5. Graduate school is not what it used to be.

Grad school is not what it was, because college is not what it was. Before World War II, about five percent of Americans had college degrees. College was not a common experience, but something enjoyed by a minority of people who had access to the privilege of a college education either by virtue of their social standing or because they were genuinely bright. Colleges drew from a small segment of society and could be quite demanding of their students. Latin and Greek were often required subjects. After the war, as American higher education was “democratized,” state-supported colleges sprung up by the hundreds. As more people graduated from college, more jobs required college educations, and hence the demand for higher education grew. Graduate schools had to produce more and more faculty members to staff the expanding centers of higher learning.

Standards, of course, had to conform to the demands placed on institutions of higher education. Latin and Greek were no longer requirements, and just as the genuinely bright or socially established were no longer the only ones with access to college, graduate programs had to grow to include people closer to the middle of the bell curve to meet the demand for new PhDs. The days of wildly expanding job opportunities in academe are long gone, but the large graduate programs are still around. Graduate students today may be above-average in many respects, but they do not represent, generally speaking, the intellectual elite, and modern graduate school requirements reflect this.

4. It takes a long time to finish.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, it is taking longer and longer for students to earn graduate degrees (or undergraduate degrees, for that matter). The traditional model of a four-year bachelor degree, followed by two more years of study for a master’s degree, and finally an additional two years of study for a doctorate is long dead. The average time-to-degree for students in PhD programs is in many cases now in the neighborhood of ten years.

Ten years is a long time to remove yourself from the “real world.” As you are continuing to pursue higher education, your friends will be advancing in their careers, buying cars, taking out mortgages, and starting families while your quality of life will look a lot like it did when all of you were in college together. When you do finally earn your PhD, quite likely at some time in your thirties, you can start applying for jobs with starting salaries that your friends were earning when they were fresh out of college. The graphs that depict an increase in average earnings for increasing levels of education do not all take into account the years of income lost to earning those degrees. A decade is a substantial part of your life.

3. Your pedigree counts.

Where you earn your degree matters. It isn’t fair. It probably shouldn’t be this way, but it is. You will find it very hard to find an American academic who does not openly champion egalitarian principles and a belief in equal opportunity, but academia is not an equal opportunity business. If you graduate from Harvard, you will have an easier time moving along the academic path into graduate programs—and into an academic job—than if you graduate from Cornell. If you graduate from Cornell, you will have an easier time than if you graduate from Notre Dame. If you graduate from Notre Dame, then you are better off than if you had graduated from UC Davis, etc. This applies whether you are earning a bachelor’s degree or any kind of advanced degree. The actual quality of graduate programs may or may not have anything to with the reputation of the university in question.

Pride gets in the way of seeing this clearly sometimes, but the academic hierarchy is absolute and unforgiving. The various magazine rankings are only a reflection of a reality that existed long before the rankings did. The consequences of this hierarchy are real. There are only so many jobs. By the time that the Harvard PhDs have found tenure-track jobs across the United States—largely at the state universities where most of the jobs are—there are only so many jobs left for the Yale PhDs, the Princeton PhDs, the Stanford PhDs, the Cornell PhDs, etc. It is a long way down the list before we get to the University of Kentucky PhDs or the Michigan State PhDs. Those schools at the lower end of the list are now hiring Ivy-League graduates for their faculties, because the Ivy League alone produces so many PhDs that the academic market is saturated.  Where do you suppose all of the PhDs churned out by humanities programs at state universities end up? Some of them are working the night shift.

2. Your colleagues are your competitors.

Your fellow graduate students—at least those in your discipline—are your competitors. They are your competitors for funding while you are a graduate student, because you will compete with them for teaching assistantships, research assistantships, fellowships (both internal university awards and external awards), travel grants, etc.  When university budgets are tight, as they are now, all of these things are in shorter supply and higher demand than usual.

When you graduate, you will compete with these same people for very few jobs. The more closely your work resembles that of a given graduate student peer, the more likely that you will be in direct competition with that person. So, the very people with whom close association would theoretically most benefit your own research are those who are most likely to be competing with you for the same scarce resources. This does not encourage cooperation, morale, or friendship (although these can develop in spite of the circumstances).

The smart people are somewhere else.

If you think that going to graduate school will allow you to spend your days in a community of the enlightened, consider the axiom that it is unwise to borrow money that is difficult to repay. To go into debt for a graduate degree in the humanities is to go into debt for a credential that, at best, will qualify you for a job with a relatively low starting salary in an extremely competitive job market. Meanwhile, you will have removed yourself from the job market to pursue this degree, so don’t forget to add up the years that you will have incurred debt when you could have been earning money. But surely people in graduate school would be too smart to finance their educations with debt…

According to FinAid.org: “The median additional debt [the debt that graduate students pile onto the debt that they acquired as undergraduates] is $25,000 for a Master's degree, $52,000 for a doctoral degree and $79,836 for a professional degree. A quarter of graduate and professional students borrow more than $42,898 for a Master's degree, more than $75,712 for a doctoral degree and more than $118,500 for a professional degree.” This is not intelligent behavior. The smart people are somewhere else.