Got PhD? What it pays during Post-doc?

By | January 15, 2018

Highly educated lowly paid. Post-doctoral salaries are even lower than the median household earnings in US, despite years of toiling to get there.

Post-doc salaries

Most people starting a PhD dream of working in academia without realizing the years of post-doctoral roles needed to get there. What they also don’t realize are the measly salaries despite such high qualifications. This dataset from NSF, for those finishing PhD in 2016, shows the median salary of a post-doc was approximately $45k for men & $44k for women, well below the 2016 US household income of $59k.

By looking at different fields, economics and management pay the highest, an almost 20% premium although salaries in most other fields are pretty close. However, these are nowhere close to what industry pays, which are often in six figures.

There are few bright points though. First, academia seems gender neutral and salaries in most fields are well matched between men and women. That’s a far cry from the US average earnings and salaries in the industry where women earn almost 20% less than men. Second, ‘soft’ fields with low salaries in industry still pay as much as engineering and ‘hard’ sciences for a post-doc.

We live in an era of high complexity that demands more and more specialization. A PhD alone may not be sufficient to get the right training and stints as post-docs will likely become part of the skill set required to get an edge for tomorrow’s workforce. But it will be interesting to see how long they will be willing to wait for the big paycheck and keeping toiling.

Source: Nature, 10 Jan 2018. Gender pay gap persists

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