98. Your family pays a price.

Few people choose to become parents while living the life of relative poverty that graduate school entails. If you go to graduate school, in fact, there is a good chance that you will never have children (see Reason 31). For women, the likelihood of childlessness increases with education. The U.S. Census reported that about 23 percent of women with a graduate or professional degree between the ages of 40 and 50 were childless in 2012. When it comes to securing tenure, women who do not have children enjoy a significant advantage over women who do (see Reason 71). Childless men are hardly uncommon in academe either. Graduate students who have children have described the difficulties of being a parent in graduate school. Likewise, it is difficult to be the child of a graduate student for many of the same reasons that it is difficult to be married to a graduate student (see Reason 58). The demands of graduate school are tough on parents and children alike, not to mention the debt, job insecurity, and relocations that are typically a part of the bargain. When the television personality Dr. Phil McGraw was 12 years old, his father was a full-time graduate student. The family made ends meet by delivering daily newspapers on a 52-mile paper route.

Whether you have children or not, you are still part of a family, and you probably like your family. Your family members like you, too. They may even be encouraging you to go to graduate school. If that is the case, they are doing so with the best intentions, but they likely do not realize that they are nudging you toward a career that will take you (and keep you) far away from them. It doesn’t matter where you live now or where you go to graduate school, because the very few jobs available to you at the end of the graduate-school pipeline will rarely be where your family is (see Reason 16). The enormous time commitment required to earn a PhD (see Reason 4) means that by the time you settle into a permanent faculty position—if you are lucky enough to find one—your parents will be reaching the age when they can most use your help. After years in school, you won’t have much in the way of financial resources to help them. In the worst-case scenario, you will still be dependent on their money (see Reason 12). And because you probably won’t live anywhere near your parents, your children, if you have any, will be far from their grandparents. There is no flexibility in the academic job market, so if you need to give up your job to be closer to people who need you, it will mean giving up your academic career. Contemplate your priorities carefully before you plunge into graduate school. Academic life can be as hard on the people you love as it is on you.

58. The one-body problem.

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?

48. The two-body problem.

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.

15. Marriage and family usually wait.

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.