97. It steals your future.

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.

94. It warps your expectations.

Graduate students develop unreasonable expectations, but over the course of a long spell in graduate school those expectations swing from one unreasonable extreme to another. They go from expecting far too much to expecting (and accepting) far too little. Not everyone enters graduate school with the intention of becoming a professor, but after a while it becomes clear that an academic career is virtually the only career for which graduate school prepares anyone (see Reason 29). Once that realization sets in, graduate students begin to imagine a future in which they have jobs like those of their advisers and the other professors who surround them every day. They can hold on to this expectation for years. It seems perfectly reasonable, perhaps even modest, but it is actually quite unrealistic. You could argue that it is wildly unrealistic. As Professor Emily Toth (aka Ms. Mentor) patiently explains to a confident graduate student looking for affirmation: "No matter how talented and accomplished you are, you probably will not get a tenure-track academic job. Ever."

Eventually, reality dawns on even the most optimistic graduate students. They see what happens to others on the academic job market, and then they start to experience it themselves (see Reason 55). This is the point at which their hopefulness turns to desperation, and their expectations sink to such depths that they––by the tens of thousands––accept college teaching jobs for which they receive ridiculously little compensation. Graduate school has funneled them into adjuncthood (see Reason 14), and they quickly learn to expect extremely low wages in return for their labor. Adjuncts are routinely paid less to teach a class than their students pay to take it. In fact, the income of a part-time adjunct will often be less than half of a teaching assistant's stipend (see Reason 53). You can see just how meager adjunct earnings are by exploring the Chronicle Data website. Needless to say, this kind of academic employment comes without job security, insurance, or retirement benefits. Why are people, including thousands of people with doctorates, willing to subject themselves to this? Because they don't know what else to do. After years of living in a dream, they are desperate to stay in the academic game (see Reason 83).

88. You are not paid for what you write.

You could argue that professors are paid to write, because they’re required to produce publications as a condition of their employment. But that is really only true of people with tenure-track positions, and their annual salaries don’t rise or fall based on the quality or quantity of their writing (though whether they receive tenure is another matter). Adjunct professors and others, writing furiously in the hope of publishing enough to be worthy of a tenure-track job, receive no compensation whatsoever for their labors at the keyboard. Likewise, aside from the lucky few who have fellowships (see Reason 18), graduate students are not paid for the hours, months, and years that they spend writing. The academic journals that weigh down the shelves of university libraries publish a vast quantity of scholarly prose every year, but they don’t pay their authors a penny. Only a tiny fraction of academic writers—including professors guilty of the gauche practice of making their own books required reading—earn any significant income from the sale of academic books (see Reason 34).

It has never been easy to make money by writing, but you might ask yourself if writing for nothing is the best use of your time. Is what you write so important to you (see Reason 35) that you’re willing to produce it for free? The great Samuel Johnson famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” In the middle of the eighteenth century, he wrote (among much else) all 42,000 entries in the Dictionary of the English Language. Dr. Johnson knew that writing was work. And while it can be rewarding in its own way, academic writing is an especially arduous kind of work (see Reason 28). It exacts a price. In an essay on his personal experiences under the Guardian headline “Writing is bad for you,” scholar Rick Gekoski observed that “the more I write, the worse I become.” In graduate school, you will likely pay for the privilege of writing a thesis or dissertation (see Reason 59), and it will cost you a hefty chunk of your life as well. If you clear all of the hurdles of graduate school, there is a chance that your academic writing will help you win and keep an academic job, but you are unlikely to earn anything from your writing directly. Incidentally, Samuel Johnson may be the most famous “Dr.” never to have gone to graduate school; his doctorates were honorary, and no one seems to mind.

87. The financial rewards are decreasing.

No one working in academe will be surprised to learn that among the most common search-engine queries bringing readers to this blog are queries concerning money (see What Brought You Here). When the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labor, workers' wages tend to fall. This is the situation in academe. There are far too many PhDs produced every year for the academic job market to absorb them all (see Reason 55), and universities fill most of their teaching positions with poorly paid graduate students and adjuncts (see Reason 14). While the "glut" of PhDs seems to be slowly attracting more and more attention, it is in fact nothing new. The problem has existed for decades. Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the situation is getting worse. In January 2010, under the heading "Another Reason to Just Say No to a Ph.D.," Gabriela Montell posted an informative graph on the Chronicle of Higher Education hiring blog. It was the work of economist Michael Mandel, who used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to determine that the "real earnings for full-time workers with a doctoral degree" had dropped 10% between 1999 and 2008. Looking at these numbers, Mandel concluded, "there's no sense of a PhD being a desirable degree."

This is information that the public rarely sees. Note that Mandel found a 10% drop in the earnings of people with doctorates who were working (and working full-time). A growing number of people with PhDs cannot find anything but part-time work. The American Association of University Professors reports that part-time faculty members represent more than half of all faculty members in the United States. In June 2012, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce published a study [PDF] showing that more than 30% of part-time faculty members have doctoral degrees. (The Chronicle highlighted the authors' characterization of the study as a "dismal" portrayal of the life of a part-time professor.) And don't forget the thousands of Americans with doctorates who depend on food stamps to feed themselves (see Reason 83). Looking only at the salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors (who represent a shrinking share of the academic workforce) can leave you with a false impression of the economic advantages of having a PhD. With so many PhDs on the job market (and more arriving every year), there is little reason for universities or other employers to pay a premium to hire them. In monetary terms, the value of a PhD is steadily declining.

85. It is not a ticket to the upper middle class.

Even among the college-educated, there is a tendency to envision the life of a professor as one that includes tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, a book-lined office in an ivy-covered building, and a house in an upscale neighborhood with a fashionable European car in the driveway. The image is understandable, given how hopelessly entwined the academic world has become with relentless social-class striving. After all, education is regarded as a means to better oneself, and “higher” education represents the top rungs on that ladder of universal self-improvement. Certain schools, of course, are seen as better than others (see Reason 3). Those within the academic establishment are obsessed with status, as are those on the outside looking in. Consider the popularity of college rankings.

Institutions, as well as individuals, have an eye toward upward mobility, which accounts for yet another case of academic terminology-inflation (see Reasons 35 and 38): so many colleges have rushed to reclassify themselves as “universities” that there are now community colleges with names like the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha. It is a fad driven by the propensity of students, faculty, and administrators alike to see their institution’s prestige as a reflection of their personal identities. Ironically, the mass movement is leaving the name “college” to venerable and genuinely prestigious institutions like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, and Dartmouth—a college with its own medical school.

Academics, of course, have traditionally done little to dissuade anyone from believing that they occupy a privileged social position (see Reason 25). Describing the “democratization of knowledge” that occurred in the mid-twentieth century, author Daniel Flynn argues that “blue-collar intellectuals proved as unsettling to the intellectual elite as the nouveau riche had been to old money.” The term “middlebrow,” he explains, emerged as “a slur” in a new “vocabulary to demarcate intellectual class.” Increasingly, academics have had to think in terms of “intellectual” classes when contemplating their vaunted status, because only a tiny fraction of them live the professor’s life as people like to portray it. The British literary scholar Terry Eagleton recently observed: “Most people I know in academia want to get out… everywhere I go, from Peru to Australia, people are very unhappy in what perhaps were once, you know, ‘the best days of one’s life.’”

Today, the tweed jackets are few and far between. Law professor Erik Jensen laments that professors are developing a new reputation for constituting “the worst-dressed middle-class occupational group in America.” This is, to some extent, the result of a change in attitude on the part of faculty members (see Reason 13). But the lengthening number of years that academics must spend in graduate school (and as adjuncts) in relative poverty and debt do not lend themselves to developing a stylish wardrobe, owning a house in a desirable zip code, or driving a BMW. At many institutions, professors occupy offices that are little better than those of their teaching assistants (see Reason 42). Many commute long distances because they can never hope to afford to live in the leafy neighborhoods near campus. Nonetheless, they are among the extremely fortunate who have jobs despite the terrible academic job market, the severity of which is now spreading rapidly from the humanities and social sciences to the hard sciences. Meanwhile, thousands of PhDs on welfare (see Reason 83) have yet to join the lower middle class.

A short time in graduate school will likely cure you of any false ideas that you may have about modern academic life, but false ideas are often what drive people to graduate school in the first place.

75. You can make more money as a schoolteacher.

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 Education 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 might 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...

67. There is a star system.

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.

63. Your friends pass you by.

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?

59. You pay for nothing.

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?

 

 

55. There are too many PhDs.

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).

53. Teaching assistantships.

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.

49. There are few tangible rewards.

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.

 

27. The academic bubble may burst.

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.

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.

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.

22. The liberal arts do not attract investment.

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 this have to do with the liberal arts? Apart from the sciences, 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 non-science 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 math or philosophy or French professors who 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 indicative of the fact that many of the traditional liberal arts are increasingly out of place in the modern research university.

19. These are the best years of your life.

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.

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.

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.

7. Labor demands are increasing.

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.