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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Listen to yourself, no one is denying anyone anything. I[b]t was THEIR choice to go into academic track[/b], no one forced them into it. As with everyone else picking out a trade to practice, they picked out what they wanted to do, and must accept what the market determines as the value of their contribution. No one owes them anything. [/quote]

this is partly true. yes it was their choice, but young people might not be aware of what that choice really means, and also, circumstances can change for the worse during the training. even at this topic, where people are supposedly informed, someone stated that professors make 300k without acknowledging the odds of getting such a position. very few people are aware of the realities of the academic market, and a vast majority of them are those who already have phds and have failed to land a good position. very few undergrads or their parents and even professors understand what the market is like.

when i entered phd program, it was still possible to go straight to TT after getting a phd. a decade later, it takes two or more postdocs to be competitive.

if you don't see the wast that is the academic system you are an idiot. the fact of the matter is that top schools could staff most of their departments with people who would [i]pay to work[/i]. that's right, if you advertised harvard professorship that only has zero salary but where you need to pay, say, 50k a year to teach, you will still get many dozens of applicants for each position.[/quote]

It is the responsibility of parents and educators to help educate young people and guide them towards making rational decisions. If a young person makes a poor decision due to poor parenting or education, it isn't the fault or the responsibility of the market to make them whole. To the contrary, it is very natural for the market to reveal just how difficult their choice is and force them to seek alternative career paths.

If someone is under the illusion that professors were well paid, that's due to a lack of effort in researching the pay of professors, especially in this day and age of information availability and transparency. I too wasted time in the process of my education. I have three degrees, one of which was redundant to a degree that I am certain I could have done without, and iffy on one more. Sure I got a sense of personal fulfillment out of the degrees, but the only one that makes me money is the third and last one. When I graduated with a CS degree, the tech bubble burst - talk about bad timing.

I am one of the PPs that tremendously argued that our current education system is wasteful, but it has little relationship with how well professors are paid since the situation is that there is an abundance of money, not lack thereof. If anything, the current wasteful education system encourages over-hiring of professors, and artificially high pay. Yet despite this, you have so many more people who wants to get into this academic track, is because parents/schools have been so passive and "supportive" of the whims of students so as to doom them to a life of disappointment.

Again, the point here isn't to gloat over people who can't find their way in the academic career path, or how well/poorly professors are paid, but that the market does not owe anyone anything - people are paid based on supply and demand, not how much we value the underlying education services. Simply put, people who can teach is in abundance, and therefore wages are low. [/quote]

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