To some extent. The big difference is this: if you leave the academic career path with a PhD in ancient history or medieval basket weaving, you're pretty darn-near unemployable and will probably wind up making $35K editing crummy manuscripts for a fourth-rate publishing house (or doing three months work in Moscow for $12,000 and calling it "lucrative"). But most of the folks I know who've left the academic career path with a PhD in physics have jumped straight into obscenely highly-paid jobs in finance, management consulting, etc.
I find it funny that a PhD (modern European History) considers a 3 month consulting gig earning 12K "lucrative." That's only ~48K/year ... after taking inflation into account, I was making more without a bachelors.
Oddly, most of my friends pursuing graduate degrees in the hard sciences aren't too worried about job prospects. From what I understand, it's almost impossible for them to get a tenure track position at a decent university. But most do have the option of working in their field in industry or just becoming quants/traders in finance world.
I have a bachelor's degree in finance. I am currently working on a bachelor's degree in mathematics in preparation for a PhD in applied mathematics at, hopefully, either Princeton or MIT. My ultimate goal is to get a quant job. For certain types of PhD's, the job prospects continue to look very lucrative; financial mathematics is one of those areas.
This article is from 1999, but everything I've read recently suggests that the situation has only gotten worse. For a while I seriously considered getting a Ph.D. in philosophy or psychology, but various articles like this one convinced my of the insanity of that idea.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] threadOddly, most of my friends pursuing graduate degrees in the hard sciences aren't too worried about job prospects. From what I understand, it's almost impossible for them to get a tenure track position at a decent university. But most do have the option of working in their field in industry or just becoming quants/traders in finance world.