The STEM Stipend Used to Be Hardship Pay

A bit of history from a casual chat: in the US, science students used to get bigger stipends than business, law or medicine students, because science students were poor.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

In a sense, it was compensation for suffering.

Think about the choice back then. Business graduates went to banks and consulting firms, law graduates went to law firms, medical graduates became doctors, all high-income paths. Science students? Five or six years of PhD, maybe a few years of postdoc, low pay, and a future that did not look bright. Without extra money, who would sign up? It is the same logic as hazard pay. The stipend covered your opportunity cost, the youth you were betting on an uncertain future.

Now it has flipped. This is the science students’ world, and AI talent is paid tens of millions of dollars a year.

I think there is something worth thinking about in that reversal. The stipend was a price the market set from supply and demand at the time. Where nobody wants to go, the price goes up. But a market price reflects the present, not the future. Twenty years ago, people who chose computer science or math looked like they were making the less clever choice, and those were exactly the people who caught today’s wave.

What changed was not science. What changed was how the era defines value. When the game is dividing up what already exists, the people who play existing rules best are worth the most. When the game is creating something new, the people who can write new rules are worth the most.

It is also a reminder not to judge future value by today’s price. AI is already hot, and everyone is moving into it. By the time everyone sees an opportunity, most of the excess return is gone. The real openings are probably in fields that are unglamorous and hard right now but sit on the deeper trend.

One more thing. Going from hardship pay to eight-figure salaries took about twenty years. The choice you make today may also take twenty years to prove right or wrong.

Be patient, and let time work on your side.