Will Getting A PhD Get Me Paid? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jess, let's do some questions.

00:00:02.000 | We're kind of a long one here.

00:00:05.000 | This one comes from Steve.

00:00:07.000 | Steve says, "In the '90s, I had a plan to get my PhD in exercise physiology

00:00:14.000 | to teach and dive deep into human performance testing research.

00:00:19.000 | Unfortunately, I allowed my significant other at the time to convince me otherwise,

00:00:23.000 | which led me down a path of ever-changing careers,

00:00:26.000 | always taking different jobs to maintain some sort of financial security.

00:00:31.000 | At the age of 53, and after listening to most of your Deep Questions episodes,

00:00:36.000 | I now have the confidence and motivation to go back to school

00:00:40.000 | to achieve my previously stated goals.

00:00:42.000 | However, after doing the math, I would be 60 by the time I graduate with a PhD,

00:00:48.000 | which would leave me maybe 10 to 15 years to work before retiring.

00:00:53.000 | One alternative is to start a small human performance testing lab as a side gig,

00:00:59.000 | slowly building up a strong client base while maintaining my day job as an office manager

00:01:04.000 | for a major Southern California university."

00:01:09.000 | All right, so that's the question.

00:01:11.000 | At the age of 53, do you go get your PhD because you have this idea

00:01:17.000 | for some sort of performance testing lab?

00:01:22.000 | Or is it just a vision that you could run?

00:01:25.000 | Well, Steve, regardless of your age, my graduate school advice applies here.

00:01:32.000 | My graduate school advice says never start a graduate program

00:01:36.000 | unless you have clear evidence that the specific degree you're going to get

00:01:40.000 | at the specific school that you're going to get it is needed to unlock

00:01:43.000 | a specific step in your career that is appealing to you,

00:01:48.000 | that you've gotten to a point where you say, "I see this thing I want to do.

00:01:51.000 | This is why I want to do that.

00:01:53.000 | But if I can get this degree here, I can do it. Otherwise, I can't."

00:01:56.000 | I am not a big believer in get the degree to see what options it opens up.

00:02:02.000 | Now, you have a bit of an idea about what you want to do with this PhD,

00:02:04.000 | but I think it is too vague to qualify.

00:02:06.000 | I mean, just based off of your question wording, so I'm extrapolating here,

00:02:10.000 | but just based off your question wording, you have this idea that there's some startup

00:02:14.000 | with a human performance testing lab that could be interesting.

00:02:18.000 | That is super vague. I would not spend six or seven years getting a PhD

00:02:21.000 | with the idea that maybe that will help me do this thing that's kind of vague.

00:02:24.000 | I think your side hustle exploration approach is probably the right one here.

00:02:32.000 | So keeping your good job, starting to explore what would this mean,

00:02:38.000 | what you even mean by human performance testing lab,

00:02:42.000 | what are the real opportunities here, what are the real demands here.

00:02:45.000 | And there's two things you'd want to capture from this experimentation on your side.

00:02:48.000 | One, using money as a neutral indicator of value.

00:02:51.000 | Can you actually get clients? Can you actually get people to give you money

00:02:55.000 | for something along these lines? That's a great indicator about whether or not

00:02:58.000 | the idea has value or not. Everyone will tell you your idea is good,

00:03:01.000 | but they will only give you money if it actually is.

00:03:04.000 | Two, it allows you to actually explore the contours of this new territory.

00:03:09.000 | What exactly do you mean by human performance testing lab?

00:03:12.000 | You probably aren't quite sure. What is the market opportunity here?

00:03:16.000 | Is it consulting? Is it content? Is it working with other companies?

00:03:19.000 | You need to figure that all out before you go get a degree for seven years.

00:03:22.000 | I want you to be at the point where you say, "We're rocking and rolling,

00:03:26.000 | and I'm being held back, just being held back by not having this degree.

00:03:30.000 | I could just see if I had it, I could do this. I'm so close,

00:03:33.000 | but I can't do this because I don't know how to do this."

00:03:35.000 | I want you to be at that point before you pull the trigger

00:03:38.000 | on any sort of higher education.

00:03:42.000 | Start exploring, Steve, and don't get that PhD until you have to have it.

00:03:47.000 | What would be, outside of your own, what would be a good example of that,

00:03:51.000 | getting a PhD, clearly elevating your career?

00:03:55.000 | It's a good question because PhDs are very specific.

00:03:58.000 | Obviously, academic, you want to be a professor,

00:04:01.000 | then you're going to need a PhD. We have a question about this coming up.

00:04:04.000 | If you're going to be a professor, you do need a PhD,

00:04:07.000 | but that's where the second part of this is,

00:04:09.000 | this degree from this program is what I need becomes important.

00:04:13.000 | If you say, "I would love to be an MIT professor,

00:04:15.000 | so I'm just going to go get a PhD." It's like, "Wait a second,

00:04:17.000 | you better be getting a PhD from a top two program,

00:04:20.000 | or it's not going to be the right thing."

00:04:23.000 | I have this issue also with a lot of military and recent vets

00:04:28.000 | that I talked to who are using their GI Bill.

00:04:31.000 | I think there's a lot of predatory online degrees where they come in,

00:04:34.000 | "Hey, get your online MBA and we'll suck out your GI Bill benefits for it.

00:04:38.000 | It's convenient, you do it on the side."

00:04:40.000 | It turns out that the employers down the road say,

00:04:42.000 | "I don't know what this online MBA is,"

00:04:44.000 | and you just wasted your money, so the specific degree matters.

00:04:49.000 | There's other fields that have specific PhD requirements.

00:04:53.000 | In biomed, biomed research, working for a drug company,

00:04:58.000 | you want to be on... I have a colleague whose wife

00:05:02.000 | works on respiratory virus vaccines at Moderna.

00:05:08.000 | We always tell him, "Your job for the rest of our culture

00:05:13.000 | is to make sure your wife is completely unburdened

00:05:16.000 | because we need her working on that. You can help the culture."

00:05:19.000 | If you want a job like that, it's not an academic job,

00:05:22.000 | but you need a PhD for that, be very careful about PhDs

00:05:27.000 | is the way I think about it.

00:05:29.000 | In computer science, this is shifted,

00:05:32.000 | but the traditional thinking in computer science, for example,

00:05:36.000 | is if you're just looking at going to industry and making salary,

00:05:42.000 | getting a master's degree, especially if you do a five-year program

00:05:45.000 | where you start your master's classes as an undergrad

00:05:48.000 | and just add an extra year, so you do five years

00:05:51.000 | and you get an undergrad and a master's degree,

00:05:53.000 | from a pure economic perspective is probably worth it

00:05:56.000 | because with the master's degree, your starting salary is up here,

00:06:01.000 | with the undergrad, it's down here,

00:06:03.000 | and in the time it takes you to get that master's degree,

00:06:06.000 | you couldn't catch up, so you do start out ahead.

00:06:09.000 | The math often, or at least it didn't back in my day,

00:06:12.000 | work out for getting a PhD and going to industry.

00:06:14.000 | So if you spend five years to get a PhD,

00:06:17.000 | and then you go to work at Google, you're going to get paid more.

00:06:20.000 | Your starting salary will be more than someone coming in

00:06:23.000 | with a master's degree, but it took you five more years.

00:06:26.000 | And in those five more years, the person who started

00:06:29.000 | with the master's degree has been promoted enough

00:06:31.000 | that they're making a lot more than you are coming in.

00:06:34.000 | So you actually have to account for the time it takes to get the degree.

00:06:37.000 | So that was always the conventional wisdom.

00:06:39.000 | There is one exception right now that's AI and machine learning.

00:06:42.000 | If you are able to get a PhD from a real star in the field

00:06:49.000 | in a relevant artificial intelligence topic,

00:06:53.000 | where you are doing, moving the avant-garde of the field forward type research,

00:06:59.000 | like I'm moving forward what's possible with deep learning,

00:07:03.000 | I'm working with Greg Hinton in Toronto,

00:07:06.000 | and we're sort of innovating the field,

00:07:08.000 | some of those PhD students are getting close to

00:07:11.000 | or exceeding seven-figure salary offers.

00:07:14.000 | So in some fields like AI, where actually being able

00:07:18.000 | to produce original research is going to be

00:07:21.000 | a huge competitive advantage, then a PhD might be different.

00:07:24.000 | But if you're going to go into a development job

00:07:26.000 | or an executive job, then in computer science,

00:07:28.000 | it's not really worth getting a PhD.

00:07:30.000 | So just be wary about it. Just go in with your eyes open.

00:07:33.000 | You need evidence. This is the type of thing I want to do.

00:07:37.000 | I know for a fact it requires a PhD to do it.

00:07:40.000 | I know for a fact the quality and competitiveness

00:07:42.000 | of the program I'm going to go to will satisfy what's necessary there.

00:07:45.000 | You just want clarity. Never use graduate degrees

00:07:49.000 | as a delaying function, as a generic option-opening function.

00:07:55.000 | No, no, it should be very specific.

00:07:57.000 | It should be solving a very specific goal.

00:08:00.000 | [Music]

Will Getting A PhD Get Me Paid? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Chapters