PhD v. JD steel cage death match

I missed this when it was published last spring. In this corner, we have the deeply embittered holder of a PhD in literature:

Don’t do it. Just don’t. I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

So you won’t get a tenure-track job. Why should that stop you? You can cradle your new knowledge close, and just go do something else. Great—are you ready to withstand the open scorn of everyone you know? During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)

On the contrary, you are probably spectacular, due to the manic professionalization of the literary disciplines meant to create Ph.D.s who can compete. Everyone has a book contract, peer-reviewed publications, and stellar teaching evaluations. This was not the case when today’s associate professors were hired in the boom of the late 1990s. But don’t resent them for insisting that it has “always been hard out there”—just let them buy you lunch. You may also be tempted to resent the generation of full professors teetering ever precariously toward retirement, and thus cleaving ever more resolutely to their positions. Leave them alone—they won’t be replaced when they leave anyway; their “tenure lines,” as they are called, will die with them.

No, you will not get a job—not because, like Kafka’s mouse, you went in the “wrong” direction, but because today’s academic job market is a “market” in the sense that one stall selling fiddlehead ferns in the middle of a strip mall is a “farmer’s market.” In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year for the rest of your life.

In one sense, it’s all so familiar:

(1) Special snowflake syndrome, aka optimism and confirmation bias. Yes the odds of getting what I want look very bad, but somebody has to get that job in a Tier I department/with the Environmental Defense Fund, right?

(2) Massive credential inflation. People whose resumes when they graduated wouldn’t at this point even get them an interview with a satellite campus of Multi-Directional State/a reasonable shot at a $38,000 per year associate gig with a firm in whatever town in Mississippi makes Jackson look like Paris are now, respectively, the chair of the department at the Tier I university, and the managing partner of a mid-sized firm in Pittsburgh. And they’re deciding whether you are worthy of a callback interview.

(3) Internalized stigmatization. That you’ve been screwed over by structural factors somehow makes almost no difference to your sense of spoiled identity and self-loathing.

On the other hand:

(1) Getting a PhD doesn’t normally leave people in much if any educational debt, right? (I don’t actually have any numbers on this — are there any?)

(2) That getting a doctorate, at least in the humanities, is a very high risk proposition has been a cultural cliche for at least 30 years. Departments weren’t peddling fake employment and salary stats AFAIK (corrections welcome).

(3) Personally I’d much rather “waste” time in graduate school than in law school, given the likely relative intellectual value of the experiences.

On yet a third hand:

(1) Law school only lasts three years, usually.

(2) Schuman claims that 6% of PhDs in her field are going to get tenure track jobs. By contrast maybe half of all current law school students are going to have legal careers of some kind. (But again “of some kind” is a crucial modifier. After all, lots of PhDs get to have academic careers “of some kind.”).