Exactly. To recast this in a slightly different way, none of us are perfect models for what a graduate student should be. There is no such model. Despite the incessant academic careerism of so many prospective graduate students in the humanities (myself included), people should and do pursue graduate study for many reasons. What if he just wants to be able to include PhD on his resume? Or style himself as really really smart? I'm sure that is a motivation, perhaps not the dominant one, for many of us.