Grad School May Not Be the Right Decision

By Zack on February 9, 2010

The debate about the merits and deficiencies of pursuing grad school are not anything new. A large section of this debate stems from Thomas H. Benton's piece last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which the professor asserts that Humanities students should only pursue advanced degrees if they have sufficient economic support that affords them the ability to receive a degree that gives them no advancement in any career. Which narrows the field significantly (richies only!).

Recently, Benson checked back in with an update on the "big lie" that has permeated the discussion of his initial piece. This lie is the "life of the mind"

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Benson then details a scenario in which a young woman with her doctorate can't land a job, lives off food stamps, isolates herself from family, friends and colleagues and sinks into depression.

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

[...]

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Suffice to say the entire article is worth reading for those leaning toward grad school. And it's particularly relevant right now. Despite whatever economic gains we've made over last year, the job market is still dismal and is expected to get worse (unemployment dropped in January, but is expected to climb again going forward). So it's easy to put off looking for a job and instead pursue grad school.

Now, I'm not particularly qualified to critique the veracity of Benson's claims, so I'm not going to do so. I am in grad school, but I also have a full time job to which the degree applies (a category he excludes from his warnings). He could be right, he could be completely off base. I suspect he has a very good point. And I am quite certain that he is correct when he implores student's to explore all of their options when contemplating graduate school. Part of that contemplation, of course, is to read this article to gain a better understanding of what a life in acdeme entails. It's also useful to inquire with the school about past graduates and how successful the program has been with putting them in jobs outside of academe.

When making a commitment of such significant monetary value, you must take note of every option on the table and it's consequence. If your field does not require an advanced degree it's probably not worth pursuing. Similarly, if your looking to continue education in an effort to pursue a life of acedeme, it may be usefule to understand the challenges to that path. (h/t to clusterflock)

"Study" courtesy DAEllis via Flickr Creative Commons