Communications of the ACM
Weighing Grad School Payback
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In his September 2020 column (p. 5), Moshe Vardi rightly criticizes the Trump Administration's policies prohibiting foreign graduate students and points out the dearth of domestic graduate students willing to fill positions. He asks to understand the root of this problem, and I would like to share my perspective on why I chose another path.
During my undergraduate program, a few professors encouraged me to consider graduate school. They said it had been the best decision they had made. However, I could not help but feel that I was talking to lottery winners about buying tickets. To me, graduate school looked like a long, slogging prospect with an uncertain outcome. The conventional wisdom was that graduate students were the grunts of the academic workforce, suffered disproportionate grievances, and won disproportionate low rewards. The stories of destitute adjunct faculty in academia pointed to a future with great risk.
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