This was a blog written by an anonymous grad student who obviously got hired in 2017-2018, so the blog never gives us the last two "reasons" to not attend Graduate School. The list of "reasons":
1. The smart people are somewhere else.
2. Your colleagues are your competitors.
3. Your pedigree counts.
4. It takes a long time to finish.
5. Graduate school is not what it used to be.
6. Intellectual expectations are falling.
7. Labor demands are increasing.
8. There are very few jobs.
9. It is very, very hard.
10. There is a psychological cost.
11. There is a psychological cost for quitting.
12. Adulthood waits.
13. Respect for the academic profession is declining.
14. Adjuncthood awaits.
15. Marriage and family usually wait.
16. Where you live will be chosen for you.
17. Funding is fleeting.
18. Fellowships are few and far between.
19. These are the best years of your life.
20. Few ideas are exchanged.
21. Graduate seminars can be unbearable.
22. The liberal arts do not attract investment.
23. There is a pecking order.
24. “You are still in school?”
25. Academe is built on pride.
26. Some graduate students are more equal than others.
27. The academic bubble may burst.
28. Writing is hard.
29. You may not start with plans to be a professor, but...
30. You occupy a strange place in the world.
31. There are biological consequences.
32. The university is an economic engine.
33. There is too much academic publishing.
34. There is too little academic publishing.
35. Mumbo-jumbo abounds.
36. “So what are you going to do with that?”
37. The university does not exist for your sake.
38. The tyranny of the CV.
39. You are asked to do the impossible.
40. Faddishness prevails.
41. Teaching is your first priority.
42. Your workspace reflects your status.
43. Attitudes about graduate school are changing.
44. Advisers can be tyrants.
45. Nice advisers can be worse.
46. You may not finish.
47. It requires tremendous self-discipline.
48. The two-body problem.
49. There are few tangible rewards.
50. You are surrounded by graduate students.
51. You are surrounded by undergraduates.
52. Your adviser’s pedigree counts.
53. Teaching assistantships.
54. “What do you do for a living?”
55. There are too many PhDs.
56. Grading is miserable.
57. Rejection is routine.
58. The one-body problem.
59. You pay for nothing.
60. The tyranny of the dissertation.
61. Unstructured time.
62. You have no free time.
63. Your friends pass you by.
64. Smugness.
65. Teaching is less and less rewarding.
66. “Why are you studying that?”
67. There is a star system.
68. It is stressful.
69. It is lonely.
70. It is unforgiving.
71. The tenure track is brutal.
72. The humanities and social sciences are in trouble.
73. Perceptions trump reality.
74. Academic conferences.
75. You can make more money as a schoolteacher.
76. There is a culture of fear.
77. It attracts the socially inept.
78. It takes a toll on your health.
79. The tyranny of procrastination.
80. “When will you finish?”
81. Comprehensive exams.
82. Teaching is moving online.
83. It narrows your options.
84. The politics are vicious.
85. It is not a ticket to the upper middle class.
86. It is a state of being.
87. The financial rewards are decreasing.
88. You are not paid for what you write.
89. Virtually no one reads what you write.
90. Virtually no one cares about what you are doing.
91. Downward mobility is the norm.
92. There is a social cost.
93. There is no getting ahead.
94. It warps your expectations.
95. Academics are unhappy.
96. Degrees go stale.
97. It steals your future.
98. Your family pays a price.
Also:
For your own sake, consider the 100 Reasons before committing yourself to graduate school. If there is no hope of convincing you not to go, here are three bits of advice:
1. Stay out of debt.
If you go to professional school (medical school, law school, business school, a school of education, etc.), you typically have to cover tuition and other expenses yourself. Students in professional school often have no option but to take out large student loans to get them through their degree programs. This makes sense only if you will graduate with a degree that will lead to a job with a salary high enough to make paying back your debt possible. For medical school graduates, this may not be a problem. For indebted law school graduates, the scarcity of jobs in the legal profession has become a crisis.
Graduate school, however, is different. In graduate school, you are not (ostensibly) being trained for a “practical” trade, but are instead becoming a scholar, undertaking the study of an “academic” subject for its own sake. This, of course, is nonsense, but it is the premise behind the idea that there should be generous financial support for graduate students (as opposed to professional students). Departments “fund” graduate students by giving them either fellowships (scholarships) or assistantships (jobs). You should NOT begin a graduate program if you have not been offered funding.
Some will say that being offered admission to a graduate program without funding is like being given a polite rejection, but universities will be happy to collect tuition from you if you are willing to pay it. No graduate program is worth the cost of tuition, especially if it requires you to go into debt. In reality, graduate school is professional training. It is training for a career in academe, and the academic job market is terrible (see Reason 55). Academic jobs are extremely hard to obtain and do not pay well, so if you go into debt for a graduate degree you are putting yourself at risk of being unable to repay that debt. Student-loan debt cannot even be discharged in bankruptcy.
2. Go to a prestigious school.
Where you go to graduate school matters. It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this point. As everyone knows, there is a hierarchy of universities, but no one takes this hierarchy more seriously than academics (see Reason 3). There are so few jobs in academe that the competition for virtually every open position is a national (and often international) competition. Those with the best chance of securing employment are the products of the nationally (and internationally) prestigious institutions. There are very few genuinely prestigious universities, and almost all of them are private. They are the Ivies and the quasi-Ivies like Stanford and MIT. The number of genuinely prestigious public universities in the United States can be counted on one hand, probably on three fingers, and quite possibly on one.
The large, perfectly respectable public university in your area is almost certainly not one of them, even if it offers an enormous array of graduate programs with extremely competitive admission standards. The problem is that there are hundreds of universities just like it all over the country, together producing tens of thousands of graduate degrees every year. If you happen to earn your PhD at such a place, you will be at a severe disadvantage on the job market, where you will be pitted against people with degrees from the genuinely prestigious universities.
Be wary of characterizations of “prestigious departments” or “top programs” at universities that are not themselves highly prestigious institutions, and bear in mind that the prestige of an institution may have no relation to the quality of education that it provides its students. As far as landing an academic job is concerned, the prestige of your degree is more important than anything you learned in the process of obtaining it. If you are not admitted to a graduate program at a highly prestigious university, then you have all the more reason to ask yourself if a massive life investment in graduate school is worth it.
3. Finish as quickly as possible.
This is by far the hardest piece of advice to follow. Circumstances tend to conspire to turn what is already designed to be a long, slow slog into an even lengthier ordeal. Everything from unreliable funding to onerous teaching assistantships can slow down your progress through graduate school. But every year that you spend in graduate school is a year of opportunity costs. It is precious time in which you’re not earning a salary, you’re not establishing seniority in a career, and you’re not exploring opportunities in fields with better job prospects than academe.
Remember that you can quit graduate school if you don’t like it, but this is far easier said than done (see Reason 11) and it is better to quit after one year than after five or six. Even if you do finish a PhD, there is no guarantee that you will ever find an academic position for which your degree is a requirement. Minimizing your time in graduate school limits your opportunity costs, as well as your exposure to an environment that can be stressful, competitive, and deeply discouraging (see Reason 50).
There is no simple way to ensure a quick path through graduate school, but following the advice in Point 2 will help. The most prestigious schools tend to offer the most generous funding packages, which can serve to relieve you of the debilitating financial worries that complicate the typical graduate-school experience. You would also be wise to choose an adviser who keeps you strictly accountable (see Reason 45) and to start working on your dissertation long before you take your comprehensive exams. You will find it very hard to prioritize your own research and writing when you have job obligations involving students and faculty, but if you do not prioritize your own academic work, graduate school can drag on for many years.
100 Reasons is intended to serve as a resource for the thousands of people who, every year, contemplate going to graduate school but have not yet taken the fateful plunge into a graduate program. It exists for their sake. But nearly 3,500 comments (as of Reason 86) have made it obvious that a substantial share of the readers of this blog are themselves current or former graduate students. Their comments have helped fulfill the purpose of the blog by providing a great deal of insight into the nature of graduate school and (sometimes unwittingly) the nature of graduate students.
What readers do not see are the search queries that drive much of the traffic to the blog. These, too, are revealing of the experiences and struggles that characterize graduate school. If you are a current graduate student experiencing loneliness, stress, or depression, then you can take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. James Mulvey discovered that someone had found his helpful website using the search query "Ph.D. in English useless destroyed my life." Some of the queries that have brought Internet users to 100 Reasons are just as despairing.
What follows is a tiny sample (about 250 examples) of the tens of thousands of search-engine queries that have brought readers to the blog over the course of its life. When considered as a whole, a number of themes emerge from these individual glimpses of graduate-student and academic life. The most common query in each broad category below is marked with an asterisk (*).
One of the most striking themes is loneliness (see Reason 69):
bad social life in grad school
feeling alone in grad school
feeling lonely in grad school
grad school loneliness
grad school is lonely
grad school lonely
grad student lonely
"graduate school" loneliness
graduate school is lonely
graduate school lonely
graduate school misery isolation loneliness
how to deal with the loneliness of academia
i am very socially isolated, and just finished a phd. what should i do?
i can't handle the social isolation of grad school
i'm a lonely graduate student
lack of social life grad school
loneliness in graduate school
loneliness phd
lonely and sad in grad school
lonely and depressed grad school
lonely at grad school
lonely depression grad school
lonely grad school
lonely grad student*
lonely graduate school
lonely graduate student
lonely graduate students
lonely in grad school
lonely in graduate school
lonely phd student
no friends in grad school
no social life grad school
phd loneliness
sad phd program isolated
social alientaion in grad school
social interaction decline while in grad school
why is grad school such a lonely and isolating experience
Another common theme is money. Graduate students tend to have very little income (see Reason 12), and because of the nature of the academic job market (see Reason 55), money problems can persist for people long after they have completed PhDs.
The words poor and poverty come up especially frequently:
academic poverty grad school
adjunct+salary+poverty
are all grad students poor
dating a poor grad student
decided do not want to be poor phd student
going to graduate school poor and with a family
grad school poor all of the time
how to be a poor graduate student
husband a poor phd
i will be so poor after grad school
life of poor grad student
poor grad school student
poor grad student
poor graduate student*
poor graduate student blog
poor with a masters degree blogs
sad grad student poor
the hard life of poor grad students
Other searches involving money reveal a variety of concerns:
academia no money
am i crazy to get my masters with no money?
being a professor for the money
can a graduate teaching assistant get food stamps
can i go to grad school with no money and job
can i work as an english professor and make good money
dating as a grad student money
do high school or college teachers make more money
do people with phds make more money [many variations of this question]
do universities take your money for phd and fail you in quals
do you lose money if you drop out of graduate school
dropping out of master program money
fear of graduate school beacause i need money now
full time graduate student money married children
grad student not enough money pay rent
graduate student money problems
how can a college professor earn more money
how much money should you put into graduate school at age 43
i know money shouldn't matter, but should i do a phd
no money in academia
phd slave quit no funding
phds who actually make money
quitting grad school while owing money
what else can adjuncts do for money
why do some professors make so much and some make so little
why is there no money in academia
why smart people go to graduate school and make so little money
Not surprisingly, stress is an extremely common theme (see Reason 68):
constantly stressed in grad school
deliberate stress of grad school
grad school incredibly stressed
grad school is stressful
grad school is too stressful
grad school stress
grad school stress blog
grad school stressful
grad school stress unhealthy
graduate school is stressful
graduate school is too stressful
graduate school preparation is stressful
graduate school stress*
graduate student stress
is academic life less stressful after grad school
phd fail stressful
phd stressful
social anxiety dropout phd
stress from graduate school
stress grad school
stress in graduate school
stressed about graduate school
stressful taship
why is graduate school so stressful
And then there are unhappiness, misery, and depression (see Reason 50):
i'm a grad student and i'm completely unhappy
grad school unhappy
graduate student unhappy worthless
phd unhappy
unhappy doctoral student
unhappy grad student
unhappy graduate student
unhappy in graduate school
unhappy in phd program
unhappy phd
unhappy phd student*
why are graduate students unhappy
all but dissertation miserable should i finish
doing a phd is miserable
grad school miserable
grad school misery
graduate school miserable
miserable in grad school
miserable phd program
phd life humanities misery
phd miserable
phd misery
phd program supposed to be miserable
all but dissertation depressed
depressed adjunct academic career going nowhere
depressed grad school can't focus
depression graduate school never finish
grad school depressed
grad school giving me depression
help grad school depression loneliness
lonely bored depressed grad school
phd unemployment loneliness depression
undergrad to grad school depression
what should parents do when their graduate student has been diagnosed with depression
Search queries also reveal some very low opinions of graduate students and academics (see Reason 43), many of which appear to be expressed by graduate students and academics themselves.
People seem especially unimpressed by their social skills (see Reason 77):
academic socially inept
academics no social skills
academics ugly socially inept
are phd students weird people
don't hire graduate students socially inadequate
grad students are weird*
graduate school for weird people
graduate students nothing to offer social
lack of social skills phd students
ph.d+socially inept
phd students lose social skills
"weird people" "grad school"
what grad school does to people
what makes phd students weird
when did grad school make me antisocial
why are academics socially awkward
why are graduate students the worst people
why do weird people go into academia
why educated people with phd are weird
why graduate student friendships are so weird
why graduate students are weird
why do mit grads have such poor social skills
The above category could include many queries featuring the word hate:
does anyone else hate grad school?
got tenure, but hate the people
got tenure, hate colleagues
grad school has made me hate academia
grad school made me hate literature
grad students when you hate your employed friends
how to keep going in grad school when you hate it
how to work with graduate student colleagues you hate
i hate being around undergrads
i hate being in grad school
i hate everyone in grad school
i hate grad school*
i hate grad school classmates
i hate graduate school what do i do?
i hate my ma and can't face the dissertation
i just started grad school and i hate it
i started grad school and i hate it
if i quit a phd program will everyone hate me
Grad students particularly hate being teaching assistants (see Reason 53):
abuse of graduate teaching assistants
bad experience as a graduate teaching assistant
being a teaching assistant is difficult
being a teaching assistant is hard
being a teaching assistant is hard work
being a teaching assistant is s**t
being a teaching assistant s**ks
bratty students teaching assistant
graduate school teaching assistantships abusive
graduate teaching assistant stress
graduate teaching assistant stress frustration anxiety evaluations pressure
hate being a graduate teaching assistant
hate being a teaching assistant*
hate being a university teaching assistant
im a teaching assistant i want to be beyond this
i hate being a teaching assistant
i hate being a ta
i hate my assistantship
i hate my ta job
i hate teaching undergrads
i hated being the teaching assistant
i ta for an a*****e professor
sick of being teaching assistant
started a job as a teaching assistant and i hate it
teacher assistants treated poorly
teaching assistant graduate worst job
40-hour week taship
And teaching assistants seem to be strongly disliked:
bad graduate teaching assistant
bad teaching assistant
hate my university teaching assistant
hate teaching assistants
horrible graduate ta's
i despise teaching assistants
i hate teaching assistants*
i hate grad student teachers
i hate university graduate students ta's teaching class
i hate when graduate assistants grade papers
my teaching assistant is a jerk
teaching assistant annoying
teaching assistants jerks
There is also much hatred for grading (see Reason 56):
grading papers makes me depressed
hate correcting papers
hate grading essays
hate grading papers
hate reading grad student papers
how to not hate marking papers
i am a professor and i hate correcting papers
i hate grading essays
i hate grading papers*
i hate grading papers!
i hate grading papers so much
i hate grading so much
i hate reading papers grad school
jobs for professors who hate grading
ta "hate grading"
teaching assistant hate grading
teaching assistant hate grading papers
things i hate about grading papers
Sadness, anger, and bitterness are evident in hundreds of search queries, sometimes in connection with concrete disappointments such as failing comprehensive exams (see Reason 81) or being denied tenure. The consequences of the latter can be particularly grievous (see Reason 71):
"academic job market" blackballed failure
anyone else get screwed over by going to grad school?
"denied tenure" "career death"
denied tenure no job
denied tenure now what
failed academic career tenure
failing comps
failed qualifying exam
"grad school" or "graduate school", feel cheated
grad school s**ks *
graduate school s**ks
how to say goodbye to a colleague denied tenure
i am a useless grad student
i failed my comprehensive exam
met all requirements denied tenure
my stupid decision to go to grad school
phd tenure track failure change career
those who failed phd qualifiers and still become successful in life
why grad school s**ks
Most troubling are the queries concerning suicide:
failure "academic job market" depression suicide
grad student burnout suicide
grad student lonely suicide
In a comment, a reader pointed out that there is a 24-hour National Graduate Student Crisis Line (1-800-GRAD-HLP or 1-800-472-3457), provided by a non-profit organization, that is available to graduate students in the United States.
If you're a graduate student or academic, and you find yourself in the depths of despair, try to remember that the world is much bigger than academe. The intense and often absurd pressures of academic life are made worse by losing sight of all that lies beyond it. There is more to life than grad school and the tenure-track, but (as you can see) the concomitant frustrations and disappointments weigh heavily on a great many people. You should know that before you go to graduate school.
I hope the site survives if just for all the comments, most of which are Anonymous and written by angry ex-grad students in STEM fields who were used and abused in GS and then the post-doctorate until they ran away "to industry." It's fascinating stuff. The whole site is a great window into the Crash Years after 2008.
