I'm in every "data science" field except the one I want to be in (computational chemistry/drug discovery).
Absolutely true that I would have still gone the way I did anyway.
Although there wasn't access via the Internet to as much information as people have nowadays to do that perfunctory research, I was well aware of the low pay that the tenure track offered, mostly due to the fact that I assumed that my public school teacher parents (both of them, elementary school) made peanuts compared to the lawyers/doctors/stockbrokers at the time. My assumption that this translated to higher education was not entirely wrong. I just didn't care and thought that making maybe $80K/year sounded damned good to me to do something I loved.
But the point is, I went into it coming from a background where there wasn't a lot of money and I wasn't interested in being a doctor or lawyer or getting an MBA. I might be accused of romanticizing the professorial lifestyle at the time, but I certainly fell in love with the research and the lifestyle.
The other things to note are that my Master's in geology is a very, very employable degree from a top-ranked school. My Ph.D., not so much. So there was/is a fallback option to work in the geosciences - turns out I'm not much of an oil guy, and water doesn't pay much - and I could have gone into industry at any time.
So, yes, I would still have made the decisions I made.
Low pay (relative to other professional careers) is one thing. I have a number of friends who were prepared for the pay, but simply cannot secure a tenure-track position at all. They thought they'd be able to. And yeah, they were willing to move wherever.
I don't know for sure if they didn't know the truly low rate of success here, or just thought they'd be one of the successful ones, or just didn't think too hard about it.
To them, you are living the dream -- that they have not been able to achieve. I don't know about "data science", but in many fields (including things like mathematics and physics, we're not just talking humanities), it is lot harder to do what you did now than it was then. What you did is what they want to do, and would also be happy with $80K (at least in early career; 80K now is a lot less than 40 years ago!) to do something they love too.
But should people know that before going in? And then not complain about it, if they chose to go in anyway? I don't know, I'm not too invested in determining who "should" be complaining vs stoically and silently accepting their fate, I don't think there's really an answer.
I just know that it's really hard in most fields to turn a PhD into a tenure track job now. And that's probably not as widely recognized as it could (or "should") be. I think universities and advisers recruiting hard into their PhD programs despite this, without being clear, are probably not treating their students respectfully, even if the students perhaps "should" see through the recruiting spiel.
(I also have a couple friends with PhDs in the past 10 years who have succeeded in getting tenure track jobs, or even tenure already. it is not unheard of, although moving in that direction. I have a pretty academic social circle)
Absolutely true that I would have still gone the way I did anyway.
Although there wasn't access via the Internet to as much information as people have nowadays to do that perfunctory research, I was well aware of the low pay that the tenure track offered, mostly due to the fact that I assumed that my public school teacher parents (both of them, elementary school) made peanuts compared to the lawyers/doctors/stockbrokers at the time. My assumption that this translated to higher education was not entirely wrong. I just didn't care and thought that making maybe $80K/year sounded damned good to me to do something I loved.
But the point is, I went into it coming from a background where there wasn't a lot of money and I wasn't interested in being a doctor or lawyer or getting an MBA. I might be accused of romanticizing the professorial lifestyle at the time, but I certainly fell in love with the research and the lifestyle.
The other things to note are that my Master's in geology is a very, very employable degree from a top-ranked school. My Ph.D., not so much. So there was/is a fallback option to work in the geosciences - turns out I'm not much of an oil guy, and water doesn't pay much - and I could have gone into industry at any time.
So, yes, I would still have made the decisions I made.