95. Academics are unhappy.

You know that today's graduate students are unhappy when the Wall Street Journal can refer (and not entirely facetiously) to the world's best-positioned graduate students as Harvard's Les Miserables. If the discontent experienced in graduate school were only a temporary condition to be endured on a path to a better life, then it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of unhappiness among those who make it all the way through graduate school, and not just among the thousands of PhDs living on welfare (see Reason 83), or the thousands burdened by crushing debt, or the thousands working as barely paid adjuncts (see Reason 14). (The plight of adjuncts has turned so tragically absurd that it's now fodder for the Sunday comics.) There are also, of course, those who have suffered through the devastating humiliation of being denied tenure.

And then there are those for whom everything worked out. Yes, a great many academics who not only found tenure-track jobs (see Reason 8) but managed to survive the long road to tenure (see Reason 71) are surprisingly miserable. For some, their unhappiness began as soon as they were tenured; the Chronicle of Higher Education has covered the phenomenon of post-tenure depression on more than one occasion. For others, an unshakable sadness took hold much earlier in their careers. The culture of fear (see Reason 76) that pervades academe ensures that the deep unhappiness felt by so many academics is rarely discussed openly. More often than not, it takes an observer working outside of academe to bring the subject to light.

The miseries of academic life are on full display, however, in fictional depictions of the university. Over the decades, those depictions have grown darker. Edward Albee's 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" put academic torments on the stage. Countless novels put those torments on the page. As most academic fiction is written by academics, it is worth considering the source. In fiction, academics have found a way to describe their professional environment without jeopardizing their jobs. In Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that since the 1970s professors portrayed in academic novels have "become more and more grotesque figures, full of self-doubt and self-hatred." Why is this so? In his review of Showalter's book, Joseph Epstein offers an answer that outlines the trajectory followed by idealistic graduate students:

When young, the life ahead seems glorious. They imagine themselves inspiring the young, writing important books, living out their days in cultivated leisure. But something, inevitably, goes awry, something disagreeable turns up in the punch bowl. Usually by the time they turn 40, they discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive; the collegiality is seldom anywhere near what one hoped for it; there isn't any good use for the leisure. Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.

As it is, society permits some academics to live (and die) in genuine poverty, but the ranks of the miserable in academe extend far beyond the financially insecure. Academics are unhappy, and even students are beginning to notice.

92. There is a social cost.

As you grow older, you begin to appreciate the value and rarity of genuine friendships. Graduate school is hard on friendships, and so is the academic life that follows it (see Reasons 14 and 29). In many ways, graduate school is inherently alienating (see Reason 30), leaving you out-of-step with friends who follow traditional paths into adulthood (see Reason 12). It places tight constraints on your financial independence, as well as on your time (see Reason 62), and it often requires you to move far away from friends and family. On a more fundamental level, it requires you to devote yourself to things of no interest to anyone around you (see Reason 90), let alone to anyone in your wider social circles. The concerns that cause you tremendous stress in graduate school can appear hopelessly petty to those on the outside. Meanwhile, as you move deeper into a world very different from that of your friends, you will find it increasingly difficult to understand and relate to their experiences (see Reason 63). In addition to all of its other costs, graduate school can cost you your friends, and that is a higher price than you might think.

To make matters worse, academe does not provide an environment conducive to forming new friendships. Not only does it attract difficult personalities (see Reason 77) and pit them against each other (see Reason 2), but the academic job market routinely moves people to places where they have absolutely no personal connections to anyone (see Reason 16). Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one professor noted that in 20 years he had never heard a colleague introduce another professor as "my friend." After describing two friends who broke down in tears "just about every single week of their graduate school careers," a different professor wrote of a colleague "who claims that he hasn’t made a new 'friend' in the academy since 1997." As difficult as it can be for academics to develop personal relationships on campus, they often have surprisingly little opportunity to form friendships outside of their college or university. The Chronicle has covered the fear of "social death" experienced by faculty members contemplating retirement: "One still highly productive faculty member well north of 70 summed up the struggle well when he said, 'It’s not about the money. I just don’t know what I’d do in the morning. I don’t have any hobbies and I don’t have any friends who aren’t here. This is really all I have. Does that make me pitiful?'"

90. Virtually no one cares about what you are doing.

In graduate school, you often feel alone because you often are alone, but also because no one cares about what you're doing. You spend vast amounts of time and effort writing things that no one wants to read (see Reason 89), and no one wants to hear you talk about them either. Your mother isn't interested in your research. Your friends aren't interested. Your fellow graduate students, consumed by their own work, are most definitely not interested. Even your adviser may not be interested in what you're doing (see Reason 45). The people with a seemingly insatiable interest in your progress through graduate school—the people who ask you all those awkward questions—do not care about the projects that devour your thought and energy.

Not surprisingly, graduate students commonly suffer from intense loneliness and isolation, a reality made painfully clear by the search-engine queries that direct readers to 100 Reasons. The ritualized atmosphere of an academic conference (see Reason 74) is one of the few environments in which people pretend, for a few minutes at least, to be mildly interested in each other's research. In the event that people are interested in your work, their interest is likely hostile; that is, your work is similar to theirs, so they view you as a competitor (see Reason 2). Apart from conferences, you can go through life as a graduate student without ever meeting anyone who shows a genuine interest in what you're doing, which, over time, can make you begin to question your own interest in the rhetoric of masculinity in medieval French poetry, in the idiosyncrasies of Portuguese urban planning, or in the application of game theory to the economic behavior of soybean farmers. This helps explain why so many people find dissertations so excruciatingly hard to finish (see Reason 60) and why graduate-school attrition rates are so high (see Reason 46). It's not easy to care about your work when no one else does.

86. It is a state of being.

Graduate school is not school in any sense that you have experienced school before (see Reason 47). Nor is it a job, although a job is often part of the bargain (see Reason 7). Graduate school is a way of life. It is all encompassing. From the moment that you begin your existence as a graduate student, you have to worry about your courses, your labor obligations, your faculty committee, your reading lists, your comprehensive exams, and your thesis or dissertation. You have to worry about conferences, publications, and positioning yourself for the perilous job market waiting for you in the distance. You have to worry about competition (see Reason 2). And, more likely than not, you have to worry about money (see Reason 17). You don’t leave any of these worries on campus at the end of the day. They follow you home every evening, they tag along with you on your trips to the grocery store, and they loom at the back of your mind at the beach and at Thanksgiving dinner (see Reason 62). When you enlist in graduate school, you enter a new state of being.

Ironically, this totally engrossing and exhausting experience does not count for much in the world beyond academe. (For far too many people, it does not count for much within academe either.) Americans tend to define themselves by their careers, but graduate students don’t have careers. In the eyes of others, graduate students are defined by what they’re not. Your unkind relatives and acquaintances will call you a “professional” student to remind you that you don’t have a profession. Your work and your worries are every bit as real as those of anyone else, but somehow your “in-between” status renders you a non-entity (see Reason 30). While graduate school is consuming your life, others will regard you as if you were trapped in a state of suspension. Of course, you look forward to a career—a career in academe. But graduate school can only offer the hope of an academic career. It’s an extraordinarily costly roll of the dice. For about half of those in PhD programs, it does not end well (see Reason 46).

69. It is lonely.

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.

54. “What do you do for a living?”

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.

51. You are surrounded by undergraduates.

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.

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.

43. Attitudes about graduate school are changing.

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.

37. The university does not exist for your sake.

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?”

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.

30. You occupy a strange place in the world.

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.

24. “You are still in school?”

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.