Are you kidding?! As a recent Ph.D., with a good share of recently-minted Ph.D. friends, I hardly think this is the case. We all have our horror stories of difficult committee members, or the need to work which dramatically lengthens the time in school.

“The implication is that graduate study in English and History is primarily about training and credentialing for a career, with the implicit judgment that it’s silly to imagine that people need nine years to jump through the requisite hoops or learn the appropriate skills.”

Indeed. Unless you belong to an aristocratic class you need a job. No matter how much you enjoy your field and the pursuit of intellectual pleasure you still need to eat and to feed your family. I am one of the lucky few who was able to find a tt position. As a new Professor I really think long and hard before recommending that any of my students pursue graduate degrees in the humanities . . . at least until the Boomers retire!

It’s a good idea to have some idea what the best case and worse case scenarios are before you make a decision that involves spending 6-8 years in rigorous work for low pay leading to potentially more years of low pay and a vagabond like existence moving from one place to another hoping to land that coveted tenure track position. If you know the score and are convinced that it is the best path for you, more power to you. If you don’t think about the realities that you could face and feel like you are owed something more…well, I guess a nice way to say it is less power to you.

I approve greatly of the intrinsic value of humanities. (CS Lewis again: “On Learning In Wartime.”) It is a foundation of the advance of knowledge in general. The difficulty of finding employment is only one factor, not the whole, in deciding whether wishes to devote oneself to a subject.

That said, I do find it tiring when relatives moan about jobs drying up when they “have all this education,” clearly believing they are entitled to some handsome salary because of it. And worse, resenting others who make more.

I believe it was into the 20th century that Oxbridge dons were *required* to be unmarried.

Do we want a career, prestige, or do we really just want an education for its own sake?

1. Don’t go into debt for a grad degree in the Humanities (I would advise against it for any degree if at all possible)
2. The desired studies have to be balanced with everything else in life. If I were single and without children, my income threshold would be very different and I would be much more likely to be happy patching together an income from the adjunct teaching world and part-time barista type jobs. There is a reason that for much of the early history of universities, teaching was very much a near-monastic type existence in the sense that it pretty much precluded a wife (yes, the teaching profession was all male back then) and children and one had to be devoted completely to it. If one is dead-set on the tenure-track professor career path, just know that it will likely involve a long-time of low-income and if marriage and family is also part of ones plans, an understanding spouse is an absolute must (think of military life or the life of pastoral ministry in a system that involves episcopal appointment).

In my situation, I am married with three children and my family is much more important to me than some idealized career goal. And frankly, I was a good student, but not so outstanding that the world of professional theology couldn’t do just fine without me. I can scratch that itch by being a lifelong learner and exercising my teaching gift where opportunities arise.

But otherwise, if you’re incurring a moral obligation to pay the debt, you’ve a responsibility to exercise reasonable foresight about whether you’re gong to be able to pay it — and what your spouse and kids will think about living with the debt, someday.

I tell people thinking about doctoral work the same thing as you, that it has to have intrinsic value. But I add one other element, which is that they shouldn’t take on debt to do it, both because there are no jobs and even the jobs that are available don’t really pay well enough (in the humanities) to make substantial debt worth it. And if they are married, I tell them that their spouse has to want it for them as much as they do.

The ethical question, it seems to me, is whether there is a certain amount of false advertising taking place and whether the Ph.D. is the proper degree for this. When we apply to doctoral programs we often have to explain how we want to contribute to the academic life of the institution or how we see our academic career progressing. The idea, whether implicit or explicit, is that a Ph.D. is supposed to prepare you for an academic career. If it is not or if the prospects for an academic career are marginal, then we need to be more honest about it. And how much of the benefits of doctoral work could be conveyed without the requirements of a dissertation and without exploiting graduate students for cheap teaching labor? Just a couple of years of extra coursework may be sufficient to give people the additional training they need that allows them to be lifelong learners at a high level, while minimizing their loss of income.