a-phd-may-cost-you-a-lifetime-of-debt

I am sure she had other opportunities in those 20 years, so there must be something that keeps her at the university.

Different issue. The question is what the DBA would make in the private sector.

 

Not much research about this but my gut feeling is that a DBA from Harvard would make about the same as an MBA from Harvard in the private sector. The value of this degree is really the networking capabilities rather than the actual knowledge you get from it.

The difference is that DBA students at Harvard do no pay for tuition and also receive a small salary while completing the DBA.

If you look at the curriculum of most PhDs and DBAs, you are required to write papers and present at conferences. These skills are not really valuable in industry that requires people to produce some tangible results rather than just papers.

One can argue that paper writing enhances critical thinking but the reality is that high salaries come with your ability to bring high revenues to the company and not just letters after your name.

 

vanity PhD

My vanity is not so great that I would have spent the six years I did in earning a PhD.

lost earnings + cost of degree + poor job prospects = I tell my students (at a tier-one liberal arts college) not to consider a PhD unless there's nothing else in life you want to do.

 

That's exactly what I was told when I was in a bachelors program, and now I preach the same mantra. Conversely, I'm glad I did pursue a masters and a doctorate, but in hindsight if I could know then what I know now, I do not know if I would pursue a doctorate all over again. In my case, having a doctorate ended up helping me. But frequently, that is not the case for many others.

 

I think that's spot on. I am sure there are think tanks and some organization who really need to kind of academic research expertise that an MBA can't offer, but those are probably few, and even they probably first and foremost want a lot of hands-on industry experience.

Then, of course, the most brilliant, most interesting people don't care much about what common wisdom (or their professor) tells them. The world needs brilliant philosophers and historians and art critics and all that. The challenge is to know if you have what it takes to be one of them. If yes, by all means, go and get that Ph.D. and don't worry about boring stuff like ROI. If not, then maybe better get that MA/MS/MBA and make a good salary without the frustration and sacrifices.

 

Academia is very good at dangling the carrot of tenure in front of you when they can work you like a mule. ("Just wait until so-and-so retires" "If we get this next grant funded" etc.) Then it's "oh sorry, our budget got cut." or "They decided to hire someone from outside the institution this time."

The other problem is that you can become so specialized, its hard to convince anyone in private industry to hire you. Sometimes just having PhD on your resume is a reason for rejection.

Hence the term (and good book) "PhD trap."

 

The same stands for academia, when I completed my doctorate the IT field was about object oriented, component programming, etc and now is about cyber security, service oriented, big data, etc.
In few words, you have a window of opportunity of about 5 years to land tenure after the PhD, after this your research becomes irrelevant and new graduates have more chance.

Some people here have it right, if you want this just for self improvement and to teach on the side as an adjunct just to tell people that you are a professor, a part time DL PhD from South Africa that comes with a low price tag will do the trick.