Should you go to grad school in the humanities? A professor's perspective

Should you go to grad school in the humanities? Well first, I totally get the temptations:

1. For someone smart like you, school is really interesting. You could spend your days learning more stuff - stuff more advanced than what you did in college!
2. Humanities grad school could lead to a career in the humanities, teaching and studying this cool stuff for a living, which sounds pretty awesome.
3. It never hurts to have another degree after your name, does it?

And here's a fourth reason you might harbor, deep in your heart of hearts: school is also a lot more familiar and comfortable than the uncertainty of the real-world. Going to grad school makes it sound, to your friends, family, and to yourself, like you have a plan and your act together. Working at your whatever-temp-job while you figure out what to do next does not sound - or feel - like that at all.

Personal anecdote. I know I felt the pull of this fourth reason. When in my last year of college I applied to both acting grad schools and philosophy grad schools. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but strangely, I insisted on going to grad school for something. Why is that, I must ask myself? In retrospect, my answer has to be something like "fear of the real world."

Lots of students have come to me asking if they should go to grad school. Here is the advice I tend to give. Feel free to skip the personal anecdotes - they're offset for your convenience. I won't be offended.

Oh and I should add: I don't know how much of this advice applies to non-US grad schools. Sorry for the somewhat parochial perspective.

Do not pay to play

This is the number one rule, I would say, and most other profs I know agree on it. Humanities grad school is not like law school or med school, where it makes sense to take a ton of debt because chances are pretty good you'll soon have a tidy income to pay it off with. Because chances are low you'll get a humanities job, and because even if you get a humanities job you won't be paid all that well, all the good grad schools in humanities pay you to attend - they waive your tuition and give you a small but livable stipend to help with teaching, or (if you're very lucky) just for doing your studies.

If you have to pay to go to a humanities grad school, this basically means two key things:

1. You are not going to a particularly good grad school, which means you are going to have that much harder time getting a job when and if you finish. (There are surely exceptions here, but they are rare.)
2. These are your your key years to invest and save - remember due to the magic of compound interest, it's way better to start saving a little now than a lot later. Paying for grad school means big negative savings. And especially given (1), that debt is going to be really hard to pay off later. (This is why it can hurt to have an extra degree after your name.)

Now these points might not have much weight with you, if for example you are independently wealthy. In that case, you can pay to play whatever game you want, academic or not. For the rest of us working joes and janes, though, these are serious issues. Imagine your current job (or the job you could get in the next couple weeks), but with $500/month extra in debt, and having aged 8 years, and you get the picture. (Yes, eight years. That's a fairly typical time to PhD in the humanities. And yes we all plan to do it in at most five.)

Of course getting paid (even a small amount) to study cool stuff is a sweet deal, which means there is serious competition for such spots. This leads us to the next point.

Personal anecdote. I knew it was hard to get into acting grad schools, but I did not know it was hard to get into philosophy grad programs when I first applied. (I did not have very good career mentoring!) My undergrad was at Harvard, and I thought if that name was good for anything, it was good for getting into an academic grad school. I naively applied just to the top four grad schools in philosophy, and got rejected at all four. Only after that did my advisor tell me such schools were accepting on average 6 out of 360 applicants that year, and that he himself was rejected to all but one of the ten schools to which he applied - and this guy was a Marshall Scholar who was now a Harvard professor. Those numbers have surely gotten worse in the interim. (I got into one of those schools later, but only after a lot more work and a lot of luck.)

The competition

I like to say that deciding to become an academic is like deciding to become a professional baseball player. (Or professional actor, professional novelist, professional musician ... take your pick of the careers we already know are longshots.)

Why is this analogy apt? For one thing, we all know that it is very hard to become a pro athlete. Why? Because it is fun to be a pro athlete (or at least it looks that way from the outside), and we love the idea of getting paid to do something fun. But not many people know that your odds are about the same for getting an academic job. It turns out there are lots of other smart people like you who love the idea of getting paid to study and teach, and they are all lining up for that same spot.

Another apt but depressing thing about this analogy is that, as with pro sports, it might already be too late. If you decide at 24 to become a pro baseball player, it is nearly impossible to realize your dream. You have to have been training in one way or another all your life. The same is true with academics - if you don't already have a top grade point from a great school with fairly famous professors eager to recommend your work, well then it's not strictly impossible to get a job in academics, but it's close.

But you're smart!

Okay, so lots of people want to be in academics - but unlike the vast majority of them, you've got what it takes!

Personal anecdote. Again, I was a sucker for this. When I applied to grad schools my second time, the American Philosophy Association was recommending schools include an official statement on how dismal the job market is for philosophers with each application. I read these and thought basically - though not in so many words - "yeah but I'm me!"

I have two main responses to this.

1. There are lots of really smart people.
2. In the end it's not the smarts that really matter.

There are lots of smart people

Beware of this kind of exceptionalism. You are smart, I'm sure, but there are lots of smart people around, and you may not have met enough of them yet to get a sense of that. Remember that the atmosphere gets rarer the higher you go. Even if you were the top 1% of all academics at your college, you might only be average in your grad school.

Again the baseball analogy is apt. When you're the best baseball player in your local high school league, it's easy to imagine you're destined for stardom. But then you start to play college ball, and meet all the other players who were the best in their leagues. And only the very best of them will make it to minor-league pro ball. And only the best of them will get up into the majors. And only the best of them will be first-string players for winning teams. And only the best of them will be top-paid stars.

Similarly it's hard to be a top student in a top college, and way harder to be a top student in a top grad school, and even harder to get a paid job out of grad school, and even harder still to get a paid job in a top school.

Personal anecdote. How hard is it to get a job? You've heard it's very hard, but maybe this will drive it home some: I went to Harvard as an undergrad. Then I went to Michigan for my PhD, which for philosophy is actually a step up from Harvard by most reckonings (at least in my day, not too long ago). I took 7 years to get my PhD (that's shorter than average for my department at the time). Then I applied to about 160 jobs over a couple job market seasons. Of those 160 applications, I got one 2-year post-doc, and then one tenure-track job at a school I'd never heard of. And I was super-lucky to get it!

It's mostly not about the smarts

I think often when students ask me whether they should go to grad school, they are really asking me this: "am I exceptionally smart?" They want to hear from me that "oh yes, you of all people should go to grad school", because they want to hear the implication that "oh yes, you of all my students are exceptionally smart." And I totally get that.

Personal anecdote. Again maybe I'm just projecting here, since I sure suffered (and still suffer, though a bit less) from this need to be told I was smart. But years of experience suggests that this need is very common, especially among those tempted to go to grad school. So it's worth asking whether this is going on for you.

But here's the thing: success in grad school, as with many things, is not about the "raw talent" (to the extent there even is such a thing) - it's mostly about the diligence and effort. No matter how smart you are, if you don't actually buckle down regularly to wrestle with others' smart thoughts, and then wrestle your own down onto paper, you will not finish grad school, let alone enter academia.

This is especially relevant for doing your own thesis / dissertation. This takes a special kind of self-discipline. If you were not the kind of student who started an assignment in college at least a week before it was due, you will find the discipline required for writing a dissertation extremely trying. Imagine: on any given day you could work really hard, or you could put it off for another day and go have fun instead. Ask yourself honestly what you would do - or much better, what in the past you have done - in those circumstances.

A similar question to ask yourself is whether you're a finisher, or whether you tend to like the idea of finishing a project but don't actually follow through all that often. No judgment is meant here - the world needs dreamers as well as doers. But grad school requires a strong finisher. In my grad program, only about 30% finished their degree. The other 70% spent many years of bitter work and left with little to show potential employers for it.

Personal anecdote. I was very close to being one of those 70%; that is perhaps a story for another day. If I had the rights I would post here a Matt Groenig Life is Hell cartoon about the "grad school dropout" - a cartoon that haunted me for years.

Here's a rough test for being a finisher: how often do you buy books thinking basically "it would be really cool to have read this book," and then never actually sit down to read the book? If this happens a lot, it's some indication that grad school could be a big scale version of the same phenomenon for you - maybe you like the idea of getting a grad degree way more than you like the actual work required to get one.

My bottom-line advice

So try the real world for at least a while, or a while longer. There is no particular rush to go to grad school (though you should put your potential recommenders on notice, so they will remember you later). Meanwhile, you can always study as a hobby! A life making better money earlier, in a fairly satisfying job, supplemented with studying the stuff you love on the side, might turn out way better than a life in academics. Remember, if it's your job, then you have to worry about publications, grading, working on what's trendy rather than what interests you, administrative work, and so on. Only a small proportion is spent studying exactly the stuff interesting to you.

Personal anecdote. If you've been reading these all along, you'll remember I was also thinking about being an actor. This is perhaps even crazier than wanting to be a philosopher. (When I was about to graduate college, my parents were supportive but not thrilled with my two possible career paths!) But then I realized I could always keep acting, or at least doing my "longform" improv, as a hobby. And to this day I still do improv and plays. So it is possible to keep doing something you love as a hobby!

If after at least a year you still find yourself reading and writing a lot on your own time in your chosen field - instead of, say, vegging out to a movie at night - then maybe start to think seriously about applying to grad schools. You should be doing at least enough work to have written a new and really good writing sample (a key part of your application), ideally incorporating feedback from your potential recommenders.

If after a year you realize you didn't do a lot of studying, on the other hand, then don't beat yourself up! Instead, you should feel proud that you learned something about yourself before making a potentially costly mistake. The studies will always be there as a hobby when you really want them.

tl;dr: probably not, even though you are exceptionally smart.