Cosmic_Rage

Many academic departments seem to be interested in recruiting underrepresented student groups within various academic fields. However, it's common knowledge that base salaries for PhD students are extremely low and often near the poverty line in many geographies. Do you think these two forces are working against each other?

Yeah, that's fair. I personally left grad school with a Masters in part since I couldn't justify living with the low salary for multiple years in an expensive city, despite liking my project a lot, when my career goals changed and tech didn't require me to get a PhD.

Thanks! It's going well and a huge amount of what I did in grad school translated well to the what I have to be able to do at my job now, so it worked out.

To rephrase it, are students from families less capable of providing them with financial support less likely to go into academia because the entry salaries are low for what types of jobs they're qualified for? Are grad student salaries so low that family financial backgrounds correlate to completion/success in grad school?