Should you go to graduate school?
The question recurs online with significant regularity. The recurrence is regular and significant because academics (former grad students), professionals (also former grad students), and grad students themselves constitute a significant proportion of the internet addled population. Unfortunately, this demographic is also likely to give advice out of a terrifying churn of resentment, grievance, and imprudence.
If your primary concern is the ignoble—but honest and understandable—motive of profit, the answer is certainly no. This is the “action” that Nate Silver (member him?) referred to in the tweet that launched today’s discourse. But everyone knows that already.
If you are asking this question, it is usually because you’ve found something you want to study, and you enjoy being a student.1 This is good, and it is the main reason to go to graduate school. Graduate school is wonderful. You get to study with excellent professors. The people you’ll go to graduate school with are smart and interesting and passionate.2 Graduate school permits an almost-perfect form of social life for thinky people: afternoon graduate seminars which transition almost seamlessly to conversations about the seminars (and the people in them) at bars afterwards. (This is something
Taylor captured very well about grad school in The Late Americans.) Graduate school is a mostly respectable form of perseveration—you extend the structured indolence of undergraduate life for a few more years, holding the realities of the labour market at bay. It is, yes, “leisurely” in the bowtie conservative sense. When you are young and unattached, studying and socializing—and even if you have a kid as my wife and I did3—it’s simply a great way to spend your twenties.The only hitch is what we might euphemistically call “material considerations.” If you are independently wealthy and you love learning, why wouldn’t you want to go to graduate school? But for the overwhelming majority of us, you should not spend a cent on it. Why? Because it is unreasonably expensive, and there are ways of studying seriously that will not reduce you to a life of penury afterwards. And because, as everyone should know by now, the academic job market somehow reconciles the antinomies of preposterous competitiveness and cruel arbitrariness.
With this in mind, here is the advice I give my own students, none of whom have ever been wealthy enough to disregard material considerations when asking this question: don’t pay; walk away. In other words, only go to graduate school if your spot is fully-funded (tuition remission and some other income to live on—assistantships, scholarships, relevant work), and be minimally o.k. with the idea of walking away when your five years or so are over.4 This advice side-steps the question of ability, assuming that if you can get a fully-funded spot in a PhD program these days, you’re talented enough. The second part of the advice is a nod to the meagre employment opportunities in traditional academia, but also takes for granted that long-term employment in the academic precariate is undesirable for most people. So you need to decide in advance that you’re willing to do something else, because it will be too difficult to do so after you’ve spent five years of your life thinking of yourself as “an academic.” You need to preemptively decouple your identity from belonging to a particular academic institution. If you don’t have to pay, and you not only entertain leaving, but fully understand why “walk away” is just as important as the first injunction, then go and read your books and have a great time.
My advice here does not apply to professional programs, or law/medical school, etc., where the financial calculations often work differently than in research-based fields in the arts and sciences, broadly construed.
Smart, competent weirdos—just my type.
Actually having a kid during graduate school worked very well for us. My wife and I were both PhD students at the time, and we did have very good funding. But we managed to have a baby and finish our degrees without, at first, any regular paid childcare. For the first year, I took Joanna on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she did Mondays and Wednesdays, and our dear friend Mary did Fridays. She was a great sleeper, and we eventually learned how not to waste time during her naps. We frequently took her to campus, her little blonde tuft sticking up out of the Ergobaby. I would leave her with the departmental assistants when I went to brown bag lunches. There was an older woman—Billie—who used to check undergraduates’ bags for unchecked-out books, and I’d leave Joanna with her while I got books for my dissertation. Marilynne Robinson once asked to hold Joanna during a talk, and was delighted that we brought our baby to hear her. We used to bring her to the campus bar with us, and let her nap in her carseat underneath our table. Our friends bopped her and passed her around; she started talking in full sentences at nine months old.
Some versions of this advice require the would-be graduate student to have some sort of additional backup plan, but life rarely works that way.