Personal anecdote. I was very close to being one of those 70%. This cartoon haunted me for years.
From Matt Groenig’s School is Hell
Should you go to graduate school in the humanities? In summary, the answer is “probably not—even though you are exceptionally smart.” Let’s see why.
First, let me say that I totally get the temptations:
There may also be some other, somewhat more sinister reasons lurking deep in your heart of hearts:
It’s okay to have these as part of your reasons, but it is worth acknowledging them, and figuring out how big a factor they are.
Personal anecdote. I know I felt the pull of these last two reasons. In my last year of college I applied to both acting grad schools and philosophy grad schools. In other words, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. But strangely, I insisted on going to grad school for something. Why is that, I must ask myself? In retrospect, my answer has to be something like “fear of the real world.”
Lots of students have come to me asking if they should go to grad school. Here is the gist of the advice I tend to give.
(I don’t know how much of this advice applies to non-US grad schools; sorry for the somewhat parochial perspective.)
This is the number one rule, I would say, and most other profs I know agree on it. Humanities grad school is not like law school or med school, where it makes sense to take a ton of debt because chances are pretty good you’ll soon have a tidy income to pay it off with. Because chances are low you’ll get a humanities job, and because even if you get a humanities job you won’t be paid all that well, all the good grad schools in humanities pay you to attend—they waive your tuition, and pay you a small but livable stipend to help with teaching, or (if you’re very lucky) just for doing your studies.
If you have to pay to go to a humanities grad school, this basically means two key things:
Now these points might not have much weight with you, if for example you are independently wealthy. In that case, you can pay to play whatever game you want, academic or not. For the rest of us working joes and janes, though, these are serious issues. Imagine your current job (or the job you could get in the next couple weeks), but with $500/month extra in debt, and having aged 8 years, and you get the picture. (Yes, eight years. That’s a fairly typical time to PhD in the humanities. And yes we all plan to do it in at most five.)
Of course getting paid (even a small amount) to study cool stuff is a sweet deal, which means there is serious competition for such spots. This leads us to the next point.
Personal anecdote. I knew it was hard to get into acting grad schools, but I did not know it was hard to get into philosophy grad programs when I first applied. (I did not have very good career mentoring!) My undergrad was at a top school, and I thought I could take admission into an academic grad school for granted. It was only after I got rejected at the four top schools to which I applied that my advisor told me that those schools were accepting on average 6 out of 360 applicants that year, and that he was rejected to all but one of the ten schools to which he applied—and he was a Marshall Scholar who was now a professor at a top school. Those numbers have surely gotten worse in the interim. (I got into one of them later, but only after a lot more work and a lot of luck!)
I like to say that deciding to become an academic is like deciding to become a professional baseball player.
Why is this analogy apt? For one thing, we all already know that it is very hard to become a pro athlete. And why is that? Because it is fun to be a pro athlete (or at least, it looks that way from the outside), and we love the idea of getting paid to do something fun. But not many people know that your odds are about the same for getting an academic job. It turns out there are lots of other smart people like you who love the idea of getting paid to study and teach, and they are all lining up for that same spot.
Another apt but depressing thing about this analogy is that, as with pro sports, it might already be too late. If you decide at 24 to become a pro baseball player, it is nearly impossible to realize your dream. You have to have been training in one way or another all your life. The same is true with academics—if you don’t already have outstanding academic skills (plus ideally some evidence of such, like a top grade point from a great school with fairly famous professors eager to recommend your work), well then it’s not strictly impossible to get a job in academics, but it’s close.
Okay, so lots of people want to be in academics—but unlike the vast majority of them, you’ve got what it takes!
Personal anecdote. Again, I was a sucker for this kind of thinking. When I applied to grad schools my second time, the American Philosophy Association asked that graduate schools include with each application an official statement on how dismal the job market is for philosophers. I read these and thought basically—though not in so many words—“yeah, but I’m me!”
I have two main responses to this.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
Beware of “yeah but I’m smart” exceptionalism. You are smart, I’m sure, but there are lots of smart people around, and you may not have met enough of them yet to get a sense of that. Remember that the atmosphere gets rarer the higher you go. Even if you were the top 1% of all academics at your college, you might only be average in your grad school.
Again the baseball analogy is apt. When you’re the best baseball player in your local high school league, it’s easy to imagine you’re destined for stardom. But then you start to play college ball, and meet all the other players who were the best in their leagues. And only the very best of them will make it to minor-league pro ball. And only the best of them will get up into the majors. And only the best of them will be first-string players for winning teams. And only the best of them will be top-paid stars.
Similarly it’s hard to be a top student in a top college, and way harder to be a top student in a top grad school, and even harder to get a paid job out of grad school, and even harder still to get a paid job in a top school.
Personal anecdote. How hard is it to get a job? You’ve heard it’s very hard, but maybe this will drive it home some: I went to Harvard as an undergrad. Then I went to Michigan for my PhD, which for philosophy is actually a step up from Harvard by most reckonings (at least in my day, not too long ago). I took 7 years to get my PhD (that was a bit shorter than average for my department at the time). Then I applied to about 160 jobs over a couple job market seasons. Of those 160 applications, I got one offer for a 2-year post-doc, and then one offer for a tenure-track job at a school I’d never heard of. And I was super-lucky to get it!
I think often when students ask me whether they should go to grad school, they are really asking me this: “am I exceptionally smart?” They want to hear from me that “oh yes, you of all people should go to grad school”, because they want to hear the implication that “oh yes, you of all my students are exceptionally smart.” And I totally—painfully, even—get that.
Personal anecdote. Again maybe I’m just projecting here, since I sure suffered (and to some extent still suffer) from this need to be told I was smart. But years of experience suggests that this need is very common, especially among those tempted to go to grad school. So it’s worth asking whether this is going on for you.
But here’s the thing: success in grad school, as with many things, is not as much about the “raw smarts” as you might think—it’s more about the diligence and effort. No matter how smart you are, if you don’t actually buckle down regularly to pour your smart thoughts on paper, you will not finish grad school, let alone enter academia.
This is especially relevant for doing your own thesis / dissertation. This takes a special kind of self-discipline. If you were not the kind of student who started an assignment in college a week before it was due, you will find the discipline required for writing a dissertation extremely trying. Imagine: on any given day you could work really hard, or you could put it off for another day and go have fun instead. Ask yourself honestly what you would do in those circumstances. Actually, scratch that: ask yourself instead what in the past you have done in those circumstances. What you actually did before is much better evidence of what you will do than imagining facing future work, because that imagination (if it’s anything like mine) can be wildly optimistic.
A similar question to ask yourself is whether you’re a finisher, or whether you tend to like the idea of finishing a project but don’t actually follow through all that often. In my grad program only about 30% finished their degree. The other 70% spent many years of bitter work and have little to show potential employers for it.
Personal anecdote. I was very close to being one of those 70%. This cartoon haunted me for years.
From Matt Groenig’s School is Hell
Here’s a rough test for being a finisher: how often do you buy academic books thinking basically “it would be really cool to have read this book,” and then never actually sit down to read the book? If this happens a lot, it’s some indication that grad school could be a big scale version of the same phenomenon for you—maybe you like the idea of getting a grad degree way more than you like the actual work required to get one.
So try the real world for at least a while, or a while longer. There is no particular rush to go to grad school (though you should put your potential recommenders on notice, so they will remember you later). Meanwhile, you can always study as a hobby! A life making better money in a fairly satisfying job, and then studying the stuff you love on the side, might turn out way better than a life in academics. Remember, if it’s your job, then you have to worry about publications, grading, working on what’s trendy rather than what interests you, administrative work, and so on. Only a small proportion is spent studying exactly the stuff interesting to you.
Personal anecdote. If you’ve been reading these all along, you’ll remember I was also thinking about being an actor. This is perhaps even crazier than wanting to be a philosopher. (When I was about to graduate college, my parents were supportive but not thrilled with my two possible career paths!) But then I realized I could always keep acting, or at least doing my “longform” improv, as a hobby. And to this day I still do improv and plays. So it is possible!
If after at least a year you still find yourself reading and writing a lot on your own time in your chosen field—instead of, say, vegging out to a movie at night—then maybe start to think seriously about applying to grad schools. You should be doing at least enough work to have written a new and really good writing sample (a key part of your application), ideally incorporating feedback from your potential recommenders.
If after a year you realize you didn’t do a lot of studying, on the other hand, then don’t beat yourself up! Instead, you should feel proud that you learned something about yourself before making a potentially costly mistake. The studies will always be there as a hobby when you really want them.