Graduate School

Well I'm a senior right now going for my BBA, and by just taking another two years and getting a MBA I would more than double my starting salary, so I say it is definitely worth it for some careers. I'm not sure how useful getting a PhD (and beyond) would be for most careers though.

I would just take a look at the company(s) you want to work for and see what their views are on people having graduate degrees. For instance I know of a few places, which I was initially interested in, that only interviewed people if they had an MBA. I really don't understand this philosophy as I would consider having two years of work experience to be far more valuable than just two extra years of academics! On this same note though, ideally it would be nice to find a job that encourages you to further your education, and possibly will even pay for you to get your masters (or above). This is the route I plan on going, as I can't really afford to get a masters from the school I wish to attend at the moment.

All that being said, depending on what your dream job is there may or may not be any rush to go straight on to your masters...

Also, I've had various teachers at my university encourage me to try and aim for the best graduate school I can reasonably make it in to (or at the very least a different university from which I received my undergraduate degree). If you continue on in the same university you received your bachelors degree from then you will have mostly the same professors teaching you the same stuff over again which will ultimately result in you gaining very little (knowledge-wise) from the degree.

Best of luck with whichever route you decide to go...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Professors do their job for the love of the work, not for the money it brings. When I finish with my PhD, I can either look into getting a post-doc paying a little more than I'm making now (not much), or go into industry and make closer to $90k. If I am eventually lucky enough to become a tenure-track professor, then I'll be starting around $60k a year. Less than what I could have made with my BS.

Yeah.., my sister is currently in the process of finishing up her PhD in Bio-Chemistry, and she is planning on going on to do a post doc afterward with goals of eventually becoming a professor. It is really strange because before her PhD, while she was getting her masters, she expressed a strong disinterest in teaching in the future. All the sudden though, as she was in the process of getting her PhD at her new school, she changed her mind...

I wouldn't necessarily say professors, especially at the high-level universities (in the science field) aren't making a good income though! There have been several cases I recall where my sister has been required to share a percentage of her grants with the professor, and just about all of their multi-million dollar grants usually include rather sizable personal expense allocations. I think most of these professors at her school are making somewhere around $500,000 (and up) a year...

Most of my professors though stepped down from being high level managers of companies, making in the millions, to about what you said of making ~$60,000 a year. Most are still on the boards of companies however, so they still make several hundred thousand dollars a year. I can tell though that a lot of the ones I've had (especially for my 4000 level classes) really do seem to love teaching.., I wonder if I will ever be that way when I get old(er)...

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Originally Posted by RacinReaver

I can see some professors making a lot of money if they've got patents or do a lot of consulting on the side, but I doubt most of those professors are making $500,000 a year.

Here's how much the average full professor makes at some top schools (in 100k).
Harvard: 185
Yale: 165
Princeton: 172
MIT: 152
Caltech: 162
Stanford: 174
Cornell: 148.2
Penn State (Main Campus): 125
U of Michigan: 137

So, yeah, top professors at top universities make decent money, but they're not getting salaried at $500k+ unless they're high demand Nobel Prize winners or famous politicians.

(Data from The Chronicle: AAUP Faculty Salary Survey )

I know my own advisor here at Caltech makes around $190k, and he's seen as one of the top people within his field (as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, which probably help get a pay bump considering they're fairly prestigious things).

I'm wondering if those numbers, as well as what your adviser claims, includes the income derived from their grants. For most science fields, or any field really where there is research being done, I believe a large percentage of a professor's income comes from their grants.

Originally Posted by Guest Column: Letting Scientists Off the Leash

... In fact, the university rarely pays the full salary of the professor — depending on the department, the professor must find between 25 percent and 75 percent of his or her salary from outside grants ...

(Professor of bioengineering at Stanford University)

[Here] is an interesting article/blog on this subject if you wish to read it...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I suppose you can always write books and/or articles as well when your a professor, and that will probably help your income a little. It is probably much easier to get them published and have them sell well if you have one or more PhDs behind your name. I remember I had this one professor wrote an excessive amount of books, somewhere around thirty I believe...

With that in mind, I think that a lot of professors out there get their PhDs mostly for the respect that comes with them in the academic community, and not just necessarily because they love teaching. I remember one of my best professors, who didn't have a PhD, told me that without a PhD he was considered by colleagues and the academic community as being almost at the bottom despite the fact that he was extremely successful in the business world. Likewise one of the poorest teachers I've had recently had like seven (or some ridiculous number) of degrees, and didn't really seem to have any interest at all in teaching. I think he was using the degrees mostly as a way to boost his creditability/respect in the academic community so he could sell more books (he was the one I mentioned at the start of this post).

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