a wolf angel is not a good angel

Via In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood, a question of why people pursue PhDs, given the (lack of) academic job market. These are my interpretations of the responses.

Answer (a), from Cold Spring Shops (Apr 29, permalinks bloggered):

Hey, well, I’m getting paid some, guaranteed to keep this for a couple of years, and it’s not like I’m going to get a job anywhere else.
(Presumably these students intend to leave when the job market gets better.)

Answer (b), from Intersection of Anthropology and Economics:

They don’t want a real job! They want to say: look, look how badly the world has treated me. I will now go into seclusion and reject the real world, which obviously deserves to be rejected for its blindness.

Comment (c), from Optimization Prime, mostly on why grad students whine about money:

It’s not like they’re expecting tonnes of money. They’re complaining that society has its priorities so fucked up that atheletes get more money than intellectuals.

These all seem to miss the point.

I know people who have said something like (a), but also “this is really the only thing I want to do anyways”. I do not know people who go to grad school solely to wait out a bad job market. (Professional schools might be different, as might other fields, where I don’t know a good selection of people.) I’m not sure many people think a PhD in linguistics is going to help retool for the job market. But this is certainly a factor, it’s just not the only one.

I don’t know anyone who would go into grad school *intending* not to get a job. Every single person I met wanted a job in the field, and usually an academic job. (Chemists of my acquaintance often wanted research jobs in industry.) “Gee, let’s see if I can get rejected from every job I apply for.” Please. How many people court rejection this much?

And though I do think that priorities are screwed up about who gets paid how much, the reason I was complaining about money was because I was getting paid significantly less than the poverty line, and although I don’t live that expensively, I couldn’t live on that.

The “hey, what else do I want to do that I’d be good at” sentiment is definitely there for many people. Even among people who know there are other things they could do, this is what they must want to do more, otherwise why bother? And there’s the reality that these are the people who pretty much always got the honours, were the ones selected for this or that. Of course they’re going to still be the ones. After all, they were told after elementary school that in high school, there’d be more smart people around, and they wouldn’t be the best. But they were. In high school, they were told that about university. And again, they were the best, the smartest. So there! They will still be the best. They will be the special ones who get the competitive fellowships, the conference talks, the jobs.

And, of course, some of them will. But some of them won’t. And although everyone realises that, they know that they’ve been told again and again it would change, and it didn’t, so why would it really change this time? It will change for the others, who weren’t really the best before.

And if you’re 21 or 24, you’re still not entirely sure what does or doesn’t matter — how many people, at 20, said they never wanted kids and changed their minds? (Lots don’t, of course, but lots of people do.) I didn’t imagine how much I wanted to have a place of my own — that I owned — but I do. (It’s in the 1-3 year plan; I have savings, so I hope to start looking after I get a real salaried job.) Or you don’t know what this can do to relationships. Or how you will feel living wherever you end up. Or what it’s like to live on that little money, possibly in a place where you can’t legally work. This isn’t a terrible thing; grad school is not necessarily a worse place to find these answers than any other place. But your cheap time changes, and then you’re in the place where time is less cheap, but you’ve already sunk so much time in — you should at least get something tangible (a degree) out of it, right? And then after all maybe you *will* be lucky and get a job.

But starting out, these are not things that you think of. Maybe you have huge student loans. If you’re still in school, you don’t need to pay them back yet. (This is why a lot of people I know didn’t take a year off. They couldn’t find a job that would pay enough to make it worthwhile.) You won’t need to take out money for grad school if you have a fellowship, you think.[1] You’ll get enough money to live on, long vacations, you can sleep in. You love what you study. You’ll get to keep doing that. What else matters? Life of the mind. That’s what’s important.

And the decision might be a bit uninformed, but it’s not irrational, especially because the job market isn’t the top thing on your mind. As an undergraduate, you don’t know what job searches are like. You see the successes. You don’t know what adjuncting means, not really. Maybe you see some grad students. You share a class or two with the incoming students, and, sometimes, you’re better prepared than they are. You have some 3rd years TAing you; they’re not looking for jobs, either, and they don’t tell you about the people who are. If you ask, you’re saking what the life is like, not what the end game is like. Five years is a long time away. You don’t know how things might change by then. How often have you made 5 year plans in your life? You weren’t in university for five years.

I think and rethink why I chose to go to grad school. And I still think I made the right choice. Yes, it turned out that it was later the right choice to leave. I didn’t go in because there was nothing else I *could* do; I went because there was nothing else I wanted to do as much. I certainly didn’t go in hoping to be rejected. Ha. It sucks being rejected. I’m not going to court it unnecessarily. I’ll apply to jobs where I might not get it, etc — I even buy lottery tickets — but I don’t go out and say “hey, I want everyone to tell me to fuck off”. My priorities were just different. Then they changed, and I was unhappy, and I left. (I’m so glad I went somewhere that they give terminal MAs.)

I think about why friends went, and it was pretty much for the same reasons as me.

It’s easy to look back and say how silly some of the things you thought then were. Easy to say that of course being closer to family will matter (I stayed in the NE for this, but it mattered even more than that). That living on that little money isn’t worth it. Maybe you’ll still love the studying as much — and it will or won’t be enough. You can’t have perspective on the time you’re living in. It’s easy to see 10 and 20 years out of high school that the things that seemed to matter then really didn’t, in the end. But they did matter then.

[1] For most people, this seems to be true. I only know a few people who went into debt; mostly these are people who didn’t get summer jobs. I don’t tend to feel too sorry for them, given how hard I worked in the summers.

Update — my response to John Bruce:
A lot of the discussion focusses on what people think of the cost-benefit analysis after getting in, and possibly leaving. This is fine, but it’s not fair to the people who go in. Even if you’re not in grad school, your priorities change over the course of some years. And once you’re in, there are reasons to stay, even while there are also reasons to leave.

There are problems with academia. Simplifying the reasons that people choose to go into it doesn’t do any good, though.

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