Why so many people pursue academia to later realize this was misguided?

Humans are imperfect and make mistakes all the time, yet some mistakes have systematic roots and high materiality and so are worth a discussion. Having erred myself by entering and staying on academic path for way longer than I should have, and having advised dozens of people with similar stories on moving on, I outline a few most typical issues below.

1. Premature lock-in

Making a choice too early, with insufficient or wrong information, and then being locked into it both externally and internally

1.1 Choosing too early

We humans don’t know what we want, our beliefs about what we want and who we are are often anywhere from non-existent to misguided, as are our understanding of the world: with all this being especially true for people in their teens and early tweens who never been in a professional environment outside the academic one. This is why modern best practices in parenting as well as life design (see this book) focus on exposing subjects to a lot of thing, experiment and exploration. However not everyone, especially outside the West, was brought up like that. Many countries’ cultures and even institutions are incompatible with this approach: for example in Russia and in China one pre-commits to a major before applying to college, and talented youth often ends up being committed even earlier through attending specialized school systems. My path is quite typical here: I was effectively committed to math and physics since the start of high school. And it’s not just institutions: misguided implicit view one has to have a plan for life while a high-schooler appeared common to me. Once committed, it’s human nature to not reconsider what one is doing until things go badly wrong: what often happens is the “curse of success”, where the most successful people end up being stuck in the underexplored state the longest.

1.2 Choosing with insufficient or wrong information

“Weird to admit, but I chose math with less thought than I now put in choosing a sofa”

One’s teen brain is far from fully developed, and, outside the luckiest environments, the thinking tools enabling well-considered decisions are not available at that point as well.. My in retrospect extremely consequential ending up in math probably hinged on nothing more than “I like it and seem to be good at it”(which was true of pretty much every academic subject, so likely math being elevated in the more math focused school tipped the final choice). This is a bit unusual and is related to my disadvantaged background, for others a common reason seems to be: influence by teachers and professors. I’m not at all claiming intent here, but it’s only natural school teachers and especially college professors are biased towards valuing academics and academia, and end up biasing students, including through being overrepresented in the role model pool. This seems to particularly affect disadvantaged students (as their parents and parents’ social circles are not convincing role models for them, so teachers play a bigger role), and academically-gifted students who often end up more narrowly focused on academics than others. Internationally, in places with major lock-in, of course the conditioning is “you chose this so we expect you to continue this”. But even in the US the system is not focused on ensuring exploration, and happy to indulge talented kids who ended up narrowly focusing very early on. Related to the professors’ bias, one particularly toxic implicit message I’ve often saw transmitted was something along the lines of: “academia is amazing! if you’re a strong student this is the best most worthy thing you could be doing! Science is the only source for good in the world and only Academia does real Science! people doing something else just aren’t good enough for Academia, unlike you!”. Hard for me to judge prevalence, but my strong impression is for most professors’ conscious and unconscious academia promotion crowds out the obligations of their (often not quite official) responsibilities as mentors expected to guide students towards what’s best for the students.

1.3 Lock-in effects

We briefly touched on the generic one, both people’s and institutions’ being geared towards under-exploring. For many internationals it’s worse due to first the college major pre-commitment, and then the allure of using PhD to escape to the first world. But maybe the most pernicious factor is the role of the environment in determining what we see and how we think, considered in the next section.

2. Cult environment

[ this pertains first and foremost to the PhD, but to a large extent is also true of “PhD-bound clusters” (often tightly-knit groups of undergraduate students engaging in highly advanced coursework and research targeted towards getting to into a PhD program).

I wouldn’t claim this pattern is universal, but this is what I’ve seen frequently in my own and others experiences. Note I was in Pure Math, and expect the pattern to be strongest in esoteric and impractical disciplines (eg many humanities) and weakest for programs that both make practical sense and have strong industry connections (eg economics). ]

Math PhD is not a job, it’s an all-encompassing lifestyle choice. You’re thinking math all the time. You’re only talking to math people, and almost only talking math. Math people would talk math at a bar. They would talk math between themselves at parties, annoying non-math people present. Many/most math phds students whole social circle is only other phds and often only other math phds. The lifestyle is, for those who go for it, both addictive and leaves no place for anything else. There is no diversity of opinion. Nobody asks whether we should be doing this at all. Everyone frets over “making it” in academia, treating well-publicized issues with this institution (eg having to do 1-2-3 barely-paid postdocs throwing you all around the country or the world) not as yellow/red flags but as challenges to overcome, treating potential “not making it” the same way most treat death, with complete silence.

This environment commonly ruins one’s self-worth and perspective. Depression-rates among PhDs are well-publicized, most people I’ve seen in that environment suffer from low self-worth as the perspective is something like “academia is the only possible thing for me/making it in academia is very hard/I don’t seem to be doing quite as well as a young Newton so I’m probably screwed” - imagine an athlete who believes their life is over unless they win olympic gold. Even when one occasionally starts thinking about alternative options, it often quickly stops without much exploration being done: “but I’ve been doing this for so long”/”but I don’t know how to do anything else”/”but I don’t know any environment except this”/”but I’ll be like those weak students who changed course earlier”. Traumatized by how hard academic path is, and having not seen anything else in life, those people can’t even if they tried believe what becomes obvious later: that they are very smart and can easily succeed at most non-academia things; that not all good things in life are as hard as winning that olympic gold, that most pursuits really don’t require a decade+ of prep studying. Another common misguided attitude is: “everything outside academia is boring/run of the mill; aren’t only those guys who flunked out of my fancy math class end up there? aren’t all the smart people in academia?”.

3. What can be done?

From talking to juniors, anti-academia sentiment now seems quite widespread on elite american campuses, so many people at least get a warning. Some professors are a bit more differentiated in their career messaging now, but this is far from enough and needs to be institutionalized: related to the whole forever-stalled push for academia reform for it to take responsibility and start to manage its overproduction of PhDs. Not going to a PhD right out of undergrad and working in industry for at least a year is a popular advice. Unfortunately this doesn’t help internationals whose infosphere and opportunity sets are quite different: so it’s on PhD professors and peers to made them aware.