100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School

79. The tyranny of procrastination.

2012-02-27T09:00:00.006-08:00

The problem of procrastination in graduate school is, in part, a problem of perception. When you could be working anytime and all the time (see Reason 62), it can feel like you’re procrastinating when you’re doing anything else. Reading for pleasure, spending time with family and friends, cooking, exercising, and even sleeping (see Reason 78) are hard to enjoy when you’re saddled with the feeling that you should be working instead. Of course, if what you’re doing has the slightest appearance of procrastination to you, it may well look that way to someone else. In the event that your department can only fund half of its graduate students next year (see Reason 17), you don't want to be the one that your departmental chair sees sauntering into a Tuesday matinee as she happens to drive by the movie theater.

But there is also real procrastination. We procrastinate when we are faced with tasks that we do not want to do. Graduate students are masters of procrastination. You can hardly blame them for their reluctance to dive into a pile of ungraded freshman essays (see Reason 56), but they are often just as reluctant to dive into a day of writing. That is because academic writing can be profoundly unpleasant (see Reason 28). Sometimes they procrastinate by turning on the television, but more often than not they create diversionary work for themselves by reading one more book, looking up ten more articles, or spending an extra week in the archives—all in the name of “research.” Sitting down and writing is the only way out of graduate school with a degree, but the great difficulty with which so many graduate students approach this task is your first clue (and often their first clue) that they don’t actually like what they are doing. Unfortunately, procrastination simply prolongs their misery.

78. It takes a toll on your health.

2012-02-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate school is hard on your mental health (see Reason 68), but it is also hard on your physical health. As a grad student, you spend a long time in relative poverty, and healthy living and poverty seldom go hand-in-hand. Your diet is more likely to consist of cheap processed foods than wholesome fare. Your bus rides are especially crowded during the flu season. Your workplace, the college campus, is a notoriously effective environment for the spread of illness. You spend most of your time sitting. And if you are lucky enough to have health insurance, it probably leaves you at the mercy of the student health center.

Especially harmful is the effect that graduate school has on sleep. When you’re faced with a combination of unstructured time (see Reason 61) and endless work (see Reasons 39 and 62), you’re often working when you should be sleeping. On those occasions when you have to meet a deadline, the situation is only made worse. How much sleep do you suppose a teaching assistant gets during a week when she has to read, comment upon, and grade 100 undergraduate papers? In college, you might have been able to get away with too little sleep and eating poorly, but your body can only take so much. Graduate school can easily drag on for a decade (see Reason 4), and in the meantime you’re not getting any younger.

77. It attracts the socially inept.

2012-01-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate school demands that you spend an immense amount of time alone (see Reason 69). It demands sustained interest in highly esoteric subjects. And it demands that you approach those esoteric subjects with the utmost seriousness. You can see how this environment would be attractive to people who are more comfortable in their own thoughts than in the company of others. This applies across academic disciplines. While some graduate students are involved in cutting-edge medical research, others are studying the subtle aspects of postwar Croatian cinema (see Reason 66). Oddly enough, the latter take their work as seriously as the former. Grad school can be compared to an endless fan convention at which all the participants cluster by genre or disciplinary interest, and where every individual is highly invested in a particular sub-sub-sub-genre.

In fact, graduate school is best suited for those who are fanatical, because devotion to one’s field (measured in terms of productivity) is what is rewarded (see Reason 38). The problem for most graduate students is that they are normal people. They do not thrive in prolonged isolation, and even though they may have an abiding interest in their subject of study, it does not amount to fanaticism. In the world in which they find themselves, however, they have to both co-exist and compete with the die-hard fans (see Reason 2). Earnest discussion of obscure topics, irrational in-group status jockeying, and competitive devotion may be fine for hobbyists at weekend conventions, but graduate school goes on for years. It does not take long to spot the odd characters who inhabit this environment, nor to see its effects on healthy personalities (see Reason 50). Keenly aware of the variety of people who manage to percolate through graduate programs, academic hiring committees rely on an old-fashioned test: how will a job candidate perform in a conversation over dinner?

76. There is a culture of fear.

2012-01-16T13:05:00.000-08:00

The worst fears to which graduate school gives rise are fears about the future, which stem from both immediate concerns about funding (see Reason 17) and long-range concerns about the miserable job market (see Reason 8). But there is another fear pervasive in academe that runs counter to a central principle of modern democracy. It is the fear of speaking freely. Reason 75 saw the 2,000th comment posted on 100 Reasons, and all but a tiny fraction of those comments were posted anonymously. There is probably no American newspaper today that publishes more articles by writers using pseudonyms than the Chronicle of Higher of Education. Even Professor William Pannapacker, the patron saint of graduate-school realists (and a Harvard PhD), wrote his first columns warning people about graduate school using the pen name Thomas H. Benton. The author of a recent book about his experiences as a college instructor is known only as Professor X.

Why? Why are academics—of all people—afraid of writing (and speaking) honestly about their profession? Why do so many of those who do express themselves feel compelled to do so anonymously? The answer lies in the staggering power imbalance between academics and the people who employ them. That imbalance is so great because of the crippling realities of the academic job market. The consequences of offending your colleagues and superiors in any way can be dire, because until you have tenure (see Reason 71) your employment is insecure; you are easily replaced. For the same reason, untenured college instructors often endure humiliating working conditions (see Reason 14). For graduate students who have not yet been hired for their first real jobs, developing a fear of saying the wrong thing is an essential success strategy. If you decide to go to graduate school, you should know that it may be a very long time before you will be comfortable expressing yourself about subjects of considerable importance to you.

75. You can make more money as a schoolteacher.

2011-12-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine that you and your friend Sally graduate from college this year on equal footing. You decide to enter a PhD program in English, and Sally decides to become an English teacher in Mississippi. It will take your friend one year to complete the requirements necessary for her to qualify for a teaching license, during which time she will teach under supervision and be paid based on her “bachelor’s degree status as a first year teacher.” According to the National Educational Association, the average starting salary for a teacher in Mississippi is $30,090. Meanwhile, you will be one of the lucky graduate students to be given a teaching assistantship with an annual stipend of $15,000. Unlike your stipend, Sally’s salary will likely rise significantly over time; the average teacher salary in Mississippi is $44,498. However, for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that both your stipend and her salary are frozen at their starting levels and that you (miraculously) receive ten years of funding as a teaching assistant at Generic State University (see Reason 17). After ten years, Sally will have earned $150,000 more than you have. She will also have a decade of seniority in her profession and a secure job.

At the same time—assuming that you are in the 49 percent of those who manage to finish a PhD in the humanities within ten years (see Reason 46)—you will have just been cut loose from your program and set adrift on the bleak academic job market. Chances are that you won’t land a tenure-track position straight out of grad school but will have to spend a year (or two or five) teaching as an adjunct (see Reason 12). In that capacity, you might be paid as much as $4000 per class, which would amount to $24,000 if you teach six classes in a year. (Of course, you may be paying for your own health insurance.) If, somehow, you do eventually beat out the formidable competition for a tenure-track job in English, you will then have a job with an average starting salary of $51,204 (see Reason 23). At long last, you will have a bigger paycheck than your friend in Mississippi, but, unlike Sally, you won’t know if you’ll still have your job in five years because you’re now on the brutal tenure track (see Reason 71). In any event, it will be years before you catch up with her in earnings. Now imagine that Sally works in California, where the average starting salary for teachers is $41,181 and the average teacher salary is $68,093...

74. Academic conferences.

2011-12-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

The largest academic conferences can be highly depressing affairs involving thousands of participants and hundreds of desperate job seekers nervously waiting to be interviewed in hotel rooms (see Reason 55). Other conferences can be pleasant and collegial gatherings. In fact, the opportunity to attend regular professional meetings might be regarded as one of the “perks” of an academic career. Conferences offer an excuse to travel (and to cancel class), and a few departments still provide funding for their faculty members (and sometimes graduate students) to attend them. The ostensible purpose of an academic conference is to provide a forum in which scholars present and critique research. Rarely, however, is the emptiness of academe put on more public display than in the context of an academic conference.

To the casual observer, an academic conference must appear to be one of the strangest of modern rituals. At various sessions, speakers present their own research by reading aloud to an audience. Someone who has attended a full day of sessions will have listened to people reading for five or six hours. How well do you suppose the audience members are listening? They sit politely and at least pretend to listen, because when their own turn comes to stand up and read aloud, they would like others to extend the same courtesy to them. Sparks fly occasionally during question time, which can be mean-spirited or (less often) enlightening, but decorous boredom is typically the order of the day. The real purpose of the conference is to provide speakers with another line for their CVs, to which they all must add lines constantly (see Reason 38). Before you go to graduate school, attend an academic conference in the field that interests you, sit through a few sessions, and then ask yourself if it still interests you. While you’re there, get a sense of the anxiety among the attendees looking for work. For them, every conference is a gathering of competitors (see Reason 2).

73. Perceptions trump reality.

2011-11-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

You really can build a career in academe by writing bogus nonsense (see Reason 35). You just have to persuade others to believe (or pretend) that your work makes sense and is—for one reason or another—significant. Others in your field will be willing to play along, because doing so allows them to rely on similar jargon and "theory" to produce their own work. In disciplines where research and scholarly production have little practical application, the value of scholarship rests entirely on the perception of its value. Where does the believing end, and the pretending begin? It is hard to say, especially with respect to one's own work. Some academics convince themselves of the importance of what they’re doing, others are plagued by doubt, while a clever few knowingly take advantage of a system that allows them to make a comfortable living.

In academe, perceptions often trump reality. The perception that there is a comfortable living to be made by anyone who earns a PhD provides graduate programs with a steady stream of applicants in spite of the realities of the job market (see Reason 55). Consider the academic hierarchy (see Reason 3), in which prestige matters much more than objective measurements of educational quality. If your university is perceived to be less than prestigious, you will be at a distinct disadvantage on the academic job market regardless of the merits of your work. Valid or not, perceptions have real consequences. When William James (quoted in Reason 70) referred to graduate school dropouts as "social failures," he was expressing a perception that can make quitting grad school a traumatic experience (see Reason 11). For decades, the higher education establishment has lived off of the perception that academic degrees are worth their high price tags. If the changing perception of real estate value is any indication of what is in store for academe (see Reason 27), it would be a good idea to think again about betting your future on an academic career, even if you're confident that you would make a successful charlatan.

72. The humanities and social sciences are in trouble.

2011-11-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

Graduate students who receive funding from their universities are very fortunate (see Reason 17). To their universities, they are very expensive. Of course, grad students and adjuncts are cheaper to employ than professors, but universities are moving away from relying on tenured and tenure-track faculty to meet their instructional needs. More than three quarters of college teaching appointments are now held by graduate-student, part-time, and non-tenure-track instructors (see Reason 14). As a result, universities have come to regard graduate-student labor not as a bargain but as the norm, and they are beginning to identify which graduate students are the most cost-effective to keep on campus. Those in the humanities and social sciences are used to thinking of themselves as being inexpensive compared to their colleagues in the hard sciences, but when it comes to graduate students, it turns out that that is not the case at all.

In August 2011, Yale University released the results of a remarkable study of its own graduate school. Among other things, it found that even at Yale only 68% of those who had begun a PhD program in the humanities between 1996 and 2003 had earned a PhD by 2010 (see Reason 46). But most striking was a calculation of how much, on average, each Yale graduate student had cost the graduate school over a six-year period: $17,421 in the natural sciences, $126,339 in the social sciences, and $143,170 in the humanities. Graduate students in classics cost the university more than twenty times as much as graduate students in physics ($155,392 vs. $7,401). The numbers do not bode well for the social sciences and humanities. Disciplines that do not attract investment (see Reason 22) are looking more and more like unbearable financial burdens to the administrators of the modern university.

The terrible job market facing graduate students (see Reason 8) has never sufficed to convince universities to reduce the size of their graduate programs, but their own bottom line probably will. In the long run, the study may result in positive change if smaller graduate programs relieve pressure on the job market. For those already in the graduate-school pipeline, however, program cuts will only worsen the funding and employment situation. In its report on the study, the Yale Daily News quoted English Professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University: “It just doesn’t make sense for people to go to school in the humanities.”

71. The tenure track is brutal.

2011-10-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

The more time that you sink into graduate school, the more invested you become in an academic career (see Reason 29), and the holy grail for job seekers on the highly competitive academic job market is a tenure-track appointment as an assistant professor. Unfortunately, an assistant professorship is only a temporary, probationary position that lasts a maximum of 5-7 years. Toward the end of that period, an assistant professor applies for tenure, which is (more or less) a guarantee of permanent employment. The requirements for tenure vary, but you are generally expected to have published at least one book (sometimes two)—a feat made ever more difficult by the realities of the academic publishing business (see Reason 34)—as well as a number of journal articles. Of course, you will also have had to have taught a full load of courses every year, performed your faculty service obligations, and done it all to the satisfaction of your students, colleagues, and administrative superiors.

What happens if you are denied tenure? You’re fired. That’s it. You may have a second chance to apply for tenure, but if you do not have tenure by the end of your probationary employment period, you will be cleaning out your desk and saying goodbye to your colleagues (who voted to fire you). By now you may be in your 40s, but you will find yourself back on the vicious job market, and with the stigma of having been denied tenure. At this point, you will likely have spent a decade in graduate school, perhaps a few years as an adjunct, and six more years as an assistant professor. And yet you will have been found unfit for the one job for which all of those years were spent in preparation.

70. It is unforgiving.

2011-10-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

There are a few exceptional individuals for whom graduate school is a breeze, but the vast majority of grad students are regular people. In fact, most of them probably belong to a group described in 1903 by Harvard professor William James. In his prescient critique of graduate education, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” James identified those for whom an academic life is an end in itself. Because current standards are not what they were then (see Reason 5), the type of earnest-but-not-dazzlingly-brilliant student he described is now more likely to make it through graduate school (and even into an academic career) than would have been the case 100 years ago. Even so, graduate programs remain highly proficient (and efficient) at turning thousands of eager, hard-working people into “victims” who either drop out (see Reason 46), flounder for years (see Reason 4), or face underemployment (see Reason 14).

William James felt genuine sympathy for these graduate students, because he understood the seriousness of their situation. There is simply no obvious place to land if you stumble on the long, arduous road to an academic career. The term that he used to describe those left by the wayside was blunt: “social failures.” Remember that James had in mind the “failures” produced by graduate programs at Harvard; one can only imagine what he would say about those churned out by state universities. It is disheartening to consider what has not changed more than a century after James made his observations:

But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position… There are individuals of this sort for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly aspiration. Your private advice does not discourage them. They will fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. Or else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.

We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be attracted… We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent…

The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders, the more widespread these corruptions will become…

If only he knew.

69. It is lonely.

2011-10-03T05:00:00.001-07:00

In graduate school, you spend a great deal of time alone. Most academic work is the product of isolation. Studying, research, and writing are time-consuming solitary activities, as is the miserable drudgery of grading (see Reason 56). A longing for some sense of shared experience is probably what drives graduate students to coffee places, where they sit for hours in uncomfortable chairs, hunched over their laptops or over piles of ungraded papers. There, at least for a while, they can be in the company of others who are as alone as they are.

The loneliness of graduate school stems not only from the nature of the work, but from the way it alienates people from those around them. Much to their surprise, new graduate students discover that there is no intellectual community (see Reason 20) to mitigate the effects of their strange status on campus and in the wider world (see Reasons 30 and 37). They have no comfortable place in the social circles of either the undergraduates or the professors who surround them, and their relative poverty severely limits what they can do with friends who have regular jobs and incomes. The struggles and triumphs of graduate school are of no interest to friends and family members outside of academe. And graduate students themselves are so absorbed in their own work that they have little time or inclination (see Reason 2) to offer support to one other. Loneliness may be the single worst aspect of graduate-student life.

68. It is stressful.

2011-09-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

Graduate school is stressful. Sometimes it is terribly stressful. Stress is virtually unavoidable in any kind of work, but there is a peculiar quality to the stress of graduate school. The worst thing about it is the fact that it is caused by things that really do not matter. No one’s life (not even yours) depends on your meeting thesis deadlines, on your comprehensive exams, or on your finishing a dissertation (see Reason 60). The world will not fall to pieces if you publish an imperfect article, or fail to publish anything. Apart from what it contributes to your progress down a career path, the substance of your work will probably have no significant effect on anyone. But the stress it causes you is very real.

Why is it so stressful? In grad school, the work is not only hard (see Reason 9), but it rests entirely on your shoulders and is constantly subject to the judgment and subjective standards of others. You perform it with little immediate reward and no certainty of any future reward (see Reason 8). And you do so in a competitive environment populated by people who are just as stressed as you are (see Reason 50). You have little money and perhaps a great deal of debt, and even though you are free to walk away, there is a price to pay for leaving (see Reason 11). It takes longer to complete than you expect (see Reason 4), and while you spend so much time on things that really do not matter, your life options dwindle as your investment in the great academic job-market gamble increases (see Reason 29). Rather than giving you an increasing sense of confidence, every passing year of graduate school can be more stressful than the one before it.

67. There is a star system.

2011-09-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

Academe is more like professional sports than most academics would like to admit, especially when it comes to money (yes, money). Just as there are premiere franchises like the New York Yankees that can afford to pay players higher salaries than poorer teams, Harvard can afford a much more expensive faculty than its lowly competitors. Furthermore, in any given sport, different people who play the same position (i.e. have the same job) can earn wildly different amounts of money; superstars earn far more than “regular” players. Just as there are superstars in the sports world, there are superstars in academe, and they earn more than their colleagues. Interestingly, salary differences tend to be based on more objective standards in the sports world than they are in the academic one. Home runs, batting averages, and stolen bases are easier to measure than intellectual contributions, particularly in the realm of mumbo-jumbo (see Reason 35).

The academic salary structure seems to be designed to maximize demoralization. On every campus, the faculty members in some disciplines earn more than their colleagues in other disciplines (see Reason 23). But worse are the differences within departments, where young academics considered to be up-and-coming stars can be hired at higher salaries than those earned by their senior colleagues. Universities compete with each other for academic superstars no differently than teams compete for the best players. Considerable resources are expended in the effort to recruit (or retain) these few stars, even as competition among the masses of “regular” academics has left them accepting positions that pay little and offer next to nothing in the way of security (see Reason 14). Of course, discriminating between stars and everyone else begins in graduate school, where funding packages vary from student to student (see Reason 26). If you happen to be one of the stars, academe can be quite rewarding. If you don’t happen to be one, you will likely have the pleasure of working with some.

66. “Why are you studying that?”

2011-08-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

When dealing with the “What are you going to do with that?” question, you at least know in your own mind what you hope to do, even if that is hard to articulate (see Reason 36). Unfortunately, the simple question of why you’re studying what you’re studying can be much harder to handle, because you often can’t answer the question to your own satisfaction, much less to anyone else’s. Why are you studying depictions of gender norms in Hungarian television commercials? Is it worth years of your life to be an expert on the “performative aspects” of anything? Does the world need its hundred thousandth dissertation on Shakespeare or the Civil War? Does it need its first dissertation on your arcane topic?

It is natural to find yourself asking these questions after devoting a long time to a dissertation. There is a reason that you’re asking them. All knowledge is valuable, but it is not all of equal value. Graduate school is terribly costly in terms of time (see Reason 4), a reality made worse when you harbor doubts about whether your work serves any useful purpose (to you or anyone else). Even in the sciences, this is not an uncommon concern, as this humorous parody suggests. If you are writing a dissertation for no other reason than to qualify for a job in academe, the effort may be in vain in any case (see Reason 8). So, why are you studying that? It is bad enough when you begin to suspect that you’re wasting your time in graduate school, but it’s worse when others begin to suspect it, too. For every person who wonders aloud about your studies, there are likely many more who wonder silently.

65. Teaching is less and less rewarding.

2011-08-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has been at the back of a college lecture hall recently is familiar with the sight of row upon row of glowing screens. Some students are taking notes, but others are perusing Facebook, touching up their vacation photos, and playing games. From a student’s point of view, this can be distracting. From the teacher’s point of view, it is disheartening. Every day, you speak to a room full of people looking at computer screens without any idea of who is actually listening. Not long ago, it was easy for an instructor to tell if someone in her class was not paying attention, and she was not afraid to say something to students who fell asleep or leafed through newspapers in class. But with the proliferation of laptops and smart phones, the will to enforce attentiveness in the classroom has largely evaporated.

Students are spending a substantial portion of their (or their parents') life earnings to pay for the privilege of sitting in your classroom. As University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, they are, in fact, grossly overpaying for the privilege, which is inflating the higher education bubble (see Reason 27). As tuition rates skyrocket, it is perhaps understandable why students increasingly behave like customers to whom you should cater. They have, after all, purchased your services. Of course, in their minds, the important service that you provide is not imparting knowledge, but awarding credit. And they increasingly behave as if they believe that they should be allowed to spend their very expensive time in your classroom in any way they choose. As a graduate-student instructor or teaching assistant, the challenge of cultivating respect in the classroom is made all the more difficult by your junior status, of which your students are very much aware (see Reason 53). Meanwhile, standing at the front of the classroom, you are daily faced with their indifference.

With teaching comes the extraordinarily time-consuming and miserably thankless task of grading (see Reason 56). In fact, the first inkling you may have that a student cares about what is happening in your class is when you give him a grade with which he is not happy. This is when the behavior of a dissatisfied customer is most likely to present itself, and when you realize the sense of entitlement that now pervades the college campus. It usually begins with an email and escalates from there. In any case, it is unpleasant. That students expect high grades is not surprising when you consider that fully 43% of all grades awarded by colleges are now As. The New York Times has charted the extent of grade inflation over the past few decades in a revealing graph. This trend toward a situation in which everyone earns high grades (while sitting through lectures playing solitaire) makes grading all the more exasperating because it feels so pointless.

And whose work are you grading? You don’t really know. After Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis of New York University decided to look for plagiarism in the work submitted by his students in an introductory course, 22 of the 108 students ultimately admitted to cheating. For his efforts to ensure integrity (and a subsequent blog post about the experience), the professor felt punished by students and administrators alike. (The episode, after all, did not reflect well upon NYU.) It seems that there are undergraduates willing to pay $19,903 per term for an education, while copying the work of others and submitting it as their own. Given experiences like that of Professor Ipeirotis, you may feel little incentive to concern yourself with student plagiarism, but at least it is detectable. Some students simply pay others to write their papers for them. A popular article appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education last fall revealed the fact that whole companies exist to provide this service. The author of the piece—a man who writes students’ papers for a living—was quite blunt: “Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it.”

While you spend hours and hours assigning increasingly meaningless grades to work of increasingly dubious origin, your students are also grading you. How would you like a job in which you are subjected to 50 (or 100 or 200) performance evaluations every ten or fifteen weeks? If you teach at an American college or university, that is exactly what you can expect. Student evaluations have turned the tables on college instructors. If you are a graduate-student instructor, an adjunct instructor, or a junior faculty member, your continued employment depends upon favorable student evaluations. As a classroom teacher, how do you satisfy your students in an age of unprecedented distraction? To one degree or another, you have to entertain them. You know that your job depends on it, and you also know that your students will post anonymous evaluations of your performance on the Internet. (In how many jobs does that happen?) The causes of grade inflation are not hard to figure out.

More and more teaching and grading are required of graduate students (see Reason 7). These obligations greatly reduce the time that you have to complete your own academic work (see Reason 41) and thus prolong your time-to-degree (see Reason 4). Of course, teaching at the college level is the career aim of most people in graduate school, even if they had other plans when they began their programs (see Reason 29). Whether you are lucky enough to secure a tenure-track appointment, or if you find yourself working as an adjunct (see Reason 14), this is what you have to look forward to in the modern college classroom. Before you go to graduate school, sit in the back of a lecture hall and think it over.

64. Smugness.

2011-07-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Academe takes itself and its hierarchies very seriously, which is why where you go to school matters so much to the trajectory of an academic career (see Reason 3). The self-regard of institutions and the self-regard of those associated with them tend to go hand-in-hand. In an uncomfortably honest essay in the American Scholar, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz offers some indication of just how rigid the hierarchy is: “My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.” And yet smugness is a problem throughout academe, even outside of the elite universities. In particular, there is a tendency among those pursuing or holding an advanced degree to think of themselves as being a cut above. What Deresiewicz says of “an elite education” also applies to graduate school: it “inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”

As Richard Vedder’s discouraging statistics demonstrate, the extreme seriousness with which academe takes itself does not seem to correspond with the actual benefits students acquire from either an undergraduate or graduate education. In fact, the terrible job prospects facing graduate students (see Reasons 8 and 55) may actually worsen the problem of smugness by leaving scholars and aspiring scholars with little to cling to beyond their academic credentials (see Reason 25). If you find yourself in a non-elite graduate program and inclined to look down upon the “less educated,” you should be aware of the low regard in which your Ivy-League competitors hold you. Any time spent in academe will involve unpleasant encounters with smugness, which can take subtle and grating forms. Sometimes it is anything but subtle, as in this particularly heinous example recently recorded on a commuter train.

63. Your friends pass you by.

2011-07-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

For graduate students, nothing drives home the fact that graduate school delays adulthood (see Reason 12) more clearly than observing friends who choose a different path. You may enter graduate school with the belief that an extra degree or two will give you an advantage in life, but while you are concentrating on gaining an advantage, your friends are concentrating on life. They may never turn into millionaires—though that is far more likely in the real world than in the academic one—but they probably will pass you by. While you sit in a cramped living space working on your dissertation year after year, your friends will be working hard, too, but they will be earning salaries. They will also be buying cars and houses, getting married, and having children (see Reason 15). They may even take an expensive vacation or two. It can be hard to relate to old friends who live in a world increasingly different from your own, and even harder to make new ones (see Reason 50).

This is about more than keeping up with the Joneses—or counting on catching up with them after you finish your education. The lives of your friends are reminders of the true costs of graduate school, which can be much higher than you anticipate. More than a quarter of women in their early forties with graduate or professional degrees are childless. After years of graduate school, will what you have gained be worth what you have missed?

62. You have no free time.

2011-06-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

To an American with only two weeks of vacation per year, the idea that a graduate student has no free time must seem absurd. Not only do graduate students have considerable control over their daily schedules (see Reason 61), but the academic calendar is marked by long breaks at Christmas, in the spring, and in the summer. However, whatever time is under your control is time that you could spend working. For some reason, awareness of that fact makes it hard not to feel that you should be working all the time. When doing something other than working, you may experience a feeling uncomfortably akin to guilt. This is one aspect of the tyranny of the dissertation (see Reason 60). Academic work has a way of burdening your mind on every weekend, every holiday, and every vacation. There is no end to the workday. You are never free.

Of course, your work is more than a mental burden. It is real work. Graduate-student labor obligations (see Reason 7) can consume most of your time during the academic year, making “vacations” precious work opportunities for the research and writing that you have to do in order to graduate. When you are teaching, it can be especially difficult to balance the obligations of your job with obligations to yourself (see Reason 41). Because there is no blueprint for research and writing, figuring out how much work you “need to do” is a process of discovery. There is no limit to the amount of time you can devote to any single work of scholarship, but there is an expectation that you will produce many (see Reason 38). The fact that you have no free time is made worse by the misconceptions of those around you who are (understandably) unaware of the taxing nature of graduate school.

61. Unstructured time.

2011-06-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

At least since the Industrial Revolution, most every institution of human life has been organized according to a schedule, because there is a general understanding that productivity and efficiency are hard to maintain without one. Most of us tend to be more disciplined when we must meet the expectations of others (such as a boss) than when we are left to our own devices. While graduate school certainly has its share of scheduled obligations, the life of a graduate student is not typically regimented by the forty-hour workweek, the eight-hour workday, or the half-hour lunch. But relative freedom from the clock creates the problem of unstructured time.

In graduate school, you have to manage your scheduled obligations (courses that you are taking, courses that you are teaching, grading, etc.) on top of the immensely time-consuming tasks of reading, researching, and writing for which there are no set schedules. This is why graduate school requires an unusual degree of self-discipline that most people do not possess (see Reason 47). The organization of modern civilization (with all of its faults) tells us something about human nature. You shouldn’t despair if you are not an expert at managing unstructured time. You are human. But graduate school is a solitary business. It can easily devour ten years of your life. Ask yourself if you would do better in a collaborative setting with clear schedules and expectations.

60. The tyranny of the dissertation.

2011-05-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

The image of Sisyphus eternally moving a great weight uphill has already appeared in Reason 9, and a similar image accompanies Reason 50. Another appears here, because the experience of Sisyphus is so much like that of the graduate student. There are many weights to bear in graduate school, but the greatest weight of all is the dissertation. In academe, a person who has finished everything necessary to complete a PhD except for his dissertation is known as an ABD (“all but dissertation.”) People complete years of coursework, write and defend master’s theses, pass written and oral comprehensive exams that require hundreds of hours of preparation, and even pass exams in foreign languages that they did not know when they started graduate school, and yet they find themselves as permanent ABDs, because the last mountain proves just too steep to climb.

What makes the dissertation so terrible? First of all, it is long. It is much longer than anything the typical person has ever written in his life. Worse, however, is the kind of writing it entails (see Reason 28). You cannot begin to write a dissertation until you have done a great deal of research, and every day there is more research to consult in every academic field. The entire project is on your shoulders alone, yet the finished product must satisfy a whole committee. Then there is the added pressure of knowing that if you want tenure someday (assuming you can land a tenure-track position), you will have to turn your dissertation into a book (or write a different book from scratch) that a university press will actually publish. Unless you have a fellowship or you’re amassing debt, you have to write your dissertation while somehow making a living. As the reality begins to dawn on you that you might never find a tenure-track position, you will be tempted to abandon the great weight and move on, but the burden may remain even if you do (see Reason 11).

59. You pay for nothing.

2011-05-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Graduate school is expensive. For the privilege of being a grad student, you pay tuition—unless your tuition has been waived as part of an assistantship or fellowship. Some grad students choose to pay their tuition with money from student loans, but given the state of the job market (see Reason 55), that is not the wisest approach (see Reason 1). With support from fellowships and assistantships, some students can make it all the way through grad school without paying tuition. Others run out of funding before completing their degrees. When you start graduate school, it is best to assume that you will be paying tuition at some point, even if you have been lured into a program with what looks like a generous funding package (see Reason 17).

What does your tuition buy? Early in your program, you pay for courses in the same way that an undergraduate would. Typically, a certain number of course credits are required to graduate, as are a certain number of “thesis credits.” What is a thesis credit? Nobody knows. You are ostensibly paying for the privilege of writing a thesis or dissertation, for using the university library, and for the (often distant) supervision of your adviser. You are, in other words, paying for nothing. Of course, if you’re not paying tuition because you’re working as a teaching assistant, you're probaby getting behind on your writing, which means that you will be taking more thesis credits next year. As time goes by, you can accumulate dozens and dozens of thesis credits. By the university’s reckoning, they are worth tens of thousands of dollars. What are they worth to you?

58. The one-body problem.

2011-05-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

When both a wife and her husband have PhDs, the difficulty of finding two academic jobs in the same place creates “the two-body problem” (see Reason 48). But it takes only one PhD to a complicate a marriage. When one member of a pair makes the long journey through graduate school to a terminal degree, the stresses of that process are shared by both. Moreover, graduate students not only have little income (see Reason 12), but they also tend to be in debt (see Reason 1), so marrying a graduate student often means supporting a graduate student. Once that student has finished his or her academic program, a new problem appears.

For those who received doctoral degrees in 2003, it had taken a median span of 10.1 years to progress from a bachelor’s degree to a doctorate. Imagine that you marry someone while you are in the early stages of a doctoral program. In the time that you spend working toward your PhD, your spouse may go through a series of promotions into a nice position at his or her company. Upon graduating, you will be thrilled to land a job in your specialized field on the other side of the country (see Reason 16). Your years of work, after all, have been spent in a discipline in which few jobs will ever open, and in an extremely competitive academic job market. Unfortunately, your spouse’s company is in an industry that has no presence in that part of the country. Do you ask your supporting spouse to abandon a position (and salary) that has also been the result of years of work, so that he or she can follow you to an entry-level position?

57. Rejection is routine.

2011-05-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

No one likes rejection, but everyone encounters it. Graduate students encounter it frequently. You often feel the sting of rejection before you even start. Just to get into a graduate program, you have to pass through the gate-keeping admissions process. You can be admitted to one program, while being rejected by three others—and those rejections can linger in your memory longer than you might expect. But that is only the beginning. Once you are in a graduate program, you will find yourself applying for fellowships, assistantships, grants, conferences, research awards, travel awards, and all manner of funding, not only to keep yourself afloat, but to add lines to your all-important CV (see Reason 38). Some of those many applications will be rejected, and some rejections hurt more than others. It does not help that you are in competition with your colleagues (see Reason 2).

Then there is the problem of publishing. In the publishing business, the overwhelming majority of what writers submit to publishers is rejected. Of course, academe requires that you publish. Unlike regular publishing, academic publishing is the result of the peer-review process, which involves the time-consuming subjection of your work to the evaluation of independent experts (one hopes) who help editors decide if your work is worthy of appearing in an academic journal, or as a book published by a university press. Peer review is important for maintaining the quality of what is published as academic research, but the process can feel quite arbitrary, especially from the writer’s point of view. Academic writing is tremendously taxing (see Reason 28), so when your work is rejected (as it will be), the feeling can be quite discouraging. After experiencing years of various kinds of rejection as a graduate student, you then place yourself on the academic job market, where rejections greatly outnumber job offers (see Reason 55). All of this is to be expected in an environment in which far too many people are competing for the same opportunities, in the context of an academic hierarchy defined by exclusivity (see Reason 3).

56. Grading is miserable.

2011-04-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

If Dante had been familiar with graduate school, he probably would have added a level of Hell to his Inferno. The condemned would sit for all eternity and read one mediocre essay after another, meticulously correct every mistake, agonize over every grade, and then throw each graded essay into a fire. Grading is the most onerous and time-consuming aspect of being a teaching assistant, but it is the reason that teaching assistantships exist (see Reason 53). The most important role of the graduate student in the modern university is to relieve professors of the burden of grading. It is mind-numbing, unrelenting, and utterly unrewarding.

Teaching assistants stare in envy at undergraduates taking an exam, because for those students the brief ordeal will soon be over. For the TAs, it is just beginning. It can take days to grade a written exam, and grading papers is worse. There are few things more discouraging than finding yourself at two in the morning reading the forty-third paper in a row on the same subject when you know that there are sixty more to grade. You will be handed another pile of papers after this one, not to mention the midterm exam and the final exam. To grade conscientiously requires a draining degree of sustained focus, and after all of your effort, you know that only a few of the students will give more than a minute’s attention to the comments that you have painstakingly written with your aching hand. And none of this work moves you one inch closer to finishing your degree.

55. There are too many PhDs.

2011-04-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

The reason that there are so few jobs to be found in academe (see Reason 8) is not because there are too few colleges, universities, departments, or programs. If anything, there are too many. The problem is that the number of available jobs is vastly outnumbered by the number of people applying for them. There are simply too many PhDs produced every year for the higher education establishment to absorb them all, despite the absurd degree to which it has absorbed them into jobs that have nothing to do with traditional research and teaching. Today, universities hire doctors of philosophy to be in charge of their dormitories, alumni associations, and police departments.

Colleges benefit from this situation, because there are so many well-credentialed people desperate for teaching positions that they will work for very little money. This would not be such a problem if the world outside of academe had more use for people with PhDs (see Reason 29). The fact that it does not is why there are so many people with doctorates who now find themselves working in part-time temporary teaching positions with no benefits (see Reason 14).

A new report from the American Association of University Professors describes the situation:

In all, graduate student employees and faculty members serving in contingent appointments now make up more than 75 percent of the total instructional staff. The most rapid growth has been among part-time faculty members, whose numbers swelled by more than 280 percent between 1975 and 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, the numbers of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members and part-time faculty members each grew at least 6 percent. During the same period, tenured positions grew by only 2.4 percent and tenure-track appointments increased by a minuscule 0.3 percent. These increases in the number of faculty appointments have taken place against the background of an overall 12 percent increase in higher education enrollment in just those two years.

Meanwhile, the number of people clambering to fill these jobs continues to increase. In November 2010, the National Science Foundation reported that 49,562 people earned doctorates in the United States in 2009. This was the highest number ever recorded. Most of the increase over the previous decade occurred in the sciences and engineering, but the NSF’s report noted a particularly grim statistic for those who completed a PhD in the humanities: only 62.6 percent had a “definite commitment” for any kind of employment whatsoever. Remember that this is what faces those who have already survived programs with very high attrition rates; more than half of those who start PhD programs in the humanities do not complete them (see Reason 46).

The PhD has been cheapened by its ubiquity. While students in traditional PhD programs at research universities now take upwards of a decade to complete their programs—as they struggle to fulfill the labor requirements of their teaching appointments—others are swiftly completing accredited PhDs online. These degrees do no carry much weight in the academic hierarchy (see Reason 3), but they do increase the number of people calling themselves “doctor.” One might not think that illegitimate colleges or “diploma mills” pose much of a threat to the integrity of degrees, but consider the fact that hundreds of federal government employees purchased fake degrees and successfully parlayed them into promotions and higher salaries.

Perhaps most scandalous is what legitimate research universities have done to devalue the PhD, which is now awarded in fields ranging from hotel management to recreation and (most ironic of all) higher education administration. In the meantime, universities continue to lower standards for graduate degrees. The traditional American master’s degree—which once required a minimum of two years of study, the passing of written and oral comprehensive exams, as well as the writing and defense of a thesis more substantial than many of today’s doctoral dissertations—has been dramatically watered down. Will it be long before the PhD suffers the same fate?

For graduate students, it takes longer and longer to earn degrees that are worth less and less. And after the years of investment required to obtain those degrees, they are met with a job market with little to offer them, even as the popular culture is increasingly inclined to mock them (see Reason 43).

54. “What do you do for a living?”

2011-04-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

For most people, this is an easy and straightforward question to answer, but for graduate students it proves surprisingly tricky. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you can answer, “I’m a grad student,” but you will feel less and less comfortable saying this as you get older (see Reason 12). A variation of the same response is, “I’m working toward a PhD in psychology,” but this has a way of alienating your interlocutor even more effectively than the first answer does (see Reason 30). In either case, you have not really answered the question. Perhaps you are living off of student loans, but it doesn't feel very good to admit that. Or maybe you are working as a teaching or research assistant.

Telling someone that you are a teaching assistant does not feel very good either, especially when you are 27 or 30 or even older (see Reason 53). Some TAs—more than likely with a hint of guilt—try to avoid the problem by answering, “I teach at XYZ University.” That sounds better at first, but the almost inevitable follow-up question undermines your attempt at evasion and makes the conversation even more awkward. The fact that such a simple question can be so hard to answer underscores the strange place of the graduate student in the world. It is made all the worse by the fact that this limbo tends to last for an excruciatingly long time.

53. Teaching assistantships.

2011-04-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

There is something inherently humiliating about being a teaching assistant. This is true despite the fact that graduate students desperately want and need teaching assistantships for funding (see Reason 17), that they compete with each other for TAships (see Reason 2), and that TAships are often the only way for graduate students to acquire teaching experience. And it is true despite the fact that TAs generally have a much closer connection to their students (and their students’ performance) than professors do. In the end, a traditional TA is exactly what the job title describes: a “teacher’s helper.”

Your junior status in the classroom is painfully apparent to both you and your students. It is made all the more obvious when students come to visit you during your “office” hours (see Reason 42). It is hard for students not to harbor doubts about the quality of what they are being taught by someone so low in the academic hierarchy, and it is hard for you to remain there for so long. Teaching assistantships pay the bills (or at least some of them), but the reason that you often find yourself still working as a TA in your 30s is because of your work as a TA. What began as an apprenticeship has become a job of drudgery upon which the university depends (see Reasons 7 and 41). Being a TA requires an extraordinary amount of time—time that you cannot devote to doing what you need to do to graduate—so the indignity tends to last for years. The jobs that make it possible to be in graduate school make it difficult to escape from graduate school.

52. Your adviser’s pedigree counts.

2011-03-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Nowhere does it matter more where you go to school than in academe. Higher education takes itself and its hierarchies very seriously. You will find it hard to compete—in an extremely competitive academic job market—against people with degrees from the Ivy League and the quasi-Ivies if your degree is from Generic State University (see Reason 3). But it is not only your own pedigree that you have to worry about. Graduate students at even the toniest universities have to make strategic decisions to maximize their chances on the job market. To that end, few things are more important than choosing an adviser.

For graduate students interested in an academic career, Professor Lennard J. Davis recently offered some excellent advice in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That advice included the following:

I tell my students to plan their dissertation committees with the job search in mind. They should pick professors who not only are skilled in the field of the dissertation, but who also have national and international reputations. Letters from those professors will count a great deal. And as these things go, letters from full professors will count more than letters from associate professors, and so on down the line.

Note the emphasis on reputation and hierarchy. Professor Davis, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is refreshingly honest and would make a good adviser for that reason alone. Even better, all of his degrees are from Columbia. Unfortunately, the most understanding professors with the time and willingness to shepherd you through a graduate program are rarely those with the biggest reputations and most fashionable credentials.

51. You are surrounded by undergraduates.

2011-03-21T06:00:00.001-07:00

Most everyone who works in education experiences the strange phenomenon of growing older while students stay the same age. Graduate students experience an even stranger phenomenon. While still students themselves, they age in the presence of fellow students who remain 18-22 years old, year after year after year. As a graduate student, you encounter undergraduates every day on campus. It is more than likely that you have to work with them. And because you can’t afford to live anywhere else, you probably go home to a neighborhood (or even an apartment building) that is full of them. They surround you constantly. In fact, in ways that seem more distressing over time, your life is very much like theirs.

It is not much fun to live in a sea of undergraduates unless you are an undergraduate yourself. Their unavoidable presence and carefree ways are a constant reminder of your delayed adulthood (see Reason 12), even as their feeling of relief and accomplishment at the end of each term is a jarring reminder that your own work does not end with finals week (see Reason 47). You may not be much older than they are, but they can make you feel much older than they are. And then one day you discover that you are much older than they are. Perhaps most bothersome of all is their collective sense of possibility; they know (or at least live in the belief) that a world of opportunities awaits them, while you see more clearly every year that your prospects are becoming fewer and fewer (see Reason 29).

50. You are surrounded by graduate students.

2011-03-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

A graduate student in his first year of a PhD program was disappointed that his classmates scattered to the four winds as soon as their unbearable seminar meetings were over (see Reason 21). Not yet knowing any of his fellow students, he expressed his disappointment to a tenured faculty member. The professor responded without the slightest hesitation: “There is nothing to be gained from the company of graduate students.”

Graduate students are not bad people, but they are often unhappy people for a variety of reasons (see Reasons 1-49). Graduate school can produce real friendships and even marriages (see Reason 48), but it is rarely experienced as a community of people working together. Instead, grad school throws people together who are fighting their own lonely way toward degrees, often in direct competition with each other (see Reason 2). It is what they share that makes them unhappy—alienation from the real world, unsatisfying work, terrible workspaces, tiny paychecks, ballooning student loans, and constant uncertainty over what awaits them at the end of their long road through graduate school. Being surrounded by unhappy people is hardly a recipe for happiness.

49. There are few tangible rewards.

2011-03-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

When you build a house, paint a painting, bake a cake, or clean a room, you can step back and see what you have accomplished. Whether you work alone or in a team, being able to contemplate the finished product of your labors is a satisfying experience, a reward for your work. When that labor is further rewarded by a paycheck, it is all the more satisfying. Many modern occupations come with few tangible rewards but at least provide an income. Graduate school offers little in the way of either.

Instead of being able to see the work of your hands or the product of your ideas, you can reflect upon the thousands of hours that you spent reading in preparation for your exams, and how quickly the impractical things that you learned in the process slipped from your mind the moment that you completed them. You can meditate on the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes that produced the tens of thousands of words that you typed while staring at an ephemeral image on a screen. After a few years in graduate school, you can print out hundreds of pages of text that you have produced, but looking at a neatly-stacked pile of paper is hardly inspiring. (Would your writing inspire anyone who reads it?) After several years, when you are finally handed a piece of paper in recognition of your efforts, you can step back and contemplate your empty bank account.

48. The two-body problem.

2011-02-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate school tends to delay marriage (see Reason 15), but if you decide to go to graduate school, you will likely spend many years as a graduate student among other graduate students. Not surprisingly, grad students sometimes fall in love and marry each other. They can be a great support to one another as they together go through the struggles of grad school on a shoe-string budget, but their marriage has created what in academic circles is commonly referred to as “the two-body problem.” It is hard enough for one human being to finish graduate school and secure an academic position; you can imagine how hard it is for two people.

Let us say that you marry a fellow graduate student and both of you manage to complete your PhDs. (The fact that you have each other’s support may make that more likely.) Now it is time for you both to find jobs. First of all, there are very few jobs (see Reason 8), and the available jobs are probably nowhere near where you are now (see Reason 16). Having spent years of your lives devoting yourselves to your respective disciplines, you are both heavily invested in your fields. At the same time, neither of you is better qualified for anything other than being a professor (see Reason 29). You will be very lucky if either of you is offered an assistant professorship; you will be extraordinarily lucky if both of you are. In that unlikely event, if you are offered a job in Texas and your spouse is offered a job in Minnesota, which one of you is going to accept the position? Academic jobs are so precious that there are married couples who work hundreds of miles away from each other, but do you really want to do that? An alternative is to move with your spouse and hope that you will land a job within commuting distance of your new home. Another is for one of you to start from scratch in a new profession.

47. It requires tremendous self-discipline.

2011-02-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate school is not like college. Perhaps so many people go to graduate school because they are mistakenly under the impression that it is. In college, you go through a tidy progression of classes from one term to the next, each having a beginning and an end, neatly punctuated by mid-term exams, final exams, and regular paper assignments. While hundreds of other students march through similar routines all around you, you follow a set class schedule from day to day until, finally, you take your last final exam in your last class and walk away with your diploma. (In the mean time, you probably have some fun, too.) In the United States, graduate programs begin with coursework, but classes designed for graduate students are different from those designed for undergraduates and can be extremely unsatisfying in comparison (see Reason 21). Classes are smaller, so the feeling of shared experience is diminished from the outset. As you enter the isolation of preparing for your comprehensive exams, that shared feeling all but disappears. If you pass those exams, then the real isolation begins.

Imagine a day when someone says to you, “Write a book.” This will not be just any kind of book; a thesis or dissertation is the product of tedious research and the most laborious kind of writing: academic writing (see Reason 28). You must write this book while fulfilling your basic obligations (like paying the rent), carrying out your obligations as a teaching or research assistant (which makes paying the rent possible), and satisfying the expectations of your potential future employers by adding as many lines to your resume as possible (presenting papers at conferences and publishing articles). If you don’t receive funding from your department, then you will either have to hold down a different kind of job or sink into debt (see Reason 1) as you research and write. For all intents and purposes, you are on your own throughout this process. Some people are adept at managing unstructured time and multiple obligations at once, but graduate-school attrition rates (see Reason 46) make it clear that some people are not. Given how long it takes for most of those who do finish to finish (see Reason 4), it is probably safe to say that most people are not.

46. You may not finish.

2011-02-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Presumably, very few people start graduate school with the intention of dropping out, but graduate school attrition rates are depressingly high. In the humanities, they are painfully high. A study by the Council of Graduate Schools found that only 49 percent of those who start PhD programs in the humanities finish within ten years. (The best numbers are in engineering, where 64 percent finish in ten years.) A fraction of graduate students take longer than a decade to finish their degrees, but the vast majority of those who haven’t finished within ten years never will finish. So, even in the fields with the lowest drop-out rates, one third of those who start a PhD program never complete it.

Graduate school is difficult (see Reason 9), and some of this attrition is the result of students being unable to pass their exams or write acceptable theses. Their inability to do so may have as much to do with their work obligations (see Reasons 7 and 41) as with their academic potential. Some graduate students crack under the pressure of demanding professors (see Reason 44), while others cannot muster adequate self-discipline under the supervision of lenient advisers (see Reason 45). In many cases, money becomes an issue, and it is arguably much wiser to drop out of a program than it is to go into debt. Life simply gets in the way sometimes. For all sorts of reasons, spending the better part of a decade in a state of financial insecurity (see Reason 17) and prolonged “youth” (see Reason 12) proves untenable for many people. Unfortunately, there is a cost to be paid for quitting (see Reason 11). Anyone considering graduate school should consider the attrition statistics soberly, and then consider the bleak job prospects for those who finish despite the odds.

45. Nice advisers can be worse.

2011-02-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

If you suffer under a tyrranical adviser (see Reason 44) who expects you to meet high standards and strict deadlines, you may rise to the occasion, produce outstanding work, and graduate in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, what today counts as “reasonable” is a very long time (see Reason 4) and you may still find that there are no jobs waiting for you at the end of an arduous journey through graduate school (see Reason 8). Nonetheless, there is something to be said for advisers who push their students through the various stages of a graduate program and then push them out the door with a degree.

The sooner you finish, the better. Graduate school delays adulthood (see Reason 12) and the longer you devote to a degree, the longer you will be without a salary. And there are few things more discouraging than sinking years of your life into working toward a degree that you never finish (see Reason 11). Having an adviser who offers you maximum intellectual freedom while allowing you to work at your own pace is an advantage if you are exceptionally organized, disciplined, and focused. However, if you are not, that kind of generous leeway can be detrimental to your chances of finishing in a timely manner or finishing at all. People tend to be most productive when they have expectations to meet and a schedule to follow. Ironically, it is often the kindest advisers who are the most averse to imposing strict expectations on their students, leaving them to rely on their own far-too-often insufficient self-discipline.

44. Advisers can be tyrants.

2011-01-31T11:50:00.000-08:00

The most important relationship of your graduate-school career is that between you and your adviser (or in some departments, “major professor”). “Adviser” is an understated way of describing the person who is your academic supervisor, your advocate within the department, the primary assessor of the quality of your work, the person who will decide if and when you can take your qualifying exams and/or comprehensive exams and if and when you are ready to defend your dissertation, and—if you happen to be serving as your adviser’s teaching or research assistant—your boss. Your adviser will be the principal decider of whether you pass your exams and defense, and thus whether you will ever receive a degree. Choosing an adviser is not to be taken lightly, but the choice is not entirely yours. Research interests, departmental politics, and who happens to be available and willing to "advise" you will all play a role in determining who your adviser will be.

Tolstoy wrote that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and one could say that every tyrannical adviser is tyrannical in his own way. The worst abuses may occur in the laboratory sciences, where graduate students often perform the painstaking labor that results in the papers published under their advisers’ names. Foreign students whose student visas are dependent upon successful progress toward their degrees are especially vulnerable to demanding advisers who determine what “successful progress” is. Hopefully, most advisers will never go so far as the dean at St. John’s University in New York who has recently been accused of turning undergraduate scholarship-recipients into her personal servants. Less newsworthy are the common disheartening experiences of those whose research questions or conclusions have been dictated to them by their advisers, who have had to re-write their dissertations three times for no good reason, or whose fate is in the hands of an adviser who is simply a miserably unpleasant person (see Reason 25).

43. Attitudes about graduate school are changing.

2011-01-17T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Economist recently noted that “whining PhD students are nothing new,” and that is certainly true. Graduate students have been unhappy with their lot in life for generations. But the headline over that Economist article declaring that “doing a PhD is often a waste of time” is something new. The difficult employment situation resulting from degree overproduction—the “glut” of PhDs—has been recognized and discussed in academic circles for a long time, but it is only rarely discussed outside of academe. For one thing, graduate programs hardly go out of their way to warn prospective students about the stark reality that will face them if and when they ever finish their degrees. But there seems to be a change in the air. Perhaps there are finally too many people trapped on the academic treadmill for the problem to be ignored any longer.

As the crisis in graduate education comes to light, cultural attitudes about grad school are taking a decidedly negative turn. Media outlets (most notably U.S. News & World Report) have benefited enormously from the graduate-school mania of the last few decades, which may help explain why systemic problems in higher education have not received more attention from the media. Job insecurity is at least partially to blame for the extreme reluctance of academics and administrators to criticize the system upon which their livelihoods depend.

However, in 2003, Professor William Pannapacker (writing under the pseudonym Thomas H. Benton) bravely published a piece entitled “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the major trade journal of American academe. The Chronicle deserves credit for publishing that essay, and the series of Thomas H. Benton columns on the problems of graduate school that followed it. A recent installment was entitled “The Big Lie about the ‘Life of the Mind.’” The comments posted by readers of those columns reveal the heartbreak and disappointment of so many who are products of the graduate-school machine, as does this open letter to Thomas H. Benton. Over the past two years, attention has also turned to the stability of the higher education establishment itself, with academic insiders like Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard Horton and law professor Glenn Reynolds comparing the “bubble” in higher education to the hyper-inflated housing market before the real-estate bust (see Reason 27). Meanwhile, economist Richard Vedder has pointed out statistics that suggest that college has proven of little practical use to millions of college graduates, and has more recently considered graduate degrees.

There seems to be a new cultural awareness of the negative aspects of graduate school. Appearing in 2010 was Adam Ruben’s book, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School. Generally speaking, the details of grad-student life have never been on the cultural radar, so the decision of a major publisher like Random House to publish the book is telling. Another cultural indicator is the Xtranormal viral video posted in October 2010 depicting an earnest undergraduate asking a professor for a letter of recommendation to accompany her graduate-school application. The professor tries vigorously to dissuade her. The video is humorous, but draws on the genuine pathos that permeates academe (and seems to have inspired a subgenre of similar videos). An even more recent video (produced commercially)—styling itself as an “honest” grad school ad—is a blunt and vulgar commentary on graduate school and graduate students that drips with derision. Its humor is of the mocking variety.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the writers of the Simpsons were ahead of the curve, pointing out some of the sad realities of graduate school (with a touch of mockery) years ago. If graduate school continues to get this kind of attention, maybe it will have the positive effect of reducing interest in graduate programs and eventually relieving some of the pressure on the PhD job market. On the other hand, it is hard enough to be a graduate student in a world that scarcely notices that graduate students exist (see Reason 30), and it will be far harder if the popular culture comes to perceive them as dupes. The zeitgeist seems headed in that direction.

42. Your workspace reflects your status.

2011-01-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

Facilities vary greatly from one campus to another—and from one department to another—but office space is in short supply on nearly every campus, and graduate students tend to be among the last to be allotted workspace. For students who have not been awarded funding (see Reason 17), there is typically no workspace provided at all. For graduate students so fortunate as to have a desk on campus, it will likely be in a room shared with several graduate students, and just as likely to be without windows. Some people manage to work in these spaces, but the grumblings of your office-mates (see Reason 20) can be as distracting as the environment is discouraging. It is no wonder that graduate students spend so much time dragging their work from one coffee place to another.

This might seem like a minor inconvenience, but you may be in graduate school much longer than you anticipate (see Reason 4), and a dispiriting workspace can wear on you over many years. The subject is lampooned in a promotional video for Adam Ruben’s recent book, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School. (That such a book exists should give you pause.) When you are sitting in a basement breathing stale air and listening to the unrelenting sound of toilets flushing through the wall, your place in the university is made quite clear to you. Moreover, your lowly status is not lost on the undergraduates who come to see you during the “office” hours that you are required to keep as a teaching assistant (see Reason 41). At the end of every day, when you return home to the humble quarters that you probably share with others (because there is no other way to afford the rent), your status is made all the clearer.

41. Teaching is your first priority.

2011-01-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

If you are lucky enough to have a job as a teaching assistant, you will be told by your department that your studies are your first priority. This is ridiculous. If you were a football player, it would be a bit like your typical Division I coach telling you that your studies are your first priority. The coach, at least, will usually have the decency to wink while telling you this. Graduate-student teaching assistants, however, are told the same thing by people with straight faces, some of whom may even believe what they are saying. Try to tell the three hundred students whose papers and exams you're grading that your studies are your first priority. For that matter, go ahead and try to prioritize your studies when you have a class to teach five days a week. Don’t forget that your students will be filling out evaluations of your teaching performance at the end of the term, and that these will be part of both your future funding applications and job applications.

The irony is that teaching is not the first priority of the permanent faculty members, because their tenure and promotion depend on research and publication. Their situation is not much better, but at least they earn a salary. For graduate students, teaching has a way of becoming a full-time job, even though it is supposed to be a part-time job. Yes, you have to answer to your professors, but you also have to answer to your students, and the latter greatly outnumber the former.

40. Faddishness prevails.

2010-12-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

You probably associate fads with fashion and junior high school, but fads are very much a part of modern academic culture. Whole disciplines and sub-disciplines rise and fall in popularity, as do certain ideas and personalities, the influence of which will often cross disciplinary boundaries. The pernicious effects of this faddishness are most often felt by those who study something that is out-of-fashion at the time they enter the job market. The most savvy (if un-idealistic) graduate students will choose their programs of study and dissertation topics with an eye to what is fashionable. Just hope that your choice is still fashionable a decade hence.

If you have any doubts about academic faddishness, consider the French intellectual Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose name and ideas have proven wildly popular in academic circles. To see just how popular he is, try a little experiment. Google the name “Foucault.” Now Google the name “Aristotle.” This is an imperfect experiment, given that there is more than one Foucault, etc., but the results should surprise you. Is it even remotely possible to consider the influence of Foucault in the same league as that of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)? You can almost be forgiven for thinking so after a few years in graduate school.

39. You are asked to do the impossible.

2010-12-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

If you have never seen a graduate-level reading list, you may be in for a surprise. The largest part of your reading load is usually assigned as preparation for your comprehensive (or general) exams, but individual courses also require a great deal of reading. Reading lists are so long that it really isn’t possible for anyone but the fastest readers to read the hundreds of books and articles that are assigned in a typical graduate program. Part of the high graduate-school drop-out rate is no doubt the result of well-intentioned students making this terrible discovery the hard way.

Enormous reading loads persist despite the overall decline in academic expectations (see Reason 6). The reading lists are so long in part because of the unbelievable volume of academic literature that is constantly published (see Reason 33) and in part because professors are reluctant to shorten lists to a manageable length in a climate in which long reading lists are considered de rigeur. The consequence of this has been the redefinition of “reading.” A successful graduate student quickly learns that to “read” a work of scholarship is simply to grasp its basic argument (usually made clear in the introduction) so that there is time to move on to the next book. Retaining what you have read even using this abbreviated form of reading remains a challenge when you are faced with a list of 200 or 300 titles.

38. The tyranny of the CV.

2010-12-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Another example of terminology-inflation in academe (see Reason 35) is evident in the “curriculum vitae.” What in most other walks of life is referred to in standard American English as a résumé (an already pretentious three-syllable French word) is in academic professions referred to by an even more pretentious six syllables of Latin. (The former term, incidentally, is much older than the latter.) But the inflation does not end there. In most real-world contexts, résumés are as brief and to-the-point as possible, but the typical professor’s CV is pages and pages long. It is so long because it lists every paper that he has ever presented at a conference, every article, book chapter, or book that he has ever published, every class that he has ever taught, every grant that he has ever received, every honor with which he has ever been bestowed, and often every professional organization to which he pays a membership fee.

Of course, this means that there is now an expectation that a strong CV will be many pages long. Graduate students with an eye on the academic job market, therefore, have to start worrying about collecting items for their CVs early in their graduate programs. In fact, you will spend far more time in graduate school doing things for the sake of putting them on your CV than you will ever spend pondering what you are studying for its own sake. Unfortunately, if you want an academic job, you really don’t have a choice in the matter.

37. The university does not exist for your sake.

2010-12-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

While the modern university increasingly exists for the sake of those that it employs (see Reason 32), it still does a good job of creating the impression that it exists for the purpose of undergraduate education. There are too many parents paying enormous tuition bills for it to do otherwise. Modern campuses boast elaborate student exercise facilities, more and more comfortable student housing, and ever-fancier student-union buildings. The vast majority of the people who experience university life are undergraduate students, so it makes sense that universities work to enhance this experience. Part of the incentive to do so is the desire to produce happy alumni who will later contribute to their alma maters.

Although graduate students today tend to have much longer programs of study than undergraduates (see Reason 4), and therefore remain on campus much longer than undergraduates, they represent a smaller proportion of the student body. Furthermore, at any given time, a large proportion of graduate students are receiving funding from the university, rather than paying tuition to it. They will represent a far smaller share of the university’s alumni, and because most of them will presumably go into academe, they can’t be counted on to produce much in the way of alumni donations. There is little incentive for the university to pay much attention to the graduate student experience, so it typically doesn’t. As employees, teaching assistants (like adjunct professors) are impermanent, and thus are not among the university's stake-holding employees. It is an interesting experience to spend years of your life as an ancillary part of an institution designed to serve the 18-year olds who surround you every day.

36. “So what are you going to do with that?”

2010-12-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Once your listener has gotten over the initial perplexity caused by your admission that you are a graduate student (see Reasons 24 and 30), the next question will usually be, “What do you study?” And you will answer, “anthropology.” Then the next question will be, “Well, what exactly do you study?” And you will answer, “I study the use of body art among Polish metal workers.” And then the next question will be, “So what are you going to do with that?”

You know exactly what you hope to do with that. You hope to find a tenure-track job at a college or university where you will teach anthropology to generations of students, some of whom will go on to graduate school and write esoteric dissertations of their own (see Reason 29). For some reason, however, this is hard to articulate in a conversation. One problem is that you can see a certain absurdity in this cycle of which you are now a part. Another is that you know just how hard it is to get a tenure-track job, and you may not have a Plan B. As a result, this question, which you will face repeatedly, is always an awkward one to handle. Your answer will usually end up being something along the lines of “teach,” and your listener will nod, immediately grasping the absurd cycle himself and finding it even harder to relate to you than he did three questions earlier.

35. Mumbo-jumbo abounds.

2010-12-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which mumbo-jumbo has permeated academe. The problem is especially egregious in the humanities, but it exists everywhere in the modern university. Mumbo-jumbo takes many forms, but it is closely associated with the desire of far too many academics to be perceived as sophisticated at the cost of clarity or meaningfulness in the most fundamental sense. Four years before it dissolved its Department of Physical Education completely in 1997 (“P.E.” not being terribly sophisticated anymore), the University of California, Berkeley, renamed it the Department of Human Biodynamics. But terminology-inflation is only the tip of the mumbo-jumbo iceberg.

In the sciences, sophisticated terms are necessary to describe extremely specific phenomena. Faced with an endless need to publish, academics in the humanities have also developed a complicated vocabulary, but whether or not it is genuinely sophisticated is a matter of debate. A complex arrangement of complex words can serve as a smokescreen for nonsense. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal famously submitted “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—an article intentionally full of nonsense—to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University Press that currently describes itself as devoted to “a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena from a radical perspective, applying critical theory and methods to the world at large.” The journal subjected Sokal’s article to peer review before accepting and publishing it, at which time Sokal revealed the hoax in an article published in Lingua Franca. The experiment had little effect, however. Articles with titles like Sokal’s appear constantly. If you can’t initially write such a paper yourself, the Postmodernism Generator will write one for you. You can still build a career in academe on mumbo-jumbo, but before you give it a try, ask yourself if you can do so in good conscience.

34. There is too little academic publishing.

2010-11-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

Ironically, while academic journals proliferate (see Reason 33), there are fewer and fewer opportunities to publish scholarly books. This is a major problem. To earn tenure in most any humanities department at most any research university requires publishing a book. At the most prestigious universities, it may require publishing two books. Therefore, on the part of academics, there is a desperate need for scholarly books to be published. However, university presses (generally the only publishers that subject manuscripts to peer review) are much like graduate students; they occupy a strange place within the university and find themselves near the bottom of the university’s priority list.

The staggering number of journals is actually partly to blame for this problem. Traditionally, the most reliable purchasers of scholarly books have been academic libraries, but as libraries spend more and more on journal subscriptions (some of which are outrageously expensive), they have less and less to spend on books. As scholarly book sales spiral downward, university presses are increasingly reliant on grants, donations, and university resources to stay afloat. They can publish fewer books, and the books that they do publish are printed in ever smaller numbers. (A total print run of 300 copies is not atypical for a scholarly book today.) But to see your manuscript in print at all is a formidable challenge. While the customers for these books are disappearing, the supply of authors who need to publish does not diminish. Out of necessity, university presses can accept only a small percentage of the manuscripts that are submitted to them. Assistant professors who cannot find a press to accept their work for publication will not be professors for long.

33. There is too much academic publishing.

2010-11-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone is required to publish. “Publish or perish” is the rule in a research university, where faculty members are expected to make continual contributions to their fields. A faculty member has no hope of acquiring tenure or getting a promotion without an ever-lengthening record of publication, but the pressure to publish is so intense that even graduate students are now expected to publish research. The job market being what it is, graduate students can be certain that their competition has a record of publication, so they had best have one, too.

All of this publishing has to appear somewhere, so there are now thousands of academic journals. The subscription fees for these journals (particularly those in medicine and the sciences) are a great financial burden on academic libraries. Amidst this enormous profusion of academic publishing—and the stress that it places on everyone involved—it is inevitable that sub-par research gets through the peer-review process and into the pages of academic journals. Sometimes even fraud makes it through. Because of the requirement to publish, academics (even honest ones) sometimes publish work that they themselves question the significance of. Of course, questioning the significance of one’s work is a condition endemic to graduate school.

32. The university is an economic engine.

2010-11-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Universities ostensibly exist to educate, but after their massive post-World War II expansion to accommodate tens of thousands of students apiece, they needed to hire thousands of employees. Some of these employees are hired to teach (faculty members and graduate students alike), but a growing proportion of university employees are there to do something else. They are janitors, gardeners, groundskeepers, librarians, plumbers, coaches, secretaries, accountants, electricians, programmers, engineers, nurses, cooks, scientists, and administrators. Those employed in offices devoted to various “student services” amount to an impressive number in themselves.

A modern university is a small (or not-so-small) city teeming with activity. In their host communities, universities are economic engines that attract a continual supply of paying customers (students) and millions of research dollars, while providing employment for thousands. The students come and go, so the real university stakeholders are those with permanent campus jobs. As the Economist recently pointed out, most of the growth in American universities has been in administration; almost half of the full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators. With so many stakeholders on campus who are not there to teach or to learn, the priorities of the modern university are naturally less and less attuned to the avowed purposes of higher education. At least until the bubble bursts (see Reason 27), one might do well to look for a permanent, salaried university job that does not require years of graduate school and the uncertainty that accompanies it.

31. There are biological consequences.

2010-11-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

It is never entirely your decision as to when you will marry or have children, but to the extent that it is, there are some important facts of life to keep in mind. There is a price to pay for delaying adulthood and marriage (see Reasons 12 and 15) that goes beyond the psychological cost of graduate school (see Reason 10). For women, fertility begins to decline before the age of 30, and for men the decline begins in the late 30s. For women over 35, fertility-treatment effectiveness also declines.

Because the road through graduate school to a secure job and income is such a long and uncertain one, graduate students have good reason to wait before starting a family. Of course, the longer people wait to have children, the fewer children they can have. And if they wait too long, it can be difficult to have any children at all. This is not an issue that usually crosses the mind of someone considering graduate school, but it should. The subject of a 2002 cover story in Time magazine, the grief that Sylvia Ann Hewlett calls the “crisis of childlessness” has affected a generation of successful people who made career a priority over family. To make matters worse, graduate school has the effect of putting off both family and career.

30. You occupy a strange place in the world.

2010-11-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate students not only occupy a strange place in the university (see Reason 10), they occupy a strange place in the world. Though it is meant to be only a transitional period, graduate school has become so drawn out (see Reason 4), that you may find yourself in this strange place for many years. How is it strange? It is strange in a number of ways. There is the relative poverty that comes with the knowledge that you could be doing something else. There are the real ways in which you are removed from adulthood (see Reasons 12 and 15), and there are the perceptions (fair or unfair) among others that you are not really doing what an adult should be doing (see Reason 24). There is the constant uncertainty of not knowing what you will be doing next year (see Reason 17) or what you will be doing when you have finally earned your degree (see Reason 8).

The sense of alienation that comes with being a graduate student is not only something that you feel. It is something that the people around you feel. People don’t know what to make of graduate students. They find it difficult to relate to them. Many don’t understand what it means to be in graduate school, and those who are familiar with academe often have vaguely (or even explicitly) negative opinions of graduate students. In popular culture, references to graduate students are few, but they can be quite revealing.

29. You may not start with plans to be a professor, but…

2010-11-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

People often go to graduate school without any firm plans or expectations for their futures. For many, graduate school serves as what they think will be a temporary escape from the “real world.” Continuing their educations is a way of putting off career decisions or even adulthood itself (see Reason 12). However, once you have begun investing in graduate school and the academic enterprise more generally, you will discover that it is both hard to quit (see Reason 11) and takes a very long time to finish (see Reason 4). By the end of your graduate school experience, you will have spent a long time building a resume and acquiring a very specific skill set that is optimized for exactly one thing: being a professor.

This is something that you should consider carefully before starting a graduate program. Do you want to be a professor? If the answer is no, think twice. If the answer is yes, the problem is further complicated by the fact that the competition to become a professor at even the most modest academic institutions is fierce (see Reasons 8 and 14). So whether or not you can answer that question now, if in the course of your journey through graduate school you are able to resign yourself to the idea of being a professor (or some kind of college instructor), you will then be faced with the reality of the job market. There are a few jobs outside of academe that require a PhD, but there are not many. Would it have been worth it?

28. Writing is hard.

2010-11-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

In graduate school, you will be immersing yourself in a life of reading and writing, neither of which will be fun. For most people, writing of any kind requires effort, and writing well requires more, but academic writing is especially difficult. It is difficult because it is (rightfully) subject to scrutiny, and therefore every substantive factual assertion that you make in your writing will have to be based upon evidence that must be cited meticulously. You will seldom write a paragraph that lacks a citation, meaning that you will rarely have the opportunity to indulge in an enjoyable, free-flowing production of words unimpeded by constant pauses to consult sources and record attributions. Academic writing can be agonizingly slow.

Early in graduate school, you will probably be asked to write book reviews or other relatively short papers that require reference to a limited number of sources, but most of your writing will require a great deal of preparation before it even begins. Because your research contributions are expected to be original, you will have to acquaint yourself with the literature that has already been published on the subject about which you are writing. Then, you will have to find a way to incorporate the conclusions of your predecessors into your work before offering some kind of interpretation of your own—an interpretation that should be justified by evidence. Creativity—and one hopes that there will be some—has to be expressed within the template of what constitutes a sound academic argument. Scholarship is made better by high standards, but you should ask yourself if this is the kind of writing to which you want to devote a good portion of your life.

27. The academic bubble may burst.

2010-11-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

When considering devoting your life—or at least a large portion of it—to academe, it is worth considering the big picture and the future of higher education. For decades, tuition has been rising higher and higher, with either parents or students (incurring more and more debt) expected to shoulder the burden. As the Economist recently pointed out:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent over the last 25 years. Obviously, college costs cannot continue to devour a larger and larger share of middle class income indefinitely. Eventually, a point will be reached when people conclude that a college education is no longer worth the exorbitant ticket price. When a large enough share of the population believes that it has reached that point, colleges that are used to yearly increases in tuition income will be forced to make substantial changes. All colleges are vulnerable to changing economic conditions. Now that the consequences of the real estate bubble have become painfully apparent, more and more people are using "bubble" to describe the unsustainable growth in higher education. There are already too few jobs in academe for those seeking them (see Reasons 8 and 13). What will the situation be like if the bubble bursts?

26. Some graduate students are more equal than others.

2010-10-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

If the salary list in Reason 23 hasn’t already convinced you that there is nothing egalitarian about universities, you should be aware that the situation within graduate programs is no different. Resources are limited, so when departments dole out fellowships, assistantships, and other funding to graduate students, some students receive more than others. When recruiting, departments offer multi-year funding packages to the students whom they would most like to bring to campus. In some cases, this is essentially a promise to provide support to students from the moment that they arrive on campus until the day that they graduate. Other students are offered less, such as funding for the first year with no guarantee of further support. These awards commonly come with an assurance that “most students” continue to receive funding for two, three, or four years (see Reason 17).

Then there are the students who are admitted to graduate programs and offered no funding at all. If they decide to begin the program, they will be expected to pay full tuition and fees, and somehow support themselves as well. Again, in these cases there may be a “promise” of future funding, but even making it through one year of graduate school without funding is a heavy financial burden. Those without assistantships (as onerous as they can be) are also frozen out of the teaching opportunities that are so important on academic resumes. Students in the same program, sitting in the same classes, and on their way to receiving identical degrees can have wildly different levels of financial support from their department. Consider the effect that this has on morale.

25. Academe is built on pride.

2010-10-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

A cynic might say that while most of the Western world runs on greed, academe runs on pride. And at least according to the Biblical narrative, pride is worse than greed; pride was the sin of the devil himself.

Academe is full of people who think of themselves as smart. In the “real world,” applied intelligence is often rewarded financially, but those who have chosen to spend their lives in higher education will probably never be millionaires. Academics tell themselves that they have given up on the financial rewards that would have come to them in a different line of work, and they are more than likely right. Instead of measuring their accomplishments in dollars, they tend to derive their self-worth from their intellectual stature. Some academics work to prove the point with an endless torrent of publications, but most at the very least settle into a comfortable satisfaction with their own intelligence. But pride is easily wounded. There are two especially negative consequences of the fact that universities play host to high concentrations of people who think highly of themselves but are not rich. The first is that universities create environments in which people are easily offended and quick to defend their status. The second is that campuses are pervaded with a nagging feeling of resentment borne by people who feel that their talents have been inadequately rewarded.

24. “You are still in school?”

2010-10-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

As you age, your relatives and family friends will begin to marvel at the fact that you are still a student. After spending so much time in the Ivory Tower, it is easy for a graduate student to forget just how small the world of higher education is in the context of the wider world. Academic culture is not universally understood beyond the hedges surrounding campus. It is sometimes hard for people—even well-educated people—outside of academe to understand the difference between a college student and a graduate student. Your Uncle Joe may assume that your parents are still paying your tuition (and for some of you that may be true). Whether it is true or not, the idea of a twenty-eight-year-old living off of her parents is not particularly flattering, even in an age of delayed adulthood.

With each passing year, this question becomes more and more awkward to answer. In a real sense, graduate school has the effect of pushing the trappings of adulthood further and further into your future (see Reasons 12 and 15), and this can begin to confound the expectations of adults who have known you all of your life. Furthermore, the longer that you spend as a graduate student—heavily invested in academic culture, but without the financial means to participate fully in the life of the middle class—the less you will be able to relate to the people of the outside world, and the less they will be able to relate to you.

23. There is a pecking order.

2010-10-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Just as there is an academic hierarchy among universities (see Reason 3), there is an academic hierarchy within universities. Some departments have a positive effect on university budgets by virtue of the money that they attract in the form of grants (see Reason 22). Professional programs of study such as law and business charge high fees and offer little or no financial support to their students, so they are also an important source of income for universities. Finally, there are the departments—namely those in the arts, humanities, and many social sciences—that are entirely dependent on the university’s general budget. From a purely fiscal perspective, they are drains on institutional resources. Perhaps not surprisingly, universities tend to lavish attention on the departments and programs that attract external funding, while trying to minimize fixed costs, particularly in those departments and programs that do not generate income.

The liberal arts were once—and perhaps still are—perceived as the core of the university. Philosophy, History, and English departments are often housed in stately old buildings at the center of campuses. But shining new science buildings and gleaming law schools just as often look down on the peeling paint of their venerable neighbors. The hierarchy of departments is most clearly apparent in faculty salaries. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the average salaries for new assistant professors in 2009-2010 were:

Business                            $95,822
Law                                    $92,033
Engineering                       $75,450
Computer Science             $72,199
Public Administration         $57,873
Physical Sciences              $56,483
Math                                  $55,186
Psychology                        $54,584
Philosphy                           $53,668
Foreign Language       $52,271
History                   $51,811
English                  $51,204

Keep in mind that these all represent people who have the same job title: “assistant professor.” The relative comfort of graduate students generally reflects the place of their respective departments in the hierarchy.

22. The liberal arts do not attract investment.

2010-10-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

Research institutions are increasingly dependent on professional begging. In part, this involves hiring development officers whose job it is to find benefactors and encourage ever larger donations from them. Even more important is grant-writing. Researchers apply for grants from either private or public entities (often the federal government) in the hope that their particular research projects will be funded for a given number of years. When a professor “wins” a grant, he or she can buy equipment, pay for lab space, and fund graduate student assistants. Grant-writing (like development) is now a profession, because it has become so important as a source of income for research institutions.

What does that have to do with the liberal arts? Virtually nothing. And that is a problem for the liberal arts. Money will pour into universities for medical, scientific, or other research that is deemed important either to the public interest, or to business interests with a stake in the knowledge produced by a specific line of research. While there are sources of funding for the liberal arts (such as the National Endowment for the Humanities), they are minuscule in number compared to those available to other branches of academe. There is no doubt that there is a certain freedom afforded to liberal-arts professors by the fact that they are not dependent on grants, but external funding is a reflection of the relative importance that society places on the various academic disciplines. It is also an indication of the way in which liberal-arts departments are increasingly out of place in the modern research university.

21. Graduate seminars can be unbearable.

2010-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine sitting with a group of classmates and a professor around a table. Each of you has read a different book about a given topic, and you will each report to the class about the book that you have read. You will diligently (or perhaps not so diligently) take notes on the books described by the other students and then give your own book report. After three hours, you will go your separate ways. The professor may or may not have said much, but he probably didn’t prepare anything to say, because he understandably has higher priorities than graduate seminars. Next week, you will all read a common book and try to talk about it for three hours.

When the historian Jacques Barzun turned 100 in 2007, the New Yorker published a long piece by Arthur Krystal on the occasion of his birthday. It included a description of the Columbia University undergraduate colloquium taught jointly by Barzun and English professor Lionel Trilling from 1934 to 1975. To quote from the article:

“It was awe-inspiring,” the historian Fritz Stern, a 1946 alumnus of the Colloquium, recalled recently. “There I was, listening to two men very different, yet brilliantly attuned to each other, spinning and refining their thoughts in front of us. And when they spoke about Wordsworth, or Balzac, or Burke, it was as if they’d known him. I couldn’t imagine a better way to read the great masterpieces of modern European thought.” 

You may be under the impression that you will experience something like this in graduate school. Unfortunately, you almost certainly won't.

20. Few ideas are exchanged.

2010-10-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the single greatest disappointment for new graduate students is the realization of how little graduate school resembles a community of the life of the mind. To suppose that five percent of your time interacting with other people in your shared academic setting will be devoted to genuine intellectual discussion is to make a generous estimate. That is at the outside edge of what you can reasonably expect, and most of those conversations will go on between you and your professors. One of the factors that suppresses discourse is the fact that your peers are your competitors (see Reason 2). Another is jadedness. Another is just plain tiredness.

With your fellow graduate students, you will complain about teaching, complain about funding, and complain about department politics. You will share insecurities even as you try to hide them. You will hear a great deal of bragging, usually under a veil of pretense that is easily seen through by everyone listening, and sometimes responded to in kind. You might even enjoy a few warm conversations in the context of shared experience, but you will rarely hear anything from your peers that makes you think. You may hear nothing of the kind at all.

19. These are the best years of your life.

2010-10-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

Whether or not your young adulthood does in fact turn out to be the best part of your life by one measure or another, these probably are the years when you will be the healthiest, most energetic, and most capable of taking on challenges. This is the time to try, fail, and try again, to explore your options and discover work that you enjoy. Some of that energy would certainly serve you well in the energy-draining atmosphere of graduate school, but is that where you want to spend it? You really are only young once. Do you really want to start down the graduate school track from which it can be so hard to remove yourself? (See Reason 11.)

You can start a graduate program after you have tried something else first. For that matter, you can try two or three or four things first. In the process of giving something else a chance, you may discover your life’s calling and settle into a livelihood long before you would have finished graduate school. Having secure employment and income in your twenties gives you more flexibility when it comes to starting a family than you would have if you were to emerge from graduate school at 30 without any savings, and quite possibly in debt. Moreover, if you choose to start graduate school after working and saving for a few years, you can give yourself a monetary cushion that will improve your standard of living in graduate school and give you some peace of mind, which is a rare commodity among graduate students.

18. Fellowships are few and far between.

2010-10-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

It would be interesting to know when and how the word “fellowship” came to replace the word “scholarship” for graduate students, but that is what a fellowship is. It is money that is given to you, to use toward your studies, that does not need to be paid back. Fellowships are wonderful; there is no doubt about it. A fellowship, unlike an assistantship, is not a job; it is essentially a gift of money that comes only with the expectation that it will further your studies. A fellowship can buy a graduate student precious time to focus on preparing for comprehensive exams or on writing a thesis or dissertation. Some fellowships are designed to support travel to foreign countries for research or language acquisition.

For most graduate students, these are rare opportunities. Fellowships are awarded by the government, private foundations, and by universities themselves, but the number of fellowships is small relative to the number of graduate students. If all graduate students were funded solely with fellowships, then the average time-to-degree would be a fraction of what it is now. Of course, if all graduate students were funded this way, universities would have no teaching assistants, and the current teaching model could not be sustained.

17. Funding is fleeting.

2010-10-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have been accepted to graduate school with multi-year funding packages (i.e. guaranteed economic support in the form of teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or fellowships for a given number of years) should count yourselves fortunate—that is, unless you would be happier doing something other than going to graduate school. Those funding packages can be hard to turn down, and even harder to give up after you have begun a program of study if you do decide that you would rather be doing something else (see Reason 11); also consider what you could be earning in another line of work.

For many people, however, it is nearly impossible to plan their way through graduate school from the time that they begin their studies, because their funding situation changes from year to year, or term to term, and they have no way of knowing what the next year holds for them. Some departments at some universities are able to support all of their graduate students all the way through their programs. Other departments have extremely limited funds for graduate student support that are rationed severely. Most departments fall somewhere in between. It is hard to plan your life when you do not know what you will be doing from one year to the next. Economic uncertainty while you are in graduate school (quite apart from the situation that you will face upon graduation) can be a major stress, building as the years go by.

16. Where you live will be chosen for you.

2010-09-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

While you may have some part in choosing where you will attend graduate school—admission committees will have their part in the choosing as well—you will have very little choice in the matter of where you live after you complete your graduate education, at least if you plan to remain a professional academic. This is because there will be so few open positions for which you will be qualified at the moment when you enter the job market (see Reason 8). Remember that most faculty openings (especially in a sluggish economy) are the result of faculty retirements, so your job prospects will depend on your graduation coinciding with the retirement plans of someone whose position will be replaced. When budgets are tight, retirees are often not replaced at all.

Unless you have received some inside information, there is little way for you to guess where the job openings will appear in any given year. You may be in graduate school in sunny Southern California, and be quite happy there, but the only job announcements for someone like you, whose specialty is eighteenth-century French literature, are for positions in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Idaho. Every other job seeker in the country (and perhaps beyond) with a PhD in your specialty will apply for those three jobs, and because you have devoted eight years of your life to the subject and you aren’t ready to jump into something completely different, you will, too. And if you manage to land one of those jobs, you may very well spend the rest of your working life in Alabama. The job market will determine where you live.

15. Marriage and family usually wait.

2010-09-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

There are married graduate students, and there are graduate students with families, and the love and support offered by these loved ones is no doubt a great boon to someone in graduate school. However, if you do not begin graduate school married and with a family, you may very well finish graduate school unmarried and without a family. The reasons, more than anything else, are economic. By going to graduate school, you have more than likely either consigned yourself to relative poverty or to debt, and neither condition is ideal for starting a marriage or family.

Should you be one of those who finds a mate who is willing to support you financially and emotionally through graduate school, then you are fortunate; such patience and sacrifice are admirable qualities in a spouse. However, this will probably not be the case for most graduate students, for whom both time and money are in short supply. Raising children on a graduate student stipend must be nearly impossible for anyone in the humanities or social sciences. Furthermore, when and if you do finish a PhD, you will probably have no significant savings, and you will only now (nearing age 30) be entering the uncertain job market (see Reason 4). To wait until you are settled and securely employed before starting a family is a sensible decision, but one that can require an extra long wait if you choose to make your way through graduate school.

14. Adjuncthood awaits.

2010-09-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

As a direct result of the unceasing flow of new PhDs entering the job market every year, there is an oversupply of people qualified to teach at the university level. As in any other industry, when the supply of labor is low, wages tend to rise, and when the supply of labor is high, wages tend to decrease. As would most any business in a similar situation, colleges and universities have taken advantage of this oversupply. Instead of hiring full-time faculty members with expensive salaries and benefits, colleges can hire part-time instructors on short-term contracts. These instructors typically receive no benefits apart from what they are paid on a per-course basis to teach. In the language of American academe, they are called “adjunct” professors.

After spending the better part of a decade, and perhaps more, working toward their doctorates, many people find that a PhD is a ticket to a part-time job. Or, just as likely, it is a ticket to multiple part-time jobs that have to be held down simultaneously just to earn enough money to cover the bills. These jobs, moreover, are not guaranteed to last beyond the current quarter or semester, as universities tend to hire part-time instructors according to the vagaries of their ever-changing budgets. The life of an adjunct professor trying to make a living was described in 2002 by the Washington Post. So, once you have your PhD in hand, how likely are you to find yourself in an adjunct position? According to the American Association of University Professors, more than half of all faculty members hold part-time appointments, and 68 percent of all people teaching in colleges and universities in the United States hold non-tenure-track positions.

13. Respect for the academic profession is declining.

2010-09-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has seen the NBC sitcom “Community” can attest to its unflattering portrayal of community college faculty members and administrators. The public image of what were once called junior colleges does not seem to be rising, despite the fact that today community colleges hire for their faculties hyper-educated scholars with PhDs. This is in large part the result of the competitive academic job market (see Reason 8), which has squeezed many people with hopes of teaching at research universities or four-year colleges into jobs at community colleges. So, it is interesting that a program like “Community” should appear now.

Part of the growing disrespect for—and ambivalence toward—higher education is a result of the slackening of academic standards and the proliferation of college course and degree offerings in subjects viewed (fairly or unfairly) as frivolous by the public. Part is bred by familiarity; as more and more adults have had at least some college education, they have less reason to view universities with the reverence inspired by the unknown and unattainable. Part of the disrespect is fostered by the higher education establishment itself, which by means of “adjunctification” has made work for professional academics insecure and unrewarding. And part of the disrespect stems from academics themselves, who have helped to dismantle (for good and for ill) the aura that once surrounded their profession by, for example, dressing more and more like their students.

12. Adulthood waits.

2010-09-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Lewis Hine photograph of a boy studying at the top of the page captures at least two aspects of the graduate school experience. First, there is the boy’s concerted solitary concentration on the book that he is carefully reading. He is following his finger from line to line, a measure seldom employed when reading for pleasure. He is reading because he has to. But the photograph also captures the subject’s youth. Children go to school. As college has been dragged out longer and longer, the socially acceptable period for study has lengthened, but it can still feel strange to explain to someone that you are a student—even a graduate student—well into your twenties or thirties. Notably, the young boy photographed in 1924, with his necktie carefully tucked into his buttoned-up shirt, is more formally dressed than virtually any college student—and the vast majority of graduate students—whom one would encounter today.

Another image, the May 2010 cover of the New Yorker magazine, also captures a pair of graduate school realities. The first is the terrible job market for new PhDs and the very real possibility that your childhood room awaits you after graduation (see Reason 8). The second is portrayed in the look on the graduate’s parents’ faces. They do not share his pride. To them, their adult son looks disconcertingly at home amid his boyhood surroundings. Graduate school, like modern-day college, can act as one more extension of “youth,” in part because it dramatically stunts your earnings in early adulthood, but also because it keeps you in close proximity to the juvenile trappings of the modern college experience. Unfortunately, aging will not slow down to indulge you in your studies.

11. There is a psychological cost for quitting.

2010-09-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Just as there is a psychological cost to be paid for being a graduate student (see Reason 10), there is a cost to be paid for quitting a graduate program without a degree, or without the degree that you started out in the hope of completing. The causes of the discomfort are partly social: the pressure of explaining to others why you did not finish, the concern that others will perceive your not finishing as a failure, the expectations (real or preceived) of disappointed family members and loved ones, and the problem of explaining your foray through academe to potential employers. Other causes are internal, including disappointment with yourself for not completing something that you knew you were capable of completing.

The tragedy in this is that quitting may be the smart thing to do, but fear of the potential consequences can prevent you from doing so and prolong your time in graduate school, raising the psychological costs ever more. The longer that you devote to a program, the higher the cost of leaving can be, even if leaving is the best choice. Professor Timothy Burke of Swarthmore College has colorfully described this phenomenon. And for some of those who do successfully make their escape from graduate school, feelings of regret and incompletion can linger, irrationally burdening even people who go on to successful careers far from the Ivory Tower.

10. There is a psychological cost.

2010-09-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

Without question, some people are better suited for graduate school than others, and a good attitude goes a long way in making any challenge more manageable. However, spending years of your life developing skills and acquiring knowledge that may prove of no practical use to you in the long run is taking a kind of risk. Uncertainty hangs over graduate students’ heads, as does a looming and never-ending parade of unfinished projects and deadlines.

Perhaps the hardest part of being a graduate student is not being something else. You occupy a strange place in the university; you are not an undergraduate to whom the university at least ostensibly caters, and you are certainly not a faculty member. You are a strange combination of student, teacher, apprentice, and employee. Meanwhile, most of your friends from high school and college who did not choose to go to graduate school will be living very different lives. Chances are that they will be living like “adults” long before you are, and you may never catch up to them in lifetime earnings, no matter what their professions. Money is not everything, but you feel it when you don’t have it, and unless you have a trust fund or benefactor, while you are in graduate school you probably won’t.

9. It is very, very hard.

2010-09-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Notwithstanding the fact that intellectual expectations are falling, graduate school is still very difficult. In many graduate programs, half of the students who begin never finish. Courses require time and effort. Comprehensive exams require time and effort. Theses and/or dissertations require time and effort. After each hill that you climb, there is a bigger one waiting for you. Relationships with advisers and other faculty members must be negotiated and tended over a long period of time. All of this must be done while making ends meet. There are grants and fellowships, but most graduate students have to earn their living by working, either as teaching assistants, research assistants, or in a job not directly related to their studies.

The academic demands of graduate school require a certain level of competence, but stamina is even more important. The work is often tedious and lonely, and it is subject to constant scrutiny. That is not a condition unique to graduate school, but many of the difficult, tedious, and lonely pursuits in life come with a salary. Graduate school does not.

8. There are very few jobs.

2010-09-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

Since the massive post-war expansion of higher education, academic departments have become increasingly dependent on graduate student labor in order to maintain a research focus while educating undergraduates. Universities require every faculty member to produce a steady stream of publishable scholarship, meaning that the time that professors have to devote to teaching is limited. To meet their teaching needs, universities need a steady stream of graduate students in all of their departments to serve as teaching assistants. As a result, there is a steady stream of newly minted PhDs walking, diploma-in-hand, out of every department of every research university in the United States.

After spending as many as ten years studying, teaching, and researching as graduate students, most of these new PhDs want to put to use the skills and knowledge that they have acquired in the university setting that they know so well. Often in their thirties, they are for the first time in their lives qualified to earn a salary in the profession of their choice. But there are only so many faculty positions to be filled. The positions that are open are usually the result of retirements, and the number of people retiring from faculty positions every year does not match the number of PhDs produced, meaning that more and more people are competing for fewer and fewer jobs. This is how many Ivy League PhDs find themselves working at regional state universities, while many state university PhDs find themselves lucky to have temporary teaching positions without benefits or security, and at pay rates that may be lower than teaching assistant stipends.

7. Labor demands are increasing.

2010-09-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

If academic expectations are dropping, why does it take so long to earn a degree? Part of the explanation has to do with the labor demands that have become a part of the typical graduate student experience. As tuition rates rise, making it increasingly imprudent to go into debt for the sake of earning a graduate degree, it has become increasingly important for graduate students to self-finance their way through graduate school. And as the job market becomes more competitive, it becomes increasingly important for graduate students to be able to demonstrate that they already have ample teaching experience upon graduation.

In order to secure tuition waivers, earn enough money to live modest student lives, and acquire teaching experience, graduate students hold teaching assistantships. These assistantships can include total responsibility for courses (designing classes, designing and grading all assignments, preparing lectures, and teaching up to five days per week, i.e. doing what professors used to do) or being responsible for grading the work submitted by students in large lecture courses taught by professors. Whatever form these assistantships take, they tend to require a great deal of time. Grading 100, 200, or 300 papers multiple times per term is time-consuming, especially for someone trying to be a conscientious evaluator of student work. Add to that the time required to sit in on lectures (if you don’t happen to be giving the lectures yourself) as well. And don’t forget office hours. And answering emails from students. And the occasional make-up exam. Then there are your own classes, assignments, and that little thesis or dissertation that you are supposed to be working on.

6. Intellectual expectations are falling.

2010-09-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

Ironically, as the average time-to-degree increases, more and more graduate degrees require less and less work. Consider master’s degrees. While master’s degrees were once generally designed according to a two-year model and required the completion of a substantial thesis, today one-year non-thesis master’s programs abound. Universities will be happy to charge you tuition for such degrees, and faculty will no doubt be happy to graduate you without having to read drafts of your thesis, but you will have probably done less to earn that degree than someone who earned a master’s degree ten years ago. This is a secret to no one, so the real consequence of this development is the devaluation of master’s degrees. Everyone’s degree is worth less than a degree was worth in the past. And the trend will probably continue.

Meanwhile, foreign language requirements are being dropped or watered down, theses are getting shorter, and grade inflation is rampant. In fact, the range of “acceptable” grades in graduate programs has shrunk to such a degree that grades have been rendered effectively meaningless. In many programs, to be given a “B” in coursework is to be politely informed that you are not fit for graduate school. Students no longer benefit from the feedback provided by an honest and effective grade scale, because professors feel compelled (often for compassionate reasons) to assign inflated grades. In a purely intellectual sense, there is less and less to be gained from graduate school in and of itself.

5. Graduate school is not what it used to be.

2010-09-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

Grad school is not what it was, because college is not what it was. Before World War II, about five percent of Americans had college degrees. College was not a common experience, but something enjoyed by a minority of people who had access to the privilege of a college education either by virtue of their social standing or because they were genuinely bright. Colleges drew from a small segment of society and could be quite demanding of their students. Latin and Greek were often required subjects. After the war, as American higher education was “democratized,” state-supported colleges sprung up by the hundreds. As more people graduated from college, more jobs required college educations, and hence the demand for higher education grew. Graduate schools had to produce more and more faculty members to staff the expanding centers of higher learning.

Standards, of course, had to conform to the demands placed on institutions of higher education. Latin and Greek were no longer requirements, and just as the genuinely bright or socially established were no longer the only ones with access to college, graduate programs had to grow to include people closer to the middle of the bell curve to meet the demand for new PhDs. The days of wildly expanding job opportunities in academe are long gone, but the large graduate programs are still around. Graduate students today may be above-average in many respects, but they do not represent, generally speaking, the intellectual elite, and modern graduate school requirements reflect this.

4. It takes a long time to finish.

2010-09-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

For reasons that are not entirely clear, it is taking longer and longer for students to earn graduate degrees (or undergraduate degrees, for that matter). The traditional model of a four-year bachelor degree, followed by two more years of study for a master’s degree, and finally an additional two years of study for a doctorate is long dead. The average time-to-degree for students in PhD programs is in many cases now in the neighborhood of ten years.

Ten years is a long time to remove yourself from the “real world.” As you are continuing to pursue higher education, your friends will be advancing in their careers, buying cars, taking out mortgages, and starting families while your quality of life will look a lot like it did when all of you were in college together. When you do finally earn your PhD, quite likely at some time in your thirties, you can start applying for jobs with starting salaries that your friends were earning when they were fresh out of college. The graphs that depict an increase in average earnings for increasing levels of education do not all take into account the years of income lost to earning those degrees. A decade is a substantial part of your life.

3. Your pedigree counts.

2010-09-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

Where you earn your degree matters. It isn’t fair. It probably shouldn’t be this way, but it is. You will find it very hard to find an American academic who does not openly champion egalitarian principles and a belief in equal opportunity, but academia is not an equal opportunity business. If you graduate from Harvard, you will have an easier time moving along the academic path into graduate programs—and into an academic job—than if you graduate from Cornell. If you graduate from Cornell, you will have an easier time than if you graduate from Notre Dame. If you graduate from Notre Dame, then you are better off than if you had graduated from UC Davis, etc. This applies whether you are earning a bachelor’s degree or any kind of advanced degree. The actual quality of graduate programs may or may not have anything to with the reputation of the university in question.

Pride gets in the way of seeing this clearly sometimes, but the academic hierarchy is absolute and unforgiving. The various magazine rankings are only a reflection of a reality that existed long before the rankings did. The consequences of this hierarchy are real. There are only so many jobs. By the time that the Harvard PhDs have found tenure-track jobs across the United States—largely at the state universities where most of the jobs are—there are only so many jobs left for the Yale PhDs, the Princeton PhDs, the Stanford PhDs, the Cornell PhDs, etc. It is a long way down the list before we get to the University of Kentucky PhDs or the Michigan State PhDs. Those schools at the lower end of the list are now hiring Ivy-League graduates for their faculties, because the Ivy League alone produces so many PhDs that the academic market is saturated. Where do you suppose all of the PhDs churned out by humanities programs at state universities end up? Some of them are working the night shift.

2. Your colleagues are your competitors.

2010-09-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

Your fellow graduate students—at least those in your discipline—are your competitors. They are your competitors for funding while you are a graduate student, because you will compete with them for teaching assistantships, research assistantships, fellowships (both internal university awards and external awards), travel grants, etc. When university budgets are tight, as they are now, all of these things are in shorter supply and higher demand than usual.

When you graduate, you will compete with these same people for very few jobs. The more closely your work resembles that of a given graduate student peer, the more likely that you will be in direct competition with that person. So, the very people with whom close association would theoretically most benefit your own research are those who are most likely to be competing with you for the same scarce resources. This does not encourage cooperation, morale, or friendship (although these can develop in spite of the circumstances).

1. The smart people are somewhere else.

2010-09-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

If you think that going to graduate school will allow you to spend your days in a community of the enlightened, consider the axiom that it is unwise to borrow money that is difficult to repay. To go into debt for a graduate degree in the humanities is to go into debt for a credential that, at best, will qualify you for a job with a relatively low starting salary in an extremely competitive job market. Meanwhile, you will have removed yourself from the job market to pursue this degree, so don’t forget to add up the years that you will have incurred debt when you could have been earning money. But surely people in graduate school would be too smart to finance their educations with debt…

According to FinAid.org: “The median additional debt [the debt that graduate students pile onto the debt that they acquired as undergraduates] is $25,000 for a Master's degree, $52,000 for a doctoral degree and $79,836 for a professional degree. A quarter of graduate and professional students borrow more than $42,898 for a Master's degree, more than $75,712 for a doctoral degree and more than $118,500 for a professional degree.” This is not intelligent behavior. The smart people are somewhere else.