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MultiplyAccumulate t1_j0xlb2i wrote

Actually, it is a graph of salary vs year you got your PhD, not salary vs years since PhD. Someone who gets a PHD today will probably be making much less in 20years, than someone who got their PhD in 1960 after 20years. And year you got your PhD may matter way more than years since PhD.

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PepsiCoffee t1_j0y0xg1 wrote

and the red dots are graduate students, which is really misleading because they are not PHDs. This data is not beautiful.

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dapicis804 t1_j0y3yxl wrote

Interesting premise, confusing execution. The colours are cute though.

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ItchyTheAssHole t1_j0yftaj wrote

And yet ANOTHER terribly titled plot in r/dataisbeautiful (and to your point many other issues as well).

As a data scientist, the trash that gets published in this sub annoys me so much

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cuginhamer t1_j14wmyg wrote

Often the data is fine but the interpretation is so far removed from the actual axes that I want it to be removed and banned. Revise and resubmit!

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peter303_ t1_j0xhr4j wrote

Stanford publishes their 2022 faculty average 9-month salaries - $192K, starting at $97K for a lecturer to $268K for full professor. They can add another 30% if they teach in the summer or have research grants for the summer. And they can spend 20% time consulting with no salary limit. Palo Alto is a very high cost of living area.

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spacebunsofsteel t1_j0y3m30 wrote

Many professors at Stanford make their big money by being consultants or starting a side research lab, taking paid research gigs. And book deals.

Source: I was a Stanford grad student.

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gordo65 t1_j11kqdq wrote

Stanford is in San Francisco, so I assume that you can find those lecturers living in a van down by the river.

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flyingjesuit t1_j0xasf8 wrote

Put this next to a chart of tuition costs over the same time period and ask the question of where all the money is going.

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glittermouton t1_j0xgfot wrote

You’d have to do that by discipline cause in the sciences you don’t get into a doctoral program without having financial support either through scholarship, research associate positions, grants, etc. Very different from the arts from what I’ve heard.

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pmocz OP t1_j0x7cg0 wrote

This is part of a project to increase salary transparency in academia and improve fair pay. Check out the interactive visualization and source code here: https://academicsalaries.github.io/

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dml997 t1_j10b2hw wrote

The data set is so sparse that I think it is useless. Just looking at field = computer science full professor and no salary higher than 110K. A fresh PhD should get more than that.

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pmocz OP t1_j10gdb7 wrote

I'm trying to collect a lot more data

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phdoofus t1_j0xoda5 wrote

  1. you need to remove the reference year (present day) from this
  2. this means nothing if it's not discipline specific and very likely even ranking of institution specific and even public vs private
  3. How are you ever going to get data from private institutions?
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OliQc007 t1_j0xcmsl wrote

Would be interesting to see this with different branches of science to see how they compare

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pmocz OP t1_j0xr8wz wrote

>https://academicsalaries.github.io/

Check out the website! You can visualize different subgroups of data interactively. I'm still building up the dataset

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rvitqr t1_j0y1mea wrote

I submitted a datapoint :) The publicly-funded institutions I've worked for are required to publish salary information yearly, date of PhD was not in the data but years at the university and title were.

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Ya1233 t1_j0ywdiu wrote

I echo what a lot of the others say. It looks like OP you are making a dataset for fair pay, definitely a cool move. I’ll peep the fit.

As a viz though, this falls flat. I came to the wrong conclusion just looking at it. The legend needed to be bigger. Also if this phased through the worker types in a sort of slide show, that might’ve been more effective then the current state.

Like everyone is saying too, the time horizon distorts how I view the data.

I think this is a wonderful dataset, but definitely a viz that can be flipped to be more powerful.

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Shadowdestroy61 t1_j0z41up wrote

Grad students get paid? I know they get stipends but thought that was typically around $10k a year

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pmocz OP t1_j10g9tb wrote

It's $40k + / yr at leading universities!

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1purenoiz t1_j1ni88f wrote

I think you mean up to. Number one ecology program in the country was $17k only a couple years a ago. Duke biological sciences is much less than $40k , friend just got his PhD there.

It should be $40k a year for the work that grad students do

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Cliff_Dibble t1_j0xz9ti wrote

Me remembering my terrible college professors and how they make this kind of money

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VanishingAnimal t1_j1lsqui wrote

I don't know where these data came from, but the vast majority of us do not make this kind of money. Most science profs at R1 universities start at sub-100k (and remember that at R1s our real job is research, which pays by far most of our salaries - teaching is an afterthought for which we get little pay and almost no credit when it comes to promotion), and at R2 or lower schools many make sub-75k. With a PhD. In science. Not good. If you start talking about humanities, the salaries can dive into sub-50k territory. Bleak.

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Cliff_Dibble t1_j1m7qwh wrote

I understand some jobs are callings or passions. But you'd think people who are smart enough to get PHDs would do a cost benefit analysis of their education.

Also, I'm not familiar with your R1/R2 terminology.can you explain?

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VanishingAnimal t1_j1moori wrote

For some of us, we were told every step along the way that science funding is cyclical and things will definitely improve, including salaries. Combine those failed predictions with a genuine passion and it's a recipe for regrettable choices. On top of that, there are those very few faculty who manage to bring in millions per year in funding and therefore can command super high salaries ($300k to $500k per year) and most people who have enough drive to earn a PhD in the first place believe they also have the drive to be that outlier earner. It's a bit of a carrot dangled in our faces.

R1 and R2 come from the Carnegie system of university classification. R1 is "doctoral institution with very high research activity," R2 is "doctoral institution with high research activity," D is "doctoral/professional" (lower research activity is implied so these are places that mostly offer undergrad degrees and professional doctorates like PsyD, DPT, and EdD for example), and so on.

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Cliff_Dibble t1_j1nzoyt wrote

I gotcha, yeah in the early 2000's a buddy heard tech was the way to go. Come graduation 4 years later the market was filled already with people not only with those degrees but experience. Struggled a few years but is doing fine now.

I'm a little jaded by the American collegiate system, since it's easy to get way into debt for a degree that can be meaningless. There needs to be an actively evolving system of what degrees/skills will be needed in the future and what loans will be paid out for.

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VanishingAnimal t1_j1o50pz wrote

Totally. Something has to change with higher ed, but no one really seems to know how exactly. Lots of well meaning people; not many viable ideas.

Part of the problem is one of the things that makes the US a good place to live: Our freedom and rebellious spirit. Just try telling someone they won't get a loan for recreation studies because there's no demand for it and watch the backlash. Americans won't stand for it. They'll go and spend $100k to major in recreation studies just to spite you.

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