CommPhD20

Risks are low, potential payoff is unbelievably high. It isn't cheating, it's bringing you back up with the rest of the world so you can be the real you.

Risks are low, potential payoff is unbelievably high. It isn't cheating, it's bringing you back up with the rest of the world so you can be the real you.

You'll hear this, that, and the other thing about each brand based on people's anecdotes.
 
Here's an example - I've had a shitty CS experience with Apple that turned me off of them as well as a very positive experience with Dell. These both contradict the prevailing narratives about those brands. Aggregate customer satisfaction ratings put them both near the top - FWIW, Dell ranks fine among its competitors in customer service satisfaction.
 
Here is another resource - http://lifehacker.com/computer-manufacturers-ranked-how-to-pick-a-laptop-tha-1467145338
 
Another thing to consider is that you can help predict your customer service and overall satisfaction by knowing what you're buying. A huge portion of the reason Apple has an easy time satisfying its customers is that they don't sell low-end computers. You get something that is very expensive and thus unlikely to start out so marginal in performance that any little thing renders it unusable. Dell had dominated the low-end for a long time and this is how they got the reputation for being a bad computer maker...well, they used to be the brand with the cajones to do their best with a $200-$300 computer...but there's only so much you can do and corners will be cut.
 
Anyway, I've been going with Lenovo lately and have had good experiences all around. Good design, good computers at competitive prices, and I've had some nitpicky requests for CS that have been dealt with wonderfully. IMO, their Yoga 2 Pro is the best consumer laptop available. Perhaps not for your needs, though, since you want something a bit larger. As someone else suggested, though, it might make sense to get something that is portable and just connect it to an external monitor for when you want that screen real estate.

In the vein of Kamisha's numerous posts on feel good strategies, I have one specifically geared to us rejectees: simply google English PhD job prospects.

It's the only way I can make myself okay with not continuing in academia, pretending that it would be miserable if I did.

For the record, that honestly means nothing to me and would die to continue on!!!

Accepted to U of M (Screen Arts & Cultures) after a truly great interview weekend experience. Looks like I'll be shipping off to Ann Arbor this summer!

I was contacted by a current UIUC in my field offering advice on living and studying there. He mentioned that he could offer insight on living in "a small midwestern town" - ha! I grew up not so far from UIUC in a town of 10,000 people that was the largest town for about 30 miles every direction. Chambana might as well have been NYC to us!

I've made this point in years past, but I saw someone express this kind of anxiety recently, so it bears repeating: it's perfectly natural and quite common to not feel happy or excited after you decide what school to choose.
 
When I heard back from the program I'm attending, I knew I should feel ecstatic. It was my top choice, by a wide margin. I had worked to get into grad for ages. I also had the daily experience of reading people here who hadn't gotten in to the schools they wanted or anywhere, sometimes. I expected to feel fantastic. And then I just... didn't. I felt guilty for not feeling anything. Why didn't I feel happier? But when I shared that feeling here and with other people I knew, I found it was quite common. I think there's a variety of reasons for that. First, there's just the mental and emotional drain of the process. You spend all this time working, and then all this time stressing, whether it's about getting in or choosing your school, and then it just... stops. Which might make you feel really happy, or might just make you feel a little numb or exhausted. Second, no program can ever be as exciting as the promise and potential of any program. It felt good to know where I was going. But before you choose, there's limitless potential. You could end up anywhere, which is exciting and invigorating. No matter how happy you are with your choice, it can't contain all the potential of all the schools you applied to. Finally, I find that unless they get into all or almost all of the departments to which they apply, many people can feel somehow unsatisfied or rejected even if they get into their #1 choice or a school that they are very happy to attend. I know I've talked to different people who have said, "I would have chosen the program I'm in even if I got into those other schools... so why does the rejection hurt so bad? Why do I wish I had gotten in so much?"
 
If you don't feel this way, all the better. But if you aren't feeling as good as you thought you would, don't sweat it, and don't feel guilty. It's natural and happens to a lot of people.

I'd like to add to this, since it is good that we don't simply respond to the bummer that is the job market by bowing out.
 
The above advice works, but just like you have to fully embrace being a grad student as well as your subject matter before entering grad school, you have to really embrace these outcomes. You can't just say that you're okay with these non-TT outcomes just to alleviate your worry. It must be something that is totally okay. The system tends to make you feel like whether or not you get a tenured position in academia is the absolute verdict on your entire value. Don't tie your self-worth to that career outcome while paying lip service to being open to other possibilities. You need to consider what your life will be like if you get the PhD and don't get the good professorship. Are you okay with the life of the adjunct? Do you know what that life is like? Are you okay with the idea of spending nearly a decade studying literature and going on to a career that is quite a large departure from your studies?
 
It is okay if you say yes to these questions, but don't go through the motions as you consider them. 

I'd like to add to this, since it is good that we don't simply respond to the bummer that is the job market by bowing out.
 
The above advice works, but just like you have to fully embrace being a grad student as well as your subject matter before entering grad school, you have to really embrace these outcomes. You can't just say that you're okay with these non-TT outcomes just to alleviate your worry. It must be something that is totally okay. The system tends to make you feel like whether or not you get a tenured position in academia is the absolute verdict on your entire value. Don't tie your self-worth to that career outcome while paying lip service to being open to other possibilities. You need to consider what your life will be like if you get the PhD and don't get the good professorship. Are you okay with the life of the adjunct? Do you know what that life is like? Are you okay with the idea of spending nearly a decade studying literature and going on to a career that is quite a large departure from your studies?
 
It is okay if you say yes to these questions, but don't go through the motions as you consider them. 

I'd like to add to this, since it is good that we don't simply respond to the bummer that is the job market by bowing out.
 
The above advice works, but just like you have to fully embrace being a grad student as well as your subject matter before entering grad school, you have to really embrace these outcomes. You can't just say that you're okay with these non-TT outcomes just to alleviate your worry. It must be something that is totally okay. The system tends to make you feel like whether or not you get a tenured position in academia is the absolute verdict on your entire value. Don't tie your self-worth to that career outcome while paying lip service to being open to other possibilities. You need to consider what your life will be like if you get the PhD and don't get the good professorship. Are you okay with the life of the adjunct? Do you know what that life is like? Are you okay with the idea of spending nearly a decade studying literature and going on to a career that is quite a large departure from your studies?
 
It is okay if you say yes to these questions, but don't go through the motions as you consider them. 

I get yelled at, when I bring up the job market, so I'll brief: I don't think most people understand how bad it is, even if they are reasonably educated, and I don't think people understand how much worse it has been since 2008, and it was really bad before 2008. It is terribly, terribly bleak, and we're graduating literally thousands of unemployed PhDs in English. If you can think of literally anything else that you'd be happy to do with your life, do that.
 
Flame on.

Congrats on the good news everyone !
 
I've withdrawn my other apps and committed to UMich.

There are two ways your income can be taxed in the US, more or less:
 
1. "Payroll taxes" - these are taken out of each paycheck and add up to 6% of your paychecks. One part goes to Medicare, insurance for seniors, and the other part goes to Social Security, which is fixed income for seniors.
 
You will not pay payroll taxes on your stipend under most circumstances. This is a good thing for the most part, other than that you won't be eligible to receive Social Security if you naturalize and retire here without eventually paying payroll taxes. If you work in the USA, you'll begin paying into those and you'll have nothing to worry about.
 
2. You have the standard income tax. This is something you'll file after the end of the calendar year with the federal government (the so-called "Internal Revenue Service" or IRS). Some of your benefits will be taxable. What you won't include in your taxable income is tuition waivers or other portions of your stipend used for tuition. Certain other costs can be exempted from taxes, most notably things like textbooks -- the rule here is that it must be required of all students in the course. So books, computers, etc. you might buy for general research will not be exempted. 
 
Generally speaking, anything you spend on personal expenses, which includes your housing, will be taxable income. So if you have a $15K stipend and the rest of your costs are covered, then $15K is your taxable income. In the USA, it is customary for your employer to withhold a certain portion of your paychecks for the purpose of covering your income tax commitment. This is sometimes done for graduate stipends, but not always -- it usually is not if you have a fellowship rather than teaching or research assistantship. The amount withheld will be based on the assumed amount of taxes you'll owe at the end of the year. In this case, it may be the case that when you file your taxes, you'll be getting some of that back since more was withheld than was needed. If your school isn't withholding for you, you will have to make arrangements to budget that portion of your income -- you may pay on a quarterly basis.
 
Further, you could be subject to state income taxes. Not all states have an income tax and there is a great deal of variability in how this is done. There is some chance that even if your state has an income tax, your income won't be high enough to be eligible. 
 
There are more variables based on your resident status and your home country. You may be a "nonresident alien" or a "resident alien," the latter of which will have what is known as a green card. Determining residency status for an international graduate student is bafflingly difficult to me as it is filled with exceptions and this and that. The fundamental taxation difference is that resident aliens are taxed on American income as well as any foreign income while nonresident aliens are taxed only on American income. I'm guessing you'll eventually become a resident alien, but that is not clear to me since there are exceptions for students. You can see some scenarios here: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Alien-Residency-Examples
 
Germany (if that's where you live) and many other countries have tax treaties with the USA with provisions for students. These vary so much that it is difficult for me to tell how that will affect you. It may mean that you simply pay taxes to your home country instead. This partially depends on whether you intend to become a permanent resident of the USA or leave as soon as you are finished studying.
 
Other insurance:
 
You will need medical insurance. This is a benefit you should receive from your school, though not all will offer it. As you weigh your options, make sure to find out the degree of medical insurance they will offer. Either fully provided it free of cost to you or an 85% subsidy (you pay 15% of premiums) are the most common. These are usually good plans in that they cover nearly everything and are more cost effective since the risk is spread across the entire working portion of the university. 
 
When you receive medical care, you'll incur any costs not covered by the insurance. Certain services like doctor visits are usually paid for by what is called a "co-pay," which is a small flat fee you pay for each visit. The insurance company covers the rest of the cost. Depending on the insurance plan and type of doctor, these can be $5-$100. Under our new healthcare law, several types of preventative doctor visits must be provided free of cost: alcohol abuse counseling, aspirin for people of a certain age, blood pressure screening, cholesterol screening, colorectal cancer screen above age 50, depression screening, diabetes screening if blood pressure is high, diet counseling if you are thought to have risk of obesity-induced disease, HIV screening, immunizations, obesity screening and counseling, sexually transmitted disease testing, and interventions for quitting tobacco use.
 
The costs for procedures and how you are expected to participate can vary. You start with what is called a deductible. You pay almost all costs (other than certain flat charges like the doctor visit co-payment and free preventative services) until you reach the deductible amount. So if you have a $500 deductible and you have a mole removed for $1000, you know you will have to pay at least $500 of it. After you have met your deductible, the amount of coverage provided by insurance varies. Generally speaking, insurance plans will cover 90%, 80%, or 70% of costs at this point. So-called "catastrophic plans" will cover even less. A new part of the law requires for money you pay for drugs to count against the deductible, since this was not the case before. Drug costs vary by drug, but generally speaking a plan will have several tiers -- preferred generics, nonpreferred generics, preferred name-brands, nonpreferred name-brands, and uncovered. Preferred generics (drugs that are old enough that they are no longer patented by the original pharmaceutical company) will often be free or just $5 or $10. The costs on others can vary widely.
 
Another provision of our new law is a yearly maximum out of pocket costs, which sets a limit of how much you have to pay for all medical costs other than the monthly premiums and co-payments. This is set at roughly 10% of your income. If this is the case for your plan, if you pay $1500 - say, $500 from deductible and the other $1000 on prescription drugs and other procedures that your insurance helped cover - then the insurance must cover 100% of costs from there forward. All of this resets at year's end. It is meant to prevent you from losing all of your money due to an ongoing problem. There is no maximum amount for the insurance to cover -- a new part of the law. This means there is no limit to how much the insurance company may have to spend on your healthcare (in the past, companies would cut you off after a predetermined amount, at which point you were no different than somebody without insurance). Foreign nationals are eligible for insurance and if it isn't provided by the school, you are allowed to buy it along with federal assistance as a student. 
 
Other insurance to consider:
 
Dental insurance may be useful and is usually inexpensive. $20/month would give you a great dental plan that would make trips to the dentist less expensive and guard you against costly procedures. Some of these plans hardly do anything to help save you money while others can be great if you have something come up.
 
Vision insurance is the least common of health-related insurance and probably isn't necessary for a graduate student unless you have particular needs or it is provided by your school (dental and vision are not the standard for graduate student compensation). Seeing an eye doctor can be expensive, but not prohibitively so under most circumstances. A cheap doctor visit may be $100-$150 if you need contacts and the contacts will probably cost you $100-$200 per year if you do not have vision insurance.
 
If you own a home, you'll need homeowner's insurance. I doubt you'll own one. If you rent, that is the landlord's problem.
 
If you wish to drive, you must have car insurance. You will lose your right to drive if you do not have car insurance. The prices and coverage can vary widely, but each state will have a minimum of liability coverage. Without much of an American driving record, I am guessing that you will assessed as a fairly high risk and will pay more than the average person your age.

Don't need a second language (though this is serious added value at many institutions), definitely don't need publications (some say this adds little value unless it is single-authored in a high-impact journal -- either way, its absence isn't damning), and interviews are the exception rather than the rule, though my intuition tells me it seems to be getting a little more common.

I would be tickled shitless if I got a personally written letter from a school that rejected me -- just because it would suggest that I still impressed them. With that said, I have no expectation of that as it would be incredibly time consuming and that doesn't make sense since it is already a burdensome process for working academics.

You are my new favorite person. Made my day.

This is a good point and brings us to two things.
 
First, people who have "done it" like to be patted on the back and told how they have done the impossible. This is worth considering when you hear accomplished academics speaking about their job as if they are martyrs. It may not be as great of a job as it is made out to be, but let's not kid ourselves. Your tenured advisor almost certainly has a great job.
 
With that said, the reason this entire system continues attracting people is survivorship bias. This is an actual psychological phenomenon that affects us humans in multiple parts of life and it is alive and well here. We see the "survivors," AKA our professors, and do not encounter the "casualties." You can keep telling folks that 75% of literature PhDs never get on the tenure track, but the only people we make contact with are optimistic grad students and the survivors of the process. People tend to fixate on the survivors and dismiss the existence or relevance of the casualties. It is too tempting to just assume those casualties were not worthy. The system is not that great at rewarding merit. There are highly qualified people that will do everything right and lose this game. 
 
Of course, it is very easy to suggest to somebody to simply run away from the whole thing when you are not faced with leaving something that you are very passionate about doing. The truth is that there are some "right" circumstances to pursue this. The following are some standards that are a combination of suggestions from my mentors as well as a few places like The Professor Is In:
 
-you have to be young. A potentially decade-long process in which you will not be saving for retirement or preparing for anything but the job you fear not getting cannot be done in your 30s unless you have a spousal or other situation that puts you at no financial peril.
 
-you cannot be taking out any debt. This means your graduate school needs to support you with full tuition and fee waivers plus a livable stipend that comes with medical coverage. If you aren't getting these things, reconsider how much you mean to the program and/or how worthwhile a program that can't provide these things might be.
 
-on a related note, you can't already be under crushing debt from undergrad. If you took out $50K in loans in undergrad, going without an income for 5+ more years is probably a bad idea
 
-again on the financial side, you can't enter into life-changing circumstances like childbirth, home ownership, or perhaps even marriage if you expect to be covering the expense of these things yourself. You're allowed to live an adult life as a grad student, but you won't be compensated in a way to pay for it. There's no shame in a spouse that works and supports you while you study, but if you don't have one then don't burden yourself with financial or other commitments that you cannot handle on your own as a grad student.
 
-you cannot go to a school that does not have a clear track record of placing its PhD recipients in the kinds of positions you are seeking. If you cannot get hard data on this from the program, this should be a major red flag. Don't accept a few anecdotes. You want an idea of the percentage. You also want to know average time to degree and the attrition rate. If half the students quit, how good of a job is the program doing? "Fit" means nothing if you know going in that you have no chance at "fitting" into a job when you leave. If you aren't sure if you have a chance, you haven't done your homework.
 
-you don't waste your time at grad school and while you own and encourage your intrinsic passion for your work, you realize it is all wasted if you do not leave prepared for the job market. You also accept that being well-prepared will likely not guarantee your dream job...or any job. But if you did everything else, you'll be in a position to readjust to your circumstances and somewhat painlessly change the trajectory of your life if that is what is needed because you won't be too old, you won't be burdened by debt, you won't be obligated to a child you cannot afford to raise, etc.
 
I think the points on debt and school choice are the ones taken least seriously or are perhaps incorrectly interpreted. You don't get into the school you want and you start to expand the definition of what an acceptable program is.

Woah! 

I'm not attacking you. I'm not "harsh".  I sincerely believe that you didn't intend to come off as elitist. 

Your opinions, your intellect, your research are in no way inferior or less valid. 

SK, look back on your bit about houses. 50-60k times four, and it doesn't buy you much of a house. Homes a block from my childhood home go for between 11-24k- perhaps they're not "much of a home" but they're the dreams and hopes of the young families buying them - they mean the world to those folks. 

Privilege, finances, etc. They're touchy subjects. I'm not jealous of you. and I don't expect you to be jealous of me. We've both lived different paths in life.
 
I'm happy with mine. I hope you're happy with yours. 

FWIW, Dallas Cowboys have no resource-based advantage over any other team as the NFL has a hard salary cap, making it impossible to have a higher payroll than the maximum allowed. The minimum payroll is roughly 85% of the maximum, so everybody is spending the same. The NBA has a "soft" cap which lets you overspend the salary cap only to retain your team's own players, which will make it impossible to sign other players. If you are too far above the cap due to taking advantage of this rule, you start paying enormous penalties for the overage. For instance, the Brooklyn Nets are expected to pay a $100 million penalty for a $30 million overage this year, a figure which will double in the coming years if they do not fix that.
 
The Yankees can pretty much spend as they wish and their payroll this year will be about 4x as much as the lowest team. Spending on veteran free agents in MLB is such a precarious proposition that the teams who do so often get themselves into just as much trouble as they do improve their team. They also have a "luxury tax" and it does indeed scare teams, but it is set so high that only 2-3 teams are within a stone's throw of it in a given year. 
 
I know you didn't mean for this to become a sports discussion but I couldn't help but drop some fun facts  
 
 
I would say that the NRC is more trustworthy but they're both complete bullshit. Rankings are completely wrongheaded in and of themselves, but NRC gives weight to things that actually matter and shuns the idea of hard rankings and instead favors confidence intervals, which makes more sense.

There are two ways your income can be taxed in the US, more or less:
 
1. "Payroll taxes" - these are taken out of each paycheck and add up to 6% of your paychecks. One part goes to Medicare, insurance for seniors, and the other part goes to Social Security, which is fixed income for seniors.
 
You will not pay payroll taxes on your stipend under most circumstances. This is a good thing for the most part, other than that you won't be eligible to receive Social Security if you naturalize and retire here without eventually paying payroll taxes. If you work in the USA, you'll begin paying into those and you'll have nothing to worry about.
 
2. You have the standard income tax. This is something you'll file after the end of the calendar year with the federal government (the so-called "Internal Revenue Service" or IRS). Some of your benefits will be taxable. What you won't include in your taxable income is tuition waivers or other portions of your stipend used for tuition. Certain other costs can be exempted from taxes, most notably things like textbooks -- the rule here is that it must be required of all students in the course. So books, computers, etc. you might buy for general research will not be exempted. 
 
Generally speaking, anything you spend on personal expenses, which includes your housing, will be taxable income. So if you have a $15K stipend and the rest of your costs are covered, then $15K is your taxable income. In the USA, it is customary for your employer to withhold a certain portion of your paychecks for the purpose of covering your income tax commitment. This is sometimes done for graduate stipends, but not always -- it usually is not if you have a fellowship rather than teaching or research assistantship. The amount withheld will be based on the assumed amount of taxes you'll owe at the end of the year. In this case, it may be the case that when you file your taxes, you'll be getting some of that back since more was withheld than was needed. If your school isn't withholding for you, you will have to make arrangements to budget that portion of your income -- you may pay on a quarterly basis.
 
Further, you could be subject to state income taxes. Not all states have an income tax and there is a great deal of variability in how this is done. There is some chance that even if your state has an income tax, your income won't be high enough to be eligible. 
 
There are more variables based on your resident status and your home country. You may be a "nonresident alien" or a "resident alien," the latter of which will have what is known as a green card. Determining residency status for an international graduate student is bafflingly difficult to me as it is filled with exceptions and this and that. The fundamental taxation difference is that resident aliens are taxed on American income as well as any foreign income while nonresident aliens are taxed only on American income. I'm guessing you'll eventually become a resident alien, but that is not clear to me since there are exceptions for students. You can see some scenarios here: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Alien-Residency-Examples
 
Germany (if that's where you live) and many other countries have tax treaties with the USA with provisions for students. These vary so much that it is difficult for me to tell how that will affect you. It may mean that you simply pay taxes to your home country instead. This partially depends on whether you intend to become a permanent resident of the USA or leave as soon as you are finished studying.
 
Other insurance:
 
You will need medical insurance. This is a benefit you should receive from your school, though not all will offer it. As you weigh your options, make sure to find out the degree of medical insurance they will offer. Either fully provided it free of cost to you or an 85% subsidy (you pay 15% of premiums) are the most common. These are usually good plans in that they cover nearly everything and are more cost effective since the risk is spread across the entire working portion of the university. 
 
When you receive medical care, you'll incur any costs not covered by the insurance. Certain services like doctor visits are usually paid for by what is called a "co-pay," which is a small flat fee you pay for each visit. The insurance company covers the rest of the cost. Depending on the insurance plan and type of doctor, these can be $5-$100. Under our new healthcare law, several types of preventative doctor visits must be provided free of cost: alcohol abuse counseling, aspirin for people of a certain age, blood pressure screening, cholesterol screening, colorectal cancer screen above age 50, depression screening, diabetes screening if blood pressure is high, diet counseling if you are thought to have risk of obesity-induced disease, HIV screening, immunizations, obesity screening and counseling, sexually transmitted disease testing, and interventions for quitting tobacco use.
 
The costs for procedures and how you are expected to participate can vary. You start with what is called a deductible. You pay almost all costs (other than certain flat charges like the doctor visit co-payment and free preventative services) until you reach the deductible amount. So if you have a $500 deductible and you have a mole removed for $1000, you know you will have to pay at least $500 of it. After you have met your deductible, the amount of coverage provided by insurance varies. Generally speaking, insurance plans will cover 90%, 80%, or 70% of costs at this point. So-called "catastrophic plans" will cover even less. A new part of the law requires for money you pay for drugs to count against the deductible, since this was not the case before. Drug costs vary by drug, but generally speaking a plan will have several tiers -- preferred generics, nonpreferred generics, preferred name-brands, nonpreferred name-brands, and uncovered. Preferred generics (drugs that are old enough that they are no longer patented by the original pharmaceutical company) will often be free or just $5 or $10. The costs on others can vary widely.
 
Another provision of our new law is a yearly maximum out of pocket costs, which sets a limit of how much you have to pay for all medical costs other than the monthly premiums and co-payments. This is set at roughly 10% of your income. If this is the case for your plan, if you pay $1500 - say, $500 from deductible and the other $1000 on prescription drugs and other procedures that your insurance helped cover - then the insurance must cover 100% of costs from there forward. All of this resets at year's end. It is meant to prevent you from losing all of your money due to an ongoing problem. There is no maximum amount for the insurance to cover -- a new part of the law. This means there is no limit to how much the insurance company may have to spend on your healthcare (in the past, companies would cut you off after a predetermined amount, at which point you were no different than somebody without insurance). Foreign nationals are eligible for insurance and if it isn't provided by the school, you are allowed to buy it along with federal assistance as a student. 
 
Other insurance to consider:
 
Dental insurance may be useful and is usually inexpensive. $20/month would give you a great dental plan that would make trips to the dentist less expensive and guard you against costly procedures. Some of these plans hardly do anything to help save you money while others can be great if you have something come up.
 
Vision insurance is the least common of health-related insurance and probably isn't necessary for a graduate student unless you have particular needs or it is provided by your school (dental and vision are not the standard for graduate student compensation). Seeing an eye doctor can be expensive, but not prohibitively so under most circumstances. A cheap doctor visit may be $100-$150 if you need contacts and the contacts will probably cost you $100-$200 per year if you do not have vision insurance.
 
If you own a home, you'll need homeowner's insurance. I doubt you'll own one. If you rent, that is the landlord's problem.
 
If you wish to drive, you must have car insurance. You will lose your right to drive if you do not have car insurance. The prices and coverage can vary widely, but each state will have a minimum of liability coverage. Without much of an American driving record, I am guessing that you will assessed as a fairly high risk and will pay more than the average person your age.

This is a good point and brings us to two things.
 
First, people who have "done it" like to be patted on the back and told how they have done the impossible. This is worth considering when you hear accomplished academics speaking about their job as if they are martyrs. It may not be as great of a job as it is made out to be, but let's not kid ourselves. Your tenured advisor almost certainly has a great job.
 
With that said, the reason this entire system continues attracting people is survivorship bias. This is an actual psychological phenomenon that affects us humans in multiple parts of life and it is alive and well here. We see the "survivors," AKA our professors, and do not encounter the "casualties." You can keep telling folks that 75% of literature PhDs never get on the tenure track, but the only people we make contact with are optimistic grad students and the survivors of the process. People tend to fixate on the survivors and dismiss the existence or relevance of the casualties. It is too tempting to just assume those casualties were not worthy. The system is not that great at rewarding merit. There are highly qualified people that will do everything right and lose this game. 
 
Of course, it is very easy to suggest to somebody to simply run away from the whole thing when you are not faced with leaving something that you are very passionate about doing. The truth is that there are some "right" circumstances to pursue this. The following are some standards that are a combination of suggestions from my mentors as well as a few places like The Professor Is In:
 
-you have to be young. A potentially decade-long process in which you will not be saving for retirement or preparing for anything but the job you fear not getting cannot be done in your 30s unless you have a spousal or other situation that puts you at no financial peril.
 
-you cannot be taking out any debt. This means your graduate school needs to support you with full tuition and fee waivers plus a livable stipend that comes with medical coverage. If you aren't getting these things, reconsider how much you mean to the program and/or how worthwhile a program that can't provide these things might be.
 
-on a related note, you can't already be under crushing debt from undergrad. If you took out $50K in loans in undergrad, going without an income for 5+ more years is probably a bad idea
 
-again on the financial side, you can't enter into life-changing circumstances like childbirth, home ownership, or perhaps even marriage if you expect to be covering the expense of these things yourself. You're allowed to live an adult life as a grad student, but you won't be compensated in a way to pay for it. There's no shame in a spouse that works and supports you while you study, but if you don't have one then don't burden yourself with financial or other commitments that you cannot handle on your own as a grad student.
 
-you cannot go to a school that does not have a clear track record of placing its PhD recipients in the kinds of positions you are seeking. If you cannot get hard data on this from the program, this should be a major red flag. Don't accept a few anecdotes. You want an idea of the percentage. You also want to know average time to degree and the attrition rate. If half the students quit, how good of a job is the program doing? "Fit" means nothing if you know going in that you have no chance at "fitting" into a job when you leave. If you aren't sure if you have a chance, you haven't done your homework.
 
-you don't waste your time at grad school and while you own and encourage your intrinsic passion for your work, you realize it is all wasted if you do not leave prepared for the job market. You also accept that being well-prepared will likely not guarantee your dream job...or any job. But if you did everything else, you'll be in a position to readjust to your circumstances and somewhat painlessly change the trajectory of your life if that is what is needed because you won't be too old, you won't be burdened by debt, you won't be obligated to a child you cannot afford to raise, etc.
 
I think the points on debt and school choice are the ones taken least seriously or are perhaps incorrectly interpreted. You don't get into the school you want and you start to expand the definition of what an acceptable program is.

Whether or not a given person has the money available, it's honestly a terrible investment. There is no PhD in any field worth the many hundreds of thousands of debt nor is there an MA that should cost at least 6 figures, especially after you factor in your living expenses. If you have the money, it might make sense to eat a short-term cost (maybe in-state tuition to get an MA) but to do something like the MAPH completely out of pocket is lunacy IMO. I believe there is no better use of your time than learning, but there are better ways to do it when you could buy several houses with the same expenditure. Why not just pay yourself to hang out at home or work some enjoyable, but low-paying job if you're going to drop that much money? 

We haven't talked a whole lot about the problem that is an overproduction of PhDs. This doesn't act like a market in that while the demand for PhDs is static or perhaps going down, the production continues to escalate. This is because the stimulus to produce PhDs is very far removed from the factors that influence demand. It does act like a market to the extent that each individual person with a PhD becomes much more easily exploited when there is someone happy to adjunct for $25K/year in their place due to the amount of PhDs on the [not always literal] street. 
 
I'm going to avoid the inevitable argument that will ensue by naming names, but we all see those schools on some folk's application lists. There are too many schools that are pooping out PhDs for who knows what reason, though I would surmise it has something to do with relatively inexpensive labor without the appearance of using adjunct labor. 
 
The truth of the matter is we have some programs that are doing a very good job of preparing and placing PhD recipients into the academic job market. Others are issuing PhDs, for sure, but those people come out highly unqualified for most desirable academic jobs. The PhD issuing apparatus is composed of far too many schools that are doing a whole lot of issuing and not a lot of placing. This isn't poor career advising so much as it is a doomed-to-fail system. If this were a real market and you heard there were so many cars being made that most of them had to be sold at half-price to become rentals after sitting for years on an over-filled lot...would you react by saying, "Hey! I'd like to start a car company!" Unfortunately, this is what many universities are doing. They persist in giving out PhDs and even commencing new PhD programs because non-elite schools risk very little in having their PhD recipients ultimately become unsuccessful academics.
 
I'm no free market guy myself and I think the deeper flaw in the system is that we care so little about funding our public schools that they are forced to resort to sacrificing educational quality in favor of bottom lines. The only reason they remain interested in quality is largely due to state-applied pressure to be great academically. If only we could apply the pressure for academic quality while also applying our funds like we did when the workforce was predominantly tenure-track. Instead we have this bastardized system that is forced to act like a business in some ways and act like a public good in others. Americans have become so completely individualistic that they see no value in supporting public education. Why should [some person who doesn't need public education due to age/economic status/lack of desire for it] pay for this? How could providing the populace access to great education that is unlikely to cause permanent financial harm benefit [that person]? The truth is that it does, but the effect is too delayed to be worth forking over some money.
 
Hayek said that there are three potential states for an economic system. It starts with a binary: you have free markets or you have socialism. You have central planning or you have completely decentralized planning. This is easy enough to understand. The alternate, he says, is when you do just a little central planning. In this case, you have oligopoly. 
 
I personally still find this incredibly reductive as there should be some interventions into society against the encroachment of markets. However, it is clearly true that poorly or incoherently-made efforts at intervention can cause this kind of calamity. You can look at our media apparatus, the oil industry, the soon-to-be-dead net neutrality, and you can look at the literature PhD problem. A haphazardly placed market incentive here and there turns the whole thing to shit. The solutions tend to always be profit-oriented because we can empirically measure that. Measuring educational value is about as possible as it is for the Supreme Court to define pornography...so it tends to lose out. We will see it declining but those who are interested in bottom lines can make the unfalsifiable claim that it does not. Thus, nobody sees the problem in the adjunct-dominated workforce and its hidden supplement, the graduate student workforce that preys on the dreams of young adults and churns them out as disillusioned 30+ year olds with no chance at the work they are trained for and the rightful expectation for important work that compensates them in a way commensurate with their level of training.

Whether or not a given person has the money available, it's honestly a terrible investment. There is no PhD in any field worth the many hundreds of thousands of debt nor is there an MA that should cost at least 6 figures, especially after you factor in your living expenses. If you have the money, it might make sense to eat a short-term cost (maybe in-state tuition to get an MA) but to do something like the MAPH completely out of pocket is lunacy IMO. I believe there is no better use of your time than learning, but there are better ways to do it when you could buy several houses with the same expenditure. Why not just pay yourself to hang out at home or work some enjoyable, but low-paying job if you're going to drop that much money?