If a faculty member's salary is low, why are there still many PhD students who want to stay in academia? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Brian Farley, Molecular and Cell Biology Postdoc, UC Berkeley, on Quora.
I ask myself this question a lot, and this is the easiest way to summarize my answer: most private sector jobs are bologna.
As flawed as academia is (and it is deeply flawed), its core mission is to gain and disseminate knowledge for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Even though it often fails to reach that goal, at least there's the abstract hope that someday it might get there. So, I'm comfortable giving my time in support of that aim despite the long hours and absurdly low pay. Given the "up-or-out" mentality of academia, the only way I can continue to do this is to eventually rise to the professoriate, despite the fact that those jobs are much more demanding and packed with way more administrative nonsense.
The goal of the private sector is to make a handful of already rich individuals even richer by inventing, developing, and selling products and services that may sometimes be useful, but most of the time are no better than distractions (and in plenty of cases, are actually actively harmful). From what I can gather, a lot of the work out there is also not particularly fulfilling -- so you experience the double-whammy of disliking your day-to-day and not being able to see the long term value of your work. Most of what you do is devoted to making some mostly irrelevant numbers go up for the benefit of a privileged elite (go profits!); creativity, engagement, artistic integrity and real quality of life be damned.
My hours (and everyone else's) are way too precious to merely be sold to the highest bidder without taking the long-term goals of the work into account -- and right now, academia is one of the few worthy causes I can find that I'm qualified to work in.