To think my husband would earn a salary during a PhD?

[Badgoushk]

My husband is thinking about doing a PhD. He did a masters recently and got a high distinction so I don't think he'd have trouble getting accepted. But the question is can we afford it? Would he get paid? Did you get paid during your PhD? How much please? It would be in Energy/Climate change and it would likely be in London. Thanks.

I'm not trying to make out all is rosy in the academic garden, because it isn't.

But pick pretty much any profession on Mumsnet and ask if you should go into it, and people all say 'no'- it's the same with teaching, law, civil service, local government, even IT has had huge redundancies although the sector is now rehiring.

It would be hard to know what to do instead- I nearly jumped ship into the consultancy end of the public sector which is hugely better paid, a few years ago, and now those people are now finding it very difficult, contracts few and far between.

The recession has bitten and is still biting, and I wouldn't discourage someone with a high distinction getting a PhD at this stage in the game, as we really don't know what's round the corner, plus there are (depending what in relation to climate change) lots of work in consultancy, policy, research for non-academic orgs which most of my former PhD students do and are usually happy with it (although some actually flee back into post-doc work as it's relatively pressure free in some areas compared with private sector research/marketing companies).

Most people I know in private sector in things like marketing, IT, HR, Sales, communications, finance and most working for consultancies are doing well for themselves.

Long hours, yes, but generally not over the weekend, good job security, generous salaries and packages, lots of perks.

I'd see them a lot better off financially than the academics in my circle and job satisfaction is relatively good. Looks like a much better deal to me.

I did a computer science PhD, I loved it, had a really great experience. I was funded at about 8k per year - not London, about 15 years ago.

I did a postdoc but came to the realization that i didn't want to stay in academia long term - not as a lecturer, not as a researcher, fell out of love with publishing and conferences and writing funding proposals.

I then got incredibly lucky, I got a great industry job - very niche, just right for me. The role grew and the company grew and I've done very well. I could maybe have gotten the job without my PhD but I certainly would not have had as much success without it - all the background knowledge and skills gave me a really critical edge.

That's it really, just another experience. But it's possible to give up on academia and still be very glad to have done a PhD

MedSchoolRat, his MSc was in Global Energy and Climate Policy so definitely science rather than humanities.

Oh I dunno LRD. She's the most down to earth and honest prof we have, and this was at the tail end of her urging everyone to consider alternatives to academia. She's spent forty years as a black disabled woman lecturer, and has received more than her fair share of poor treatment. I think accusing her of trying to be clever is a bit low. She's probably one of the most honest academics I have met. Sorry - I know the convo has moved on, but just popped back to have a read and was a little shocked at the disregard. Fine to disagree with the opinion, but low to link it to her fallaciously trying to be clever.

You must realise I don't know your prof personally, and wasn't commenting on her specific situation, right? We don't all know each other. (And, honestly: don't you think it is painfully ironic to be offended at the idea I might imagine your prof was 'trying to be clever'?!)

All I'm saying is that she's saying the same thing a great many senior academics say. An awful lot of them do think what they're saying is clever. They think it's reassuring and perceptive. And - I'm sorry - but I really do not think it is either of those things.

All good - totally get that. Just seemed odd that the default response was a put-down. Maybe it seemed ageist? Or being informed by incorrect assumptions about her pedagogy? Not sure... It felt instantly dismissive. I'm mildly curious why I felt prompted to jump to her defence. I will ponder on it! Too many hours of debating feminist classrooms today I think. As you were...

OP - I just wanted to offer my experience perhaps as a bit of a counter to much of what's been posted already.

I did a part-time PhD in the humanities. I was self-funded. I already had a job which I loved and was happy with before I started the PhD which I was very reluctant to give up for full-time study. So, I worked full-time throughout the doctorate. Yes, it took a long time but it did also mean that now that I have finished, I don't have the stress of having to look for a job along with all the recently-finished full-time PhDs (as I already have one). It also meant no loss of salary over the years I was studying so no financial impact on my family.

I don't regret it at all. I have found that (rightly or wrongly) it has changed (in a positive way) how people see me at work. I love being introduced as 'Dr' at conferences. I have just published a book from the thesis. I loved my area of study and for me it felt like a privilege to be able to study it at that level and to know that I had made that happen. The amount of juggling it took to manage a full-time job, part-time PhD and a family was no mean feat and I take satisfaction from the fact that I did that (and now I don't have to do it anymore!).

If you work in subject where you can take your undergraduate degree and get 50-100k within a few years of graduation, 27k will seem a bad salary.

What kind of jobs might those be user?

Two things

• If you really can find no redeeming feature to an academic job, it is crazy to continue to work in the field. There are way easier and better paid positions elsewhere that will probably give you more time to do research on the side. I have a friend who is currently contemplating going to work for Google instead of staying, and it's probably the right thing for him financially, emotionally and in research-terms.

• I am not saying the hours aren't brutal, especially for early career people. However, I know loads of people at a mid level in academia who I don't feel are very realistic. They complain about working weekends but they actually don't really get started in the morning until 10 at the earliest, and they don't work late either. They also spend large chunks of the year away. When you add it up, they're just doing a fairly normal middle class working week.

• There is more to life than money. Doing a PhD to get rich is a terrible plan - aiming for academia if you are shit at management, admin or dislike teaching is also a terrible idea. If, however, you love a subject and you are psychologically tough enough to take a bit of a bruising (and you WILL be bruised by it, so if you have any issues around that you really should think twice), and you don't have expectations of anything beyond the degree itself, a PhD can be one of the most difficult, brilliant, frustrating, agonizing, joyful things you do for 3 years. It's like the intellectual equivalent of the SAS, brutal but kind of exciting.

• There ought to be more collective action to raise salaries. I do not understand the coyness about this.

Four things!

I may have a PhD but I still can't count to five.

Shove I agree with your points, especially point two. That's what I was trying to say- everyone who is a teacher, junior doctor, solicitor, works in IT, even some consultants (!) tell me they have more admin, work longer hours and feel underappreciated and underpaid. This is (IMO) a combination of the recession making employers feel they can extract their pound of flesh from their employees with no real risk they'll go elsewhere as there are more people than jobs, plus a general bureaucratization of the professions which is not unique to academia (and well documented within it). Academics like to appear busy, and I do know some who really work crazy hours, but I don't myself, I can't, I have caring responsibilities and children. It's still fine.

I still get a buzz from my job and am excited about what I'm researching and learning, perhaps because I work a lot with industry/collaborators and so I see inside different organizations and it doesn't look nicer there, in all honesty.

I do think though, it can depend on the institution, and I wouldn't dismiss any senior academic saying 'don't go into it now', because, compared with how it was 20 years ago, it probably is a lot harder for a lot less pay and agency. The problem is that this is true really across most public sector and professional jobs. My mum was a teacher, worked hard but was home by 4 every afternoon and did not stay up at all doing lesson plans as they weren't even invented. Never worked in the six weeks holiday. Even at management level, my parents never did the long days that are now standard.

I wouldn't be put off OP as your husband sounds like, if he has a good Masters plus is already publishing, like he will be well positioned after a PhD, either to be an academic or go elsewhere, I really don't know many people who genuinely regret their PhD, especially if they were paid to do it!

Sorry, pont, I certainly didn't intend to be ageist (and this isn't a problem restricted to senior academics, not all of whom are 'senior' in terms of being 'older' anyway).

I was knee-jerk dismissive, just because I am so weary of hearing people trot out this line, and it is so common. I think it's a really bad thing to say to a group of MA students - it's dishonest at worst and head-in-the-sand oblivious at best, because realistically, she cannot possibly be unaware of the situation.

And my irritation's still coming over too strong, sorry.

I am absolutely sure she means well and even hopes to motivate students past a depressing point. I had a really lovely supervisor for part of my PhD who was like this, and in all other respects she's an excellent mentor and teacher and so on. It's just that, by definition, senior academics' perspective of the failure and success of their cohort is one-sided. They made it. They knew people who didn't and they may have felt they were failing for a while. But they have a fairly rosy perspective because, in the end, things worked out.

I think some do, therefore, assume that the sorts of worries the OP and her partner have, have always been there and have always been roughly the same.

I agree LRD - only I'd point out that it's a much wider problem. Every single thread on here that is about young people having a rougher time than their parents gets the same kind of chorus of people insisting that the situation is broadly the same as it was 30-40 years ago. And no amount of showing them the evidence (endless graphs delineating changing population demographics, wage/housing cost ratios, student debt increases etc) alters their minds.

People are highly attached to their own 'triumph against the odds' narratives, and the idea that they succeeded by individual effort, minimising good fortune and the incredible importance of the collective situation. They also always tend to think their suffering in pursuit of their wealth has been greater than that of others: it's highly egocentric and made worse by the fact that the range of experience that a lot of these people have is pretty narrow in class terms, but also ideologically - an inability to think outside of the fairly narrow domain of capitalism (in academia, at the more liberal end of this).

So perhaps another way of looking at this is that there are grounds for solidarity across sectors? Whoever thought that weakening collectives and making it much more difficult to take action together would have led to ideal conditions for capitalist bodies to drive down wages and worsen conditions?

Absolutely.

I definitely don't want to suggest academia as a special case - I was arguing against it upthread and do think it is a class issue.

I think something that's often difficult to get at is that we're not comparing apples with apples when we compare 1970 to now. House prices, student debt, etc. etc. Those affect everyone across the board.

Yeah, exactly. Totally agree. high fives

Oh, and to show I don't have some chip on my shoulder about senior academics - a prof in my department, recently retired, often talks about how she made her career. She points out that her husband was unusual, for the time, in deliberately putting her career first because he was older and more established and she does concede this is something that may have become more common. But she's also pointed out that when she was doing her PhD it was perfectly normal to expect to buy your own house in your 20s, and for one middle-class income to allow one partner to stay at home. The fact they both worked outside the home took them comfortably into the well-off category.

Then again, my mum has horror stories of hearing meetings where someone argued that such-and-such a job/scholarship should go to young Dr Manperson, who had a wife and needed to support her, and not young Dr Ladyperson, whose husband should be supporting her ...

we need more high fives in academia, clearly.

Yep - I think it's perilously easy to forget how very, very recently a lot of that absolutely overt sexism happened. (It's still there, but not so unashamed and out in the open. Progress, but not nearly fast enough).

Perhaps a little unusually, here a lot of the profs in their 60s have been at the same institution for ages and still live in the same houses they bought when they first started the job. Huge places that are now £450-500k that are well outside the reach of most younger members of staff who don't have parental help. Yet bought when those people had very average positions in their 20s/early 30s. Obviously, there is a seachange in housing cost here, but I also wonder if academic wages have stagnated over the last 50 years in a way that the wages of similar professions (medicine?) have not?? (I've also come across references from the earlier 20th century of academics joining in building booms for the upper middle and upper classes across Europe, e.g. the Ringstrasse in Vienna - hard to imagine young academics being remotely in such games now).

Yes, but what will happen to medicine? It's female-dominated at the lower levels, and I bet it's going to lose status and earning power as a result.

The same thing's happened with housing here (though I've no idea where most profs live).

We had a godawful 'housing survey' through the university a few months back, which was clearly written by someone with no current knowledge of renting and very little understanding of how it worked. It included helpful glosses to some of the questions - posted to academic staff, not undergrads - including the explanation that 'financial help to buy' is what's commonly called 'the bank of mum and dad'.

But I digress.

Did they also draw a little picture of a house and a flat to help you decide which one you lived in??!

I really worry we are on a race to the bottom of everything, and the denial of history in the name of this rampant individualism ("We struggled in the 70s too!") doesn't help. It reminds me a lot of the people who say homeless people who are literally sleeping on the street can't be poor because they have a phone (and it often seems to be the phones of younger people that act as the "proof" that they should be able to afford a house, bizarrely). Whole thing would be laughable if it weren't all so serious.

Typically you earn about £13k tax free as a stipend, and then a small amount from teaching on top of that. You also get a student card which massively reduces travel costs and entrances into places. Overall, I worked out my stipend was equivalent to about £17k. Still a tiny amount for a very pressurised three years but better than having to pay yourself.

Guitar can I fling myself sobbing upon your bosom for a moment. I'm also working full-time and doing a self-funded part-time PhD, and it's so good to hear a positive voice about this situation.

I know completion rates are dire, but there was no way I could do it full-time. I'm a single parent and exH's contribution of £6 per week wouldn't exactly keep us. Also I like my job, it pays reasonably well, and I'm not giving up a permanent contract for the uncertainty of short-term contracts at best. Also, if I fail, it's something of a consolation I can quietly supress it on my cv - there are no gaps to explain away.

I've been very close to dropping out, but I'm currently in a phase of thinking I might just do it.

I should have requested pictorial clarification in the 'any comments' section at the end.

biblio - good luck! Sorry it's feeling rotten at the moment.