What I find really annoying is that Inside Higher Ed does not promote good blogs like mine which offer great advice to budding academics (see previous post for one example among many) and, instead, promotes stupid, poorly written whinefests for people who hate academia and invent idiotic reasons to explain that hatred. A blog called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School” is a case in point.
I will not address all of the so-called reasons the grievously confused author of that blog provides because there are already 80 of them. I’ll just discuss a few so that you get the general picture.
1. The most recent reason is the following:
When will you finish? Of all of the awkward questions that you are asked in graduate school, this one is the cruelest. It is also the one that you are asked more often than any other. Whether asked innocently (as it often is) or laced with judgment (as it often is), the question presents the same problem.
Oh, the tragedy. People might show interest in what you are doing. How will a poor little baby deal with that? The answer is clear, don;t go to grad school because that will guarantee that you will never get asked any questions like “So when will you finish this project?”, “When are you finally going to get promoted?”, “When will you be allowed more freedom on your job?” No, that never happens to anubody except grad students.
2. Then there is this:
Graduate school is hard on your mental health, but it is also hard on your physical health. As a grad student, you spend a long time in relative poverty, and healthy living and poverty seldom go hand-in-hand. Your diet is more likely to consist of cheap processed foods than wholesome fare. Your bus rides are especially crowded during the flu season.
Because as we all know, nobody but grad students eat processed foods and traveled on the bus. All of those people taking buses, they must be grad students. Not going to grad school is a guarantee that you will be able to eat organic and drive a limousine.
3. And, of course,
There is a culture of fear.
Which is so totally absent in the non-academic workplace where you can be fired at will at any moment in time. What I find especially funny is that all these detractors of academia are extremely stupid people. The unenlightened author of this blog is dense enough not to realize that fear has an internal locus of control. If you want to indulge in being terrified of life, you find ample opportunities to do so even sitting in a mansion and going over the bank statement showing that you have millions in your bank account.
4. Academic conferences are stressful or something:
The largest academic conferences can be highly depressing affairs involving thousands of participants and hundreds of desperate job seekers nervously waiting to be interviewed in hotel rooms.
Yes, if you are a blubbering fool who has nothing to say but is trying to pretend like s/he needs to be among intelligent people, then you will be stressed. If, however, you dig your field and love sharing knowledge, you will have a blast at academic conferences.
5. Then, the blogger really made me laugh by communicating the following bit of wisdom:
In August 2011, Yale University released the results of a remarkable study of its own graduate school. Among other things, it found that even at Yale only 68% of those who had begun a PhD program in the humanities between 1996 and 2003 had earned a PhD by 2010 (see Reason 46). But most striking was a calculation of how much, on average, each Yale graduate student had cost the graduate school over a six-year period: $17,421 in the natural sciences, $126,339 in the social sciences, and $143,170 in the humanities.
As somebody who did graduate from Yale with a PhD and is intimately aware of the intra-university politics, In know exactly why this stupid, completely misleading information was published. And I am capable of analyzing such studies and figuring out what political purposes they serve precisely because I went to grad school. And also because I have a brain, which is a concept that the 100 Reason blogger is not familiar with.
6. This is also a funny reason:
The tenure track is brutal.
As somebody who just went through the midpoint tenure review, I can say that the tenure track rocks. You get to see your professional life as a journey that is mapped out for you by your senior colleagues who help you travel it. Everything you do contributes to your progress, and there is a very clear goal in sight. Brutal? Being unemployed and struggling to find a low-paying, boring job is brutal. Teaching twice a week, working on research, traveling to conferences, and getting paid for doing what you adore in the expectation of getting paid even more in six years is paradise. Maybe not being a spoiled brat who finds the prospect of having to work to be “brutal” would help one get that perspective.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
After reading some of these articles and blog posts on going to university and why or why not people should go it all boils down to this: if you don’t have any goals in life, have no passions or interests other than buying stuff and watching tv, then yeah, you shouldn’t go to college. Too many people with the personalities and motivations of a potato are in college in the mistaken belief that they “need” to get a degree so they can get a “good job.” These are the people who can’t believe that an entry-level position that pays $50,000 a year isn’t waiting for them when they get that diploma.
Obviously most of these people don’t end up going to grad school. But apparently there are a few of delusional ones who do. I guess these people are the ones who end up writing stuff like that blog. I can only think that they slogged through getting their undergraduate degree all the while thinking that the passion and motivation they lacked would somehow be magically bestowed upon them if they entered a graduate degree program.
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Truer words have never been said on this subject. Instead of looking at oneself honestly and realistically, such people blame the entire universe for not giving them anything they want on a platter.
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What a bitter loser! I have no problem with people questioning going to grad school, it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but the supposed reasons given in that blog are nothing but a compilation of bile and self-loathing.
He then twists and turns facts to shape his presumed conclusion. Most academics beat school teacher earnings. So instead of admitting that and disposing of his flawed argument he says “but by then you are in tenure track”, which is as relevant to the income argument as saying that “but by then it would be Tuesday”.
There is no culture of fear. I post anonymously in academic and non academic forums because I don’t have the time (nor do I care enough) to fully think through what I’m saying in a blog which is what I like to do when I attach my name to a public opinion.
This is not unique to that blogger, I’m afraid. I’m always surprised at the appallingly bad logic used by academics when they go into whining mode. It is very rare that I read a solid, well-thought argument in those columns, even if I don’t agree with the conclusions.
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” I have no problem with people questioning going to grad school, it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but the supposed reasons given in that blog are nothing but a compilation of bile and self-loathing.”
– Exactly! Don’t want to go to grad school, then most definitely don’t. Everybody should choose the life that suits them best and makes them fulfilled. But this idea that if a certain career doesn’t work for me, then something must be wrong with the career is very puzzling.
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The blog addressed the point “Most academics beat school teacher earnings” – While K-12 teachers tend to make less, their salaries start much earlier as K-12 teachers (Bachelors + teacher certification), so by the time PHds begin having true paid work, the teachers have already made lots of money: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2011/12/75-you-can-make-more-money-as.html – However the comments section points out that right now the job market for K-12 teachers is not good
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You have no idea what you are talking about. All grad students work and get paid for their work. What do you think they live on? Air?
How annoying to see people blab uselessly and irresponsibly.
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I have these reasons touted at me by my parents at least a few times a year, and when I was an undergrad, it came from my “peers” too. I always simply responded that I was going to do what made me incredibly happy in life. Research and teaching make me happy. My special interest makes me happy beyond all “reasonable” happiness (think bouncing up and down giddiness). If I never buy a big fancy car or a huge house, that is fine! As long as I make enough money to keep a roof over my head (and over my books, let’s be honest here about priorities…), I will be making a good life. And THAT is why I went to grad school.
It drives me CRAZY when people try to tell me what I should want. I have found that most of the people who said things like that to me are the ones struggling in classes and who expect to have a cushy job when they leave school. It makes me sad for them – they haven’t found what makes them happy yet.
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I think that your approach is absolutely the best.
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I just stumbled across your blog, so this is my first comment. I have to agree with the person who criticized conferences. It’s been about 16 years since I got my Ph.D. and I still find conferences just as described. I don’t think there’s something particularly wrong with me: most of my colleagues feel the same way. I’m a normal, polite person, not an egomaniac, but when I try to talk scholarly matters at conferences with people I’ve never met, I am usually rejected quite rudely. The more senior, established academics are the worst: they’re there to drink with their friends, not to talk to people that don’t matter. So the result is that I went to a consistently decreasing number of conferences and now have not been to one in three years. Free at last!
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I agree that going to conferences in order to talk to senior academics is a losing proposition. I never even try to approach anybody because I know it will be a waste of time. The only real way to connect with leading scholars in your field and get them to like you and maybe even help you is through blogging. Seriously, I met more brilliant scholars in my field through blogging than I ever met through going to all fo the conferences I ever visited combined.
Welcome to the blog!
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Extremely poorly written by a supposedly Yale professor on a tenure-track. Commenting on fragments largely taken out of context and providing no real counter-arguments doesn’t make the author of this blog any smarter than the “dense” author who wrote the 100 reasons. I mean, referring to a published study from her own university as something to serve political goals, but is otherwise utter crap, without thereby providing any (any!) argumentation or insight why this is so, makes this blogger even less relevant or believable. Just because you are supposedly a Yale PhD holder doesn’t mean you have proven your brilliance. Neutral readers need to rely on actual argumentation, not just on some general remarks that sound just as bitter, if not more, than the ones being the subject of criticism.
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I’m not a Yale professor. Have you tried going to third grade? Because your reading skills are very minimal.
“Neutral readers need to rely on actual argumentation, not just on some general remarks that sound just as bitter, if not more, than the ones being the subject of criticism.”
– And this is the kind of writing style that allows you to form an opinion on how well others write? Seriously? Two “justs” one after another? No, buddy, don’t go to grad school. You will suck dick in any environment where people are literate.
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As a neutral reading who just read “100 reasons” and your blog thereafter, I agree with “anonymous”. I didn’t see much of a real argument here.
You seem to have sort of a nasty attitude as well.
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Yes, I have a nasty attitude towards idiots. Deal.
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I agree with both anonymous posters. The 100 reasons not to go to grad school blog presents better evidence than this or other anti-100 blogs. These anti-100 blogs rely more on opinion and empty platitudes of a “life of the mind” then real facts – surplus of phd’s, shift to online learning, degree factories, adjunct likelihood, cost, wasted time, enjoying your youth, publish or perish, pedigree subservience, the list goes on. Academic arguments aren’t (at least shouldn’t be) arguments of emotion and aggression. Good ideas should win over bad ideas because they’re better.
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“Academic arguments aren’t (at least shouldn’t be) arguments of emotion and aggression. Good ideas should win over bad ideas because they’re better.”
– Please do not go to graduate school because your extreme level of stupidity will make you an abject failure.
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