sector.
So to me it seems if one wants to pursue a PhD to become of professor making a decent wage, one must be willing to sacrifrice years of studying in a city that is not of ones choosing followed by years of finding the right position in a city that is not of ones choosing. And this is all assuming you get through the PhD program. Does this sound accurate?
Right. Don’t do it unless you can’t imagine yourself happy doing anything else.
A lot of Ph.D. types don’t really care where they live, as long as they can study what they are into. If you’re one of these types, that’s an advantage.
Also, it used to be that if you needed an ultra-smart person in a topic, you’d go and look for Ph.D.s. In today’s world, there are tons and tons of specialized masters’ programs that produce people that are completely adequate for most applied needs. It used to be that a masters’ degree was just a weigh station on the way to a doctorate; now it’s the jumping off point for people who want to apply a more advanced skill set, but it needs to be a program that’s designed to insert you into an industry (finance, politics, diplomacy, law, business, etc.).
As a result, the Ph.D. used to be applicable to a lot of things beyond being a university professor; today, it’s pretty much a degree designed for people who want a job as a university professor and/or those who really want to be called “Doctor.”
I did it in part because - as a child in an academic family growing up in an academic town, and being someone who enjoys the life of the mind - I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I’m proud of my accomplishments there, and most other people are too, but the degree doesn’t garner any respect in the finance world, although applied logic and epistemology that gets refined in the process of dissertating is something that does get respect (though, I would add, there are almost certainly more efficient ways of refining that than getting a Ph.D., if that’s what you want).
I’ve often compared the levels of university education to knowledge about tools.
If you have a bachelor’s degree in something: “You’ve seen the tools.”
If you have a master’s degree in something: “You know how to use the tools.”
If you have a Ph.D. in something: “You know how to make new tools.”
There’s just not that much demand for new tools in most of society, with the some exceptions for tech and biology.
^Thank very much for all the information bchad. It is very insightful and I appreciate you taking time out of your day to answer insightfully (is that even a word?). I’m trying hard to convince myself to do it, but I’m struggling to do so. Love for subject and passion to teach are like a 9 out of 10, but headwinds seem to be at 15+.
And, your just describing one of the major headwinds. What about degree of difficulting getting into PhD program? And what is the degree of difficulting of passing the tests, disseration, etc?
This is probably the wrong forum to ask this question. Advice you get are probably going to be subjective at best, it is probabaly best to speak to PHD candidates or professors in the fields of your interest to get a more accurate idea of what is in store for you.
Yea I would agree to an extent, but I believe bchad is a PhD who’s provided the large amount of the information here. But agree, my ace in the hole for information will be my former professor who I stayed in contact with. Just trying to gather as much info as possible.
I’m doing my Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology, and my work involves a combination of neuropsych, machine learning, and experimental research. I suggest that you consider very carefully the decision to apply for a PhD program. Bchad’s description of academia is very accurate. Although getting your PhD can be a very intellectually stimulating experience, I would not recommend pursuing a this path unless you have an unrelentless passion for a particular topic and have a very high tolerance for failure and rejection.
Which means that experience applying for finance jobs is great preparation! 
^I’m dealing with rejection right now in my job search. Somehow I don’t find myself frustrated in this endeavor as much as in convincing a bunch of anonymous reviewers about the reliability of data from experimental studies. You would think that people doing research would show more of a “Show me the data!” attitude and less of “If it ain’t fitting the main theory, the results must be wrong.” Research is really interesting and I get a kick out of doing it, but I don’t enjoy the slow environment and the lack of any sensible recognition (i.e., a wage that allows one to meet basic needs and a career path that acctualy involves research rather than teaching).
It does seem that Max Planck was on to something when he said “Science marches forward one funeral at a time.”
I disliked teaching when I started, but grew to like it as I got better at it. It is one of the few things in that line of work where you can really see the fruits of your labor in time frames of less than 6-12 months. Getting the balance of teaching and research right can be tricky.
Also, I got a lot of additional insights when I was forced to make things clear for students.
Suprisingly, I acctually think I’m better and more motivated at teaching courses that I have to teach for the first time rather than teach a repeat course. It has more to do with the fact that I learn a lot from teaching something I haven’t taught before.
I assume that you’ve also completed some graduate training? If yes, what did you do during that time and what made you go in non-academia?
I taught quantitative analysis and political economy courses at a major public policy school, with an emphasis on environmental policy and economics. The quant stuff was not as intense as an MFE, so when I left, I had to buff up on that stuff.
I left for largely the reasons I mentioned in my long post earlier. I was not a diversifier, and I was not willing to go wherever there might be a job that year that was mildly interested in what I was working on. I had a girlfriend at the time who herself was quite successful and didn’t want to leave her for a position I wasn’t crazy about.
Part of the challenge of Academe is that one’s research becomes more and more specialized as knowledge advances, but then it also starts to become so specialized that it is too easy for employers to decide that they’re not interested in that specific item that you are working on. Selecting a generally applicable dissertaion topic sounds like a good strategy, but inevitably the demands of producing original research force you to get more and more specialized to the point where you just have to get lucky that someone is interested in what you are interested in during the year or two that you are looking for a position.
I also found it immensely challenging to apply in, say, September, for a job that would start the following July, and that if it didn’t work out, you pretty much had to wait until next September to apply. The cash flow implications of that cycle were just crazy.
I also saw that the increase in tuition outpacing inflation was going to lead to a crisis that is more or less unfolding now (though not yet all that acute). It was clear to me that this was going to place pressures on university administration to do all sorts of things to squeeze professors (adjuncting, cutting departments, dangling tenure but not following up with it, slow down promotion rates in order to keep comp lower, etc). It just looked like it was an industry set for contraction, and was not likely to be a good place to be unless you were an obvious Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye type.
Hey bchad. So since we last talked 2+ months ago I’ve done extensive research on getting a finance PhD and I recently talked to one of my former finance professors and overall he said similiar things that you did about budget constraints but also noted how difficult it is to just get into not only tier 1s but tier 2s phd programs. He told me to stay away from tier 3s.
His ultimate suggestion was if I go down this path to get a MBA or MS in statistics to get a solid mathmatical foundation since the CFA is useless (my words) for the math in a finance PhD.
Before I even think about coughing up $50-$100K, do you think if I got a MBA or MS in statistics from a tier 1 or tier 2 with solid gpa (>3.5) and I had a solid GMAT (>700) that I would have a realistic shot at getting into a tier 1 or tier 2 phd finance program? Or I’m I wasting my time/money?
Or what if I kept my current job but did a part time MBA to save money? Or is that just a waste as well given less prestige?
If you consider having to do research on the side as a negative reason for becoming a professor, I would say not to do it. A successful professor’s primary goal should be to advance the reserach in his/her field. If your motivation is to be a teacher I would say just get a position as an adjunct professor as a side gig to whatever other career that you have.
You’d get along great with Navy guys.