> Almost every good place pays their CS PhD students enough to squeak by without getting into debt. I wish this was more widely known.
Right. The debt problems that people have after PhDs are more often due to their undergrad loans sitting around for 4-7 years while they were earning enough to subsist and not more.
And companies like Google are pretty keen on academic credentials. They've assembled what must be one of the largest collections of PhDs in history.