One of my favorite past-times during the Holidays season is to read the Christmas issue of The Economist. There are lots of "not-so-serious" articles on a wide range of topics that makes for an excellent reading.
In the next three posts I'll talk a bit about three of them that drew my attention.
The first ones is about life in academia and the unmatched expectations of doing a PhD (specially in humanities).
It must be really difficult to finish your PhD in Literature and have no place that would have paid you no more than 40k USD / year anyway. Not mention the fact that currently it takes about 7-8 years to get a PhD in those fields. A newly minted Finance PhD in the US gets around 170-220k / year. European salaries are much lower than that (apart from LBS and INSEAD) but still much better than what a humanities PhD would get.
I've been very lucky to be in a field where PhDs are highly paid (thank you Wall Street and the City for raising our outside option value) and that it is something that I love. At least in my case, the expectations I formed over the five years seemed close to what I ended up getting.
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