This blog is an attempt to offer those considering graduate school some good reasons to do something else. Its focus is on the humanities and social sciences. The full list of 100 reasons will be posted in time. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Billionaire Warren Buffet attributes his wealth to “a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.” With savings and time, anyone can benefit from compound interest. Its effects are extraordinary. As investor JL Collins explains, “you’ll wind up rich” and “not just in money” if you simply spend less than you earn, invest the surplus, and avoid debt. Of course, money that you save when you are young has more time to grow than money that you save later. That is why it is so important to start saving money as soon as possible. Life is expensive. You may not be thinking about saving for retirement right now, but you should be, because retirement pensions have largely disappeared, and you will probably depend on your savings someday. Unfortunately, graduate students are much more likely to go into debt than to save money. This brings us back to Reason 1.
There is an adage: “He who understands compound interest will earn it; he who does not will pay it.” If you borrow money in the form of a student loan, you are obligated to pay back every penny that you borrowed plus interest. As a graduate student, even if you manage to stay out of debt, you are still not earning a proper salary at a time in your life when saving money could do you tremendous good. Worse, you are entering a profession for which there is a long period of apprenticeship (see Reason 4), in which jobs are scarce (see Reason 8), and in which highly trained people do extremely low-paying work (see Reason 14). Your wise friends outside of academe will have built up a nest egg before your academic career has even started (see Reason 63). Moreover, Social Security benefits are based on an average of 35 years of personal earnings, so a long spell in graduate school can eat into your future Social Security income. There is a perception that graduate school leads to a better life, but working, saving, and building wealth while you are young is a much more reliable route to success. Just remember to spend less than you earn.
One of the cruelest twists on the arduous path through graduate school comes at the very end. As soon as you finish a doctoral program that took perhaps a decade to complete (see Reason 4), your fresh degree begins to age… rapidly. Doctorates are like bread; they go stale. If you have a PhD that was awarded more than a couple of years ago, and you’re still looking for a tenure-track job, then you have what is called a “stale” degree. In fact, if you do not have a tenure-track job within a year of finishing your PhD, then your chances of ever getting one begin to drop precipitously. Knowledge can become obsolete quickly, but that is not the issue here. The problem stems from the overproduction of PhDs (see Reason 55). In an age when colleges receive hundreds of applications for one job opening, eliminating the stale PhDs from the pool of applicants is a simple way to cull the herd (see Reason 8). Hiring committees justify this by reasoning that if you haven’t been hired after multiple years on the job market, then there must be something wrong with you.
Completing your PhD can actually put you at a disadvantage on the job market, because the best window of opportunity for securing an assistant professorship is in the months before your dissertation defense. This was among the findings of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Academic JobTracker project, a study of 2,500 tenure-track job searches from the 2013-14 academic year. (Incidentally, there is probably no better incentive to complete a PhD than the deadline that comes with a job offer. See Reason 46.) The Chronicle study found that only 47 percent of the jobs in history, 35 percent of the jobs in communications/ media studies, and 27 percent of the jobs in composition/ rhetoric went to candidates with a PhD more than one year old. To discourage people with stale degrees from even bothering to apply, some job announcements now specify that applicants be “new” or “recent” PhD recipients. Keep in mind that working in a non-tenure track faculty position will not prevent your degree from going stale (see Reason 14). No matter how much professional experience you accumulate after completing your doctorate, your toughest competition for academic jobs will always come from the endless supply of fresh and relatively inexperienced PhDs and ABDs (see Reason 81) who enter the job market after you. In academe, experience can work against you.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 Xtranormalviral 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 improving, despite the fact that today community colleges hire for their faculties hyper-educated scholars. This is in large part the result of the extremely competitive academic job market (see Reason 8), which has squeezed 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 have appeared at a time when community colleges were hiring instructors with PhDs from Harvard and MIT.
Obviously, the rise in the quality (or at least in the quality and quantity of the credentials) of the permanent faculty members at colleges of all kinds is not the only trend affecting academe and its public image. Part of the growing disrespect for—and ambivalence toward—higher education is a result of the slackening of academic standards for students 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” (see Reason 14) 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.
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