If you're currently in academia and also not currently holding a tenured or tenure-track position, there is something that is very likely going to happen at some point sooner or later: you're going to leave academia.
I am not making any specific claims about you and how you do, or should, live your life. I'm simply making a statement about statistics: at virtually every stage of an academic career prior to receiving a tenure-track position, the overwhelming majority of those in that career-stage will not become tenured professors. This point is worth emphasizing briefly, before turning to the meat of this article...
It is not just the statement that "most people don't become tenured professors" — this is an obviously true statement about the population — it's "worse" than that. At every stage of an academic career — whether that's high school, undergrad, master's students, PhD students, and (in many fields at least) even post-docs — even if you select from only those at that stage, most will not become tenured professors. Most undergrads do not, most grad students do not, and even most post-docs do not.
There are two main reasons for this. One is the obscenely competitive nature of academia, especially for highly theoretical fields. There are a lot of people vying for a very small number of jobs. The second reason is that often, at some point in one's trajectory, they decide that academia is not for them.
The point of this article is simple. It is to convince you, or maybe remind you, that if this highly-statistically-likely event of "leaving academia" happens to you — regardless of the reason(s) — then that is okay.
Why might it be important to be reminded of this? Because there is a certain problem that arises as one moves through the levels of an academic career, so let's explore that for a moment.
The Problem
The problem is: the further along in your academic career that you go, from undergrad to grad, to PhD to post-doc, the more it might seem like a departure from academia is equivalent to the literal end of the world. This problem is not maliciously created by some small number of bad actors, but rather is a simple consequence of how academia works.
As you move up through the ranks of academia, you start spending more and more time with tenured professors. As discussed, there are statistically very few of these people, yet they can easily start playing an out-sized role in how you view the world and your career. You specialize more and more, and your exposure to non-academic things inevitably shrinks. It then becomes very easy to start wondering what you would do if you weren't working on your very specific niche all day every day, and it's very easy to come to the conclusion that the answer is: being homeless and/or miserable.
Often (though definitely not always), tenured professors can have a very skewed and/or negative perception of jobs "on the outside." If you don't very consciously watch out, this perception can seep into your own psyche, thus putting you into a terrible bind: either lock up one of the rarest jobs on the planet (a tenured professorship in your specialty) or be a total and abject failure in the eyes of all those who you've just spent years working with and gaining the respect of.
In our opinion, this is not a healthy way to interact with academia, and it doesn't have to be this way.
A Better Way (TLDR)
The TLDR version of what we're about to elaborate more on is the following. Academia is great, research is fun, and if you want to spend the rest of your life writing papers, applying for grants, teaching, and traveling to conferences, then by all means pursue that with all the vigor that you can muster. Some of us (at Coho) have done so and are very happy.
If, however, you decide that that lifestyle is not for you, then there is plenty of very cool work that you can do "on the outside," and you can still very much have a fruitful, exciting, intellectually-stimulating career (the assumption in this article is that one has pursued a technical field of some kind throughout academia — we can't really speak much to other fields). Anyone in academia who will think less of you for leaving is some combination of a) someone you shouldn't listen too closely to anyway, b) insufficiently informed about life on the outside, c) someone who will probably not think about you nearly as much as you think they will.
More Details
As mentioned above, academia can often turn into an echo chamber. This is no one's fault, it's just what happens when people who do very similar things spend all their time together. Inside this echo chamber, there are a number of stigmas about "industry" (which we'll use as the catch-all term for not-academia) that can arise that range anywhere from "not totally true all the time" to "aggressively untrue". Let's walk through some of those that we've experienced, and we're always happy to hear from you about some that we might be missing.
Stigma 1: You're only successful in field X if you become a tenured professor in field X.
Our response: "Success in field X" is something you need to define for yourself. If "field X" is "combinatorial algebraic geometry", then your definition might indeed be "become a tenured professor", but it also doesn't have to be. There are a lot of sacrifices that come with that job title. You have almost no ability to choose where you live, you spend a lot of time doing bureaucratic work and applying for grants, and work will be on your mind pretty much 24/7.
Another definition of success, though, might be to get a phd in combinatorial algebraic geometry while being sure to learn some coding and/or data science. Then, after graduation, you find a job (in a location more-or-less of your choosing) that can pay the bills, that you enjoy a good amount, and that will give you the free time to read a paper every month and screw around with some fun follow-ups to your PhD dissertation. Maybe, depending on your specialty, you could still publish a paper once a year or every other year.
Another definition could be getting a masters, exposing yourself to grad-level courses in combinatorial algebraic geometry, and giving yourself a nice foundation to learn whatever math you want for the rest of your life while you go work as a park ranger in some beautiful mountains somewhere.
Life is hugely diverse, and math (or other technical things) is very easy and cheap to keep up with. Don't be bogged down by one definition of success.
Stigma 2: You're only successful PERIOD if you become a tenured professor.
Our response: This hardly warrants a response, but for completeness, we'll address it briefly. Again, success for you can be whatever you want it to be. Moreover, I'd be willing to be that anyone that made you feel like Stigma 2 was a thing, was probably a tenured professor. So, deduce what you want from that.
Stigma 3: The only jobs where you can do interesting work are in academic research positions.
Our response: This is not always true and, depending on your field, the opposite is very likely to be true. Again, if your field is Homotopy Type Theory, then yeah academia is probably the only place you'll be able to do pure research in exactly this field. However, if your field is machine learning and/or AI, then private companies often have many more resources and more streamlined research processes in place, and you very well could find more dynamic, exciting research environments in industry.
There's also the "middle way." Namely, perhaps you love Homotopy Type Theory but more generally just like learning things and working on hard problems (this, by the way, is an approach to "research" that we very much recommend). Then, you'll almost certainly be pleasantly surprised by the diversity of research opportunities, and the abundance of resources available for those efforts, that exist on the outside.
Stigma 4: Only less-smart people work outside of academia, and academia is where the true geniuses stay.
Our response: Obviously there are geniuses in academia, and since not-academia includes the literal rest of the population, one is obviously going to find not-geniuses outside of academia. But to think that the only place to find geniuses — or even just large collections of really smart, motivated people — is inside academia, would suggest a lack of awareness of the job market on the outside.
The competition and profit-incentive that is driven by capitalism — which, for better or worse (and sometimes both), is the main economic model of most developed nations — are forces that regularly draw brilliant minds out of academia. So, please don't think that academia is the only place that one can find "smart people" (we use quotes because we're not in the business of trying to give this a precise definition).
Stigma 5: To do work that lasts "forever," you have to be in academia.
Our response: First, let's be clear-eyed on what "forever" really means. To first-order approximation, nothing lasts forever. To second-order approximation, one could say that knowledge (in the form of books and/or papers) and/or Truth (in the form of proved theorems) lasts forever. And in some obvious way that's true — I'm sure Einstein's name will be remembered for a duration long enough to be considered "forever". That said, even many of the most accomplished tenured professors will have the overwhelming majority of their work largely forgotten (or certainly, the fact that it was them who did it will be forgotten) in a matter of decades.
This is not meant to be pure negativity, but rather a reminder that work should be done (at least, in our opinion) because there's a passion for it, not for some hope of "immortality". And work that you can be passionate about can be found in a lot of places, both inside and outside of academia.
In Short
We don't want this to sound like a diatribe against academia — some of us, and many of our good friends, are forever-academics and absolutely love it, and it truly is (or, can be) a great career. This is simply meant to be a reminder that there are a lot of exciting things happening in the world, and it's unfortunately very easy to lose sight of that when you're deep in the academic circuit.
So get your PhD (or don't), do some years of academic research (or don't), enjoy it, dive into it, and embrace it. But if one day you wake up and think that maybe a different lifestyle would be nice — maybe a few extra bucks and/or weekends off and/or a move to a city that doesn't have a university that specializes in your field and/or a simple change of pace — then that's okay too. Anyone who tells you, or makes you feel, otherwise, should be someone that you think carefully about listening to.