Bumblebea

This. 
And while we're on the subject, I'm going to have to drop in to do a little PSA about adjuncting. Please don't adjunct unless it's a matter of survival. When you adjunct, you basically eliminate your future line of employment. Moreover, you deserve better than adjuncting--we all do. We all deserve a job with benefits that pays a living wage, even if it's outside academia. I know that there are people out there who HAVE to adjunct ... but again, that's why those of us who have some sort of choice in the matter (i.e. other, better prospects) should not do it. (I could never have afforded to adjunct for an actual living anyway--it just doesn't pay enough where I live to support a single person unless you're willing to live with five roommates in a bad part of town. As @frenchphdpoints out, those who need to be self-supporting usually can't do it.)
Just say no to MAPH and just say no to adjuncting. 
 
On paying for master's degrees--so many people here have already made excellent points, so I won't belabor the matter. I will say, however, that I had a friend who did MAPSS, which is the "social science" equivalent of MAPH. She originally applied for PhD programs in anthropology and applied only to top-flight schools. She did not have a BA from a prestigious university, which I think is what set her back in the admissions process. For that reason, she was also very impressed with the Chicago name and really wanted a Chicago degree. She dropped a ton of money on MAPSS with the intent reapplying to PhD programs with a stronger and more elite background ... but when she was finished, she realized it wasn't feasible. She just had so much debt. She's been working a "soul-sucking" job (her words, not mine) ever since, struggling to pay off this ginormous Chicago debt. Her proposed anthropology projects were fascinating, and I feel that she should skipped MAPSS and reapplied, maybe to less-prestigious schools or maybe to the same schools but with an improved application. But in any case, she's not only not an anthropologist; she's not-an-anthropologist with debt and a job she really did not ever intend to take. 

Who gets into prestigious PhD programs? Well, I don't meant to sound flip here, but if I'm going to be completely frank ... those who get into prestigious PhD programs are, most of the time, people who went to prestigious undergrad institutions. Yes, there's a pipeline. There is nepotism. There is an attitude of "these people have what it takes to make it because they already made it--they were able to get into a prestigious school in the first place." 
Branding is powerful. Familiarity is powerful. The "benefit of the doubt" is powerful. Confirmation bias is EXTREMELY powerful. A person with a BA from University of Scranton is a bit of an unknown quantity; a person with a BA from Amherst with a connected adviser already has the bona fides and doesn't have to prove that they'll be able to pull their weight in a seminar room at Columbia. People look at the Amherst BA's writing sample with a different attitude from the one they take with the Scranton BA's. That's just basic human psychology, and no one's immune. 
I read this book a while ago, and it explains the thought process of a lot adcom members of prestigious PhD programs (and it can be rather shocking to read, tbh): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates
In academia, prestige breeds prestige breeds prestige, and what you do--as either an undergrad or a grad student--is looked at through the lens of which schools you went to. That's why the faculty pipeline has remained closed to many who don't fit the elite mold. When asked why faculty continue to remain so homogenous, a professor from Penn spoke frankly: "We don't want [diverse candidates]. We don't want them": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/26/an-ivy-league-professor-on-why-colleges-dont-hire-more-faculty-of-color-we-dont-want-them/
Does that mean that no one from less-elite institutions can get into a prestigious school? No, of course not. We see exceptions every year. Hell, I've met many. But to be quite honest with you, they were often very, very exceptional. Just to give a rundown (and it goes without saying that this is all based on my personal anecdotal experience):
- I knew one guy who went to an unknown state school and ended up in the PhD program an at Ivy. He was extremely brilliant and hardworking and managed to publish a peer-reviewed article in a major journal by the time he was a senior in college. He also had excellent mentoring at his state school--something that is very rare in most off-the-beaten-path places where professors are less likely to be "in the research loop" (i.e. know what makes for compelling, cutting-edge research that is going to get the attention of Ivy League adcoms). 
-I knew a couple other people who managed to "trade up" from the state school where we got our master's. Neither had gone to very good undergrad institutions, but both had sky-high test scores. More importantly, both had faculty mentors who contacted faculty members at the schools to which they were applying and lobbied for them very strongly. (To give you an indication--one guy applied only to three schools, which I thought was a suicide mission at the time. But he was absolutely CERTAIN of his chances ... and sure enough, he got in to the most prestigious university in the country. Later it came out that his adviser had really pulled some strings.) 
-I know someone who started off at a community college but managed to transfer those credits to a very prestigious public university in their state. Again, they made connections at this university. Working with somewhat famous faculty, they published a paper and won a major undergrad research fellowship. They ended up getting into three Ivies. Also had sky-high (nearly perfect) test scores.
 
By contrast, most of the people I've known who went from prestigious undergrad institution to prestigious PhD institution rarely had to show the same kind of "evidence" of their brilliance. Not that they weren't brilliant--but they certainly weren't published or winning research fellowships by the time they were seniors in college. But it was accepted that they could hack it at Penn because they were already at Swarthmore, etc. 
So my main takeaway is that it's possible for people from more modest backgrounds to get into elite programs, sure. But many of those people often had to work much, much harder, score higher on those stupid tests, and make valuable connections along the way. In sum, their application package had to be near-flawless to merit serious consideration at the nation's top schools. 
Some other reading on the topic:
https://sarahkendzior.com/2015/03/06/institutional-bias-in-academia-hiring/

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

Who gets into prestigious PhD programs? Well, I don't meant to sound flip here, but if I'm going to be completely frank ... those who get into prestigious PhD programs are, most of the time, people who went to prestigious undergrad institutions. Yes, there's a pipeline. There is nepotism. There is an attitude of "these people have what it takes to make it because they already made it--they were able to get into a prestigious school in the first place." 
Branding is powerful. Familiarity is powerful. The "benefit of the doubt" is powerful. Confirmation bias is EXTREMELY powerful. A person with a BA from University of Scranton is a bit of an unknown quantity; a person with a BA from Amherst with a connected adviser already has the bona fides and doesn't have to prove that they'll be able to pull their weight in a seminar room at Columbia. People look at the Amherst BA's writing sample with a different attitude from the one they take with the Scranton BA's. That's just basic human psychology, and no one's immune. 
I read this book a while ago, and it explains the thought process of a lot adcom members of prestigious PhD programs (and it can be rather shocking to read, tbh): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates
In academia, prestige breeds prestige breeds prestige, and what you do--as either an undergrad or a grad student--is looked at through the lens of which schools you went to. That's why the faculty pipeline has remained closed to many who don't fit the elite mold. When asked why faculty continue to remain so homogenous, a professor from Penn spoke frankly: "We don't want [diverse candidates]. We don't want them": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/26/an-ivy-league-professor-on-why-colleges-dont-hire-more-faculty-of-color-we-dont-want-them/
Does that mean that no one from less-elite institutions can get into a prestigious school? No, of course not. We see exceptions every year. Hell, I've met many. But to be quite honest with you, they were often very, very exceptional. Just to give a rundown (and it goes without saying that this is all based on my personal anecdotal experience):
- I knew one guy who went to an unknown state school and ended up in the PhD program an at Ivy. He was extremely brilliant and hardworking and managed to publish a peer-reviewed article in a major journal by the time he was a senior in college. He also had excellent mentoring at his state school--something that is very rare in most off-the-beaten-path places where professors are less likely to be "in the research loop" (i.e. know what makes for compelling, cutting-edge research that is going to get the attention of Ivy League adcoms). 
-I knew a couple other people who managed to "trade up" from the state school where we got our master's. Neither had gone to very good undergrad institutions, but both had sky-high test scores. More importantly, both had faculty mentors who contacted faculty members at the schools to which they were applying and lobbied for them very strongly. (To give you an indication--one guy applied only to three schools, which I thought was a suicide mission at the time. But he was absolutely CERTAIN of his chances ... and sure enough, he got in to the most prestigious university in the country. Later it came out that his adviser had really pulled some strings.) 
-I know someone who started off at a community college but managed to transfer those credits to a very prestigious public university in their state. Again, they made connections at this university. Working with somewhat famous faculty, they published a paper and won a major undergrad research fellowship. They ended up getting into three Ivies. Also had sky-high (nearly perfect) test scores.
 
By contrast, most of the people I've known who went from prestigious undergrad institution to prestigious PhD institution rarely had to show the same kind of "evidence" of their brilliance. Not that they weren't brilliant--but they certainly weren't published or winning research fellowships by the time they were seniors in college. But it was accepted that they could hack it at Penn because they were already at Swarthmore, etc. 
So my main takeaway is that it's possible for people from more modest backgrounds to get into elite programs, sure. But many of those people often had to work much, much harder, score higher on those stupid tests, and make valuable connections along the way. In sum, their application package had to be near-flawless to merit serious consideration at the nation's top schools. 
Some other reading on the topic:
https://sarahkendzior.com/2015/03/06/institutional-bias-in-academia-hiring/

I did not think you were aiming this at me. After all, I do indeed have a job. But I spent a large chunk of my life trying to get one, so I'm eye-rolling at some of the statements people make that imply that the market is self-sorting and that those who didn't get a job didn't deserve one in the first place because they made some "gaffe" along the way that ensured their unhireability, just as those who got hired somehow did everything "right" and deserve their success. Such as: 
I mean, really? Yes, of course there are hundreds of people who enter the job market every year who are published in respected journals, who win grants, who are qualified (really??? you think this comes down to who's the most qualified??), who don't make interviewing mistakes (!!! if it only came down to interviewing mistakes so that people could fix them!), who have interesting research that "matters" (always a subjective thing anyway), who aren't "narrow specialists" (my years and years of teaching at a non-Ivy League program ensured that), and who have taught a wide range of classes (lol, again, after years on the market and VAP circuit, just ... lol). 
And as far as being "over-qualified"--I mean, sit down. Honey, we're all over-qualified these days.
After my own years on the job market, though, I vowed never to engage in this kind of blaming. I realize just how insanely arbitrary the market is, and that anyone who has a job just got lucky. There were 200 people who could have gotten my job and were just as qualified, and they didn't. I'm not a special unicorn. I do not have a special brain. Yeah, I did a lot of "right things" along the way, and I worked hard, but so did a lot of other people. It almost didn't work out for me, and if it hadn't, it would not really have been my fault. 
The experience was extremely humbling. What's distressing to me, though, is that successful job seekers still want to see less successful candidates as responsible for their own lack of success. That doesn't exactly fill me with optimism for the future of the discipline. 

I was not speaking literally. My point was that, no, there aren't EVEN 20 "safe" programs you can graduate from that will give you a better shot at tenure-track works because oftentimes these days there aren't even 20 TT jobs in any given cycle! So of course there's no safe program, nor is there a magic bullet that will get you a job.  
This last couple years have been, hands down, the worst on record, and according to some experts we haven't hit bottom yet. 
Yes, there are anecdotal cases of people graduated from X program and getting hired at elite Y school. There are always anecdotal cases and always have been. In fact, I would venture to say that at this point ALL WE HAVE are anecdotal cases--not patterns anymore. We don't see enough people getting hired to even begin to quantify things. Some of the Ivy programs haven't made a TT placement in a couple years. The fact that someone outside the Ivy League gets a good job does not negate the overall pattern, nor should it be taken as evidence that "if you work really hard that's all that matters and you will get a job." It should more like be taken as evidence of "sometimes miracles happen, but statistically speaking they will probably not happen for you."
I mean, I also had a lot of those things--major publications (one which won an extremely elite award), a prestigious national dissertation fellowship, presenting at sometimes 7-8 conferences at year, teaching experience out the wazoo and glowing teaching evaluations, and, yes, relationships with professors, many of them leaders in the field. And oh yeah, now I've got an article forthcoming from the tip-top journal in the entire field. And I still spent six years on the market, coming in second for a lot of jobs. So no, I am not going to sit here and say that some people get jobs because they worked hard and accrued experience and made connections. A lot of us do those things. And a lot of people still go home empty-handed. 
The job market these days is about being lucky. Extremely lucky. No more of this bootstraps stuff. 

(Disclaimer: My own scholarly interests lie in the distant past, so my need to historicize the crap out of things is definitely coloring my responses to you here. People working in different eras might have much different advice.)
I think what everyone is recommending is that you need to retreat from the idea of taking one specific approach and instead think about combining different approaches. That is, if you like to come at literature from an aesthetic/formalist approach, that's great, but the literature you study is still going to require close attention not only to form but also to the historical/political issues that inform the backdrop of your chosen literary era. 
Combining approaches isn't going to be like "add a dash of gender criticism and a sprinkling of Marxist theory"--no, these days we think about approaches emerging organically from what the text is telling us about authors and readers of the time. Like, for instance, let's say you're writing about a picaresque novel that involves cross-dressing. You're probably not going to be able to write an article ONLY about the formal properties of the picaresque mode, though you might start there. You instead would do a detailed discussion of the picaresque combined with gender issues, and you'd think about how gender issues might influence the author's use of the mode, or how the mode might push the author to have specific engagements with the theme of cross dressing. And you're going to have to do research into cross-dressing and gender issues of the 18th century (or whatever century you're studying), no way around it. Then let's say the next picaresque novel you study takes place against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade. Same issue will apply--you'll have to do research into the Atlantic slave trade and think about the relevant theories as they might help you discuss the novel. And if gender issues also arise there (since race and gender and colonization don't exactly respect boundaries), then you'll also want to address that.
Basically, you have to think about what the literature is telling you and work from there. Like, IME the time has passed when people self-identify as "Marxist" or "feminist" alone and go through novels and poems and stories and apply only one theory. Their work might deal with the same issues time and time again, but that's probably because the approach is useful to the literature they study. Scholars tend to pick approaches that are most helpful to them rather than starting out with "feminism! feminism! I must do feminism!" and then applying feminist theory to everything they read. (In fact, excessive focus on one cultural approach is probably bad because we now recognize the importance of intersectionality. If someone is focusing only on gender, they're going to get called out for ignoring the experiences of non-white people, and if they're focusing on social class issues as they relate to men, they're going to get called out for ignoring women, etc. etc.) I mean, Gilbert and Gubar might have written a landmark text about women and literature ... but their work has (maybe unfairly) served as something of a punching bag ever since and an example of a narrow-minded approach.
So I'm being really long-winded here, but my main tl;dr takeaways are:
Any program worth its salt is going to have a whole bunch of people on faculty who do all kinds of approaches. You're not going to find a (good) program that is invested in one thing and hostile to all others (and if you do, run). It's true that some programs seem to produce more scholars who work on a variety of aesthetic approaches (Berkeley comes to mind--a lot of their people do novel studies and poetics) ... but people are also always going to market themselves as having a cultural angle, since that's what the job market wants these days, and that's what's going to publish. Look closely at grad student interests and review recent dissertations.  Think about what your chosen literature is telling you. It might have formal/aesthetic aspects that you find really cool, but it's also going to be engaging with other cultural issues in some way. Think about how the form might influence the treatment of issues and vice versa. This might be a way to integrate approaches and therefore seem more attractive and identifiable to adcoms.  Check out this guy's work: http://mcgarrett.faculty.wesleyan.edu/ I'm not an Americanist, but I love his work and it seems to me that it's very formalist but also attentive to social and political history. 

Who gets into prestigious PhD programs? Well, I don't meant to sound flip here, but if I'm going to be completely frank ... those who get into prestigious PhD programs are, most of the time, people who went to prestigious undergrad institutions. Yes, there's a pipeline. There is nepotism. There is an attitude of "these people have what it takes to make it because they already made it--they were able to get into a prestigious school in the first place." 
Branding is powerful. Familiarity is powerful. The "benefit of the doubt" is powerful. Confirmation bias is EXTREMELY powerful. A person with a BA from University of Scranton is a bit of an unknown quantity; a person with a BA from Amherst with a connected adviser already has the bona fides and doesn't have to prove that they'll be able to pull their weight in a seminar room at Columbia. People look at the Amherst BA's writing sample with a different attitude from the one they take with the Scranton BA's. That's just basic human psychology, and no one's immune. 
I read this book a while ago, and it explains the thought process of a lot adcom members of prestigious PhD programs (and it can be rather shocking to read, tbh): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates
In academia, prestige breeds prestige breeds prestige, and what you do--as either an undergrad or a grad student--is looked at through the lens of which schools you went to. That's why the faculty pipeline has remained closed to many who don't fit the elite mold. When asked why faculty continue to remain so homogenous, a professor from Penn spoke frankly: "We don't want [diverse candidates]. We don't want them": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/26/an-ivy-league-professor-on-why-colleges-dont-hire-more-faculty-of-color-we-dont-want-them/
Does that mean that no one from less-elite institutions can get into a prestigious school? No, of course not. We see exceptions every year. Hell, I've met many. But to be quite honest with you, they were often very, very exceptional. Just to give a rundown (and it goes without saying that this is all based on my personal anecdotal experience):
- I knew one guy who went to an unknown state school and ended up in the PhD program an at Ivy. He was extremely brilliant and hardworking and managed to publish a peer-reviewed article in a major journal by the time he was a senior in college. He also had excellent mentoring at his state school--something that is very rare in most off-the-beaten-path places where professors are less likely to be "in the research loop" (i.e. know what makes for compelling, cutting-edge research that is going to get the attention of Ivy League adcoms). 
-I knew a couple other people who managed to "trade up" from the state school where we got our master's. Neither had gone to very good undergrad institutions, but both had sky-high test scores. More importantly, both had faculty mentors who contacted faculty members at the schools to which they were applying and lobbied for them very strongly. (To give you an indication--one guy applied only to three schools, which I thought was a suicide mission at the time. But he was absolutely CERTAIN of his chances ... and sure enough, he got in to the most prestigious university in the country. Later it came out that his adviser had really pulled some strings.) 
-I know someone who started off at a community college but managed to transfer those credits to a very prestigious public university in their state. Again, they made connections at this university. Working with somewhat famous faculty, they published a paper and won a major undergrad research fellowship. They ended up getting into three Ivies. Also had sky-high (nearly perfect) test scores.
 
By contrast, most of the people I've known who went from prestigious undergrad institution to prestigious PhD institution rarely had to show the same kind of "evidence" of their brilliance. Not that they weren't brilliant--but they certainly weren't published or winning research fellowships by the time they were seniors in college. But it was accepted that they could hack it at Penn because they were already at Swarthmore, etc. 
So my main takeaway is that it's possible for people from more modest backgrounds to get into elite programs, sure. But many of those people often had to work much, much harder, score higher on those stupid tests, and make valuable connections along the way. In sum, their application package had to be near-flawless to merit serious consideration at the nation's top schools. 
Some other reading on the topic:
https://sarahkendzior.com/2015/03/06/institutional-bias-in-academia-hiring/

It's worth mentioning that ASU's English department has hired 7 tenure track English faculty in 2021 alone. Of course the job market is still prohibitively competitive etc. etc. but in a number of institutions the pandemic $ means tenure track hires. I still broadly think you're right--let's face it, people who go to state schools will either adjunct or leave the profession in 99% of cases, and admitting there is still a small chance enables people to delude themselves into thinking that a TT position is probable. But the institutional humanities are not quite yet a completely lost cause, as the fatalists on this and other websites might insist.

@nocapheremakes excellent points. If your goal is to go to graduate school to go to graduate school (a perfectly valid choice, btw!), then find a funded program and go. If your goal is to become a professor ... well, it's true that you may have a better chance coming from an elite school, but that "better chance" is largely meaningless when there are only two jobs in your field. 
I think that English graduate studies is suffering a bit from "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. I mean, everyone has been saying for years--no, decades--that there are no jobs. It's true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades, but saying "there are no jobs!" when there were, in fact some jobs, now makes the cry of "there are no jobs! no, seriously, no jobs!" feel hyperbolic. It's not hyperbolic. There are literally next-to no jobs. To give some perspective: the first year I went on the market, I think there were ~25 TT jobs in my area, and that was considered a bad year (the profession obviously produces more than 25 PhDs in this area each year). 
Last year, there were two TT jobs in North America in my area. And it's not an obscure field. And one of those jobs was cross-listed with another area. (That's happening more and more--the Hamilton job, for instance, was advertised as an 18th-19th c. position of either British or American. I can't imagine how many applications they received.)
This disconnect between perception and reality was driven home last week when I had a conversation with an old friend whose significant other is completing a PhD at an Ivy and preparing to go on the market. Significant other is freaked out about his chances. My friend said, "But it'll be better for him than it was for you, right? He's coming out of [very prestigious program], and that'll make a difference. He can write his own ticket." And I was like, "Um, right now, no. There are literally no jobs and therefore no ticket to write." And friend said, "But they've been saying 'there are no jobs' for years. Are you telling me it's not just an exaggeration? That there are really no jobs?"  
People were saying there were no jobs when there were 25 jobs. But now there are almost no jobs, and many people are still behaving as though "no jobs" is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not. And yes, of course Covid has played a major role in the tanking of the job market, and I suppose the market could come back. But all indications point in the other direction, as the pandemic has been extremely good for certain universities. Other universities are using it to justify all kinds of austerity measures, which always hurt tenure-track prospects in A&S the most. I saw the same thing happen with the Great Recession. At the time, everyone said, "the job market will bounce back once the economy does." It didn't. Instead, it showed universities that they could get away with consolidating TT lines, replacing retiring faculty with adjuncts and contingents, paying junior faculty less, and, in some cases, doing away with TT hires altogether. (A department where I taught previously hasn't made a TT hire in more than ten years despite multiple retirements; they just hire a series of "visiting" professors for a few years at a time, kicking them out after three years. When I went to our new faculty orientation, 90% of the new faculty were NTT.)
These things didn't stop happening when the Recession ended. They got worse because they benefited universities. I won't be surprised if Covid has a similar impact in the long-run, where universities end up prospering while job prospects get even worse for PhDs. I'd look to Arizona State as a bellwether--they're actually thriving due to the pandemic by combining faculty downsizing with online courses: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-colleges-that-prospered-during-the-pandemic 

OP, you're an excellent candidate, and at another time in the history of higher ed you may have been able to pursue your dream job with confidence, but now is not that time. I'm sure you've seen all the doom-and-gloom essays on the job market, and maybe you've seen some statistics, but those things don't capture your chances in a truly accessible way. Here's a good way to measure your odds of being competitive for your dream job:
Look up the wiki page for 19th century Brit Lit jobs from last year: https://academicjobs.wikia.org/wiki/Romanticism_/_Victorian_/_19th_Century_British_2020-2021
There were 3 tenure-track jobs in the United States, one of which (Hamilton College) was an ad for a specialist in the 18th and *early* 19th c. (Anything with "visiting" in the title isn't a t-t job.) Now, these are jobs that have (presumably) filled since the new academic year has started at most schools. Google the English department faculty page for each of those 3 institutions. Both St. Norbert College and Hamilton College have faculty profiles for 18th/19th c. Brit Lit Assistant Professors. The odds are high that these were the people hired for those ads from the last cycle since Assistant Professor is the lowest rank on the tenure-track. If you look up their names on Google/the Department Faculty page, you'll see their interests match each ad to a T. 
The faculty member who took the Norbert College job has a PhD from the University of Michigan from 2018, and the one who took the Hamilton College job has a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. The Michigan PhD grad served as an assistant professor at another SLAC prior to taking the job at Norbert (their CV is available online).

There are 150+ English doctoral programs in the US. Many of those programs (100+?) will admit 19 c. specialists. Say there are 30-40 19th c. specialists entering the market with PhDs every year. (Very conservative estimate, as are all my estimates here.)There were 3 jobs last year, 1 of which went to a person moving from another tenure-track job (which may or may not be replaced at that institution).  The remaining 27-37, who understandably do not want to give up on their dream, roll over onto the next cohort of applicants in next year's cycle. That's why PhDs from 2017 and 2018 are entering tenure-track jobs in the 2020 cycle. Now, this process has repeated for over a decade. Some candidates might give up and seek other types of jobs after a few years. Even with that attrition, you are conservatively looking at 150+ highly qualified 19th c. specialists, all of whom will have amazing CVs, publications, etc. (given that they persevered in grad school for 5+ years knowing the brutal market) for a pool of 3 jobs (one of which went to an 18th c. specialist!) I know it's easy to equate this to the competition for grad school admissions, but it's really an apples to oranges comparison. All candidates on the market are high achieving with stellar CVs. Many have great dissertations. The kinds of distinctions search committees make to narrow down finalists can be pretty random with such a pool of candidates.
What happens to all the 19th c. specialists from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Virginia, Brown, etc.? If any of those programs produced a 19th c. specialist last year, that 19th c. specialist probably didn't get a tenure-track job (I admit, the College of New Jersey, the third t-t job last year, has not updated its Faculty page). In fact, some of those programs are likely to have produced *multiple* 19th c. specialists in the last few years who haven't landed tenure-track jobs.

What you want to do with this information is your call, but I hope this answers your question of "what are my odds of getting into a prestigious PhD program" which as you say is a proxy for the question "what are my odds of landing a tenure-track job."

Who gets into prestigious PhD programs? Well, I don't meant to sound flip here, but if I'm going to be completely frank ... those who get into prestigious PhD programs are, most of the time, people who went to prestigious undergrad institutions. Yes, there's a pipeline. There is nepotism. There is an attitude of "these people have what it takes to make it because they already made it--they were able to get into a prestigious school in the first place." 
Branding is powerful. Familiarity is powerful. The "benefit of the doubt" is powerful. Confirmation bias is EXTREMELY powerful. A person with a BA from University of Scranton is a bit of an unknown quantity; a person with a BA from Amherst with a connected adviser already has the bona fides and doesn't have to prove that they'll be able to pull their weight in a seminar room at Columbia. People look at the Amherst BA's writing sample with a different attitude from the one they take with the Scranton BA's. That's just basic human psychology, and no one's immune. 
I read this book a while ago, and it explains the thought process of a lot adcom members of prestigious PhD programs (and it can be rather shocking to read, tbh): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates
In academia, prestige breeds prestige breeds prestige, and what you do--as either an undergrad or a grad student--is looked at through the lens of which schools you went to. That's why the faculty pipeline has remained closed to many who don't fit the elite mold. When asked why faculty continue to remain so homogenous, a professor from Penn spoke frankly: "We don't want [diverse candidates]. We don't want them": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/26/an-ivy-league-professor-on-why-colleges-dont-hire-more-faculty-of-color-we-dont-want-them/
Does that mean that no one from less-elite institutions can get into a prestigious school? No, of course not. We see exceptions every year. Hell, I've met many. But to be quite honest with you, they were often very, very exceptional. Just to give a rundown (and it goes without saying that this is all based on my personal anecdotal experience):
- I knew one guy who went to an unknown state school and ended up in the PhD program an at Ivy. He was extremely brilliant and hardworking and managed to publish a peer-reviewed article in a major journal by the time he was a senior in college. He also had excellent mentoring at his state school--something that is very rare in most off-the-beaten-path places where professors are less likely to be "in the research loop" (i.e. know what makes for compelling, cutting-edge research that is going to get the attention of Ivy League adcoms). 
-I knew a couple other people who managed to "trade up" from the state school where we got our master's. Neither had gone to very good undergrad institutions, but both had sky-high test scores. More importantly, both had faculty mentors who contacted faculty members at the schools to which they were applying and lobbied for them very strongly. (To give you an indication--one guy applied only to three schools, which I thought was a suicide mission at the time. But he was absolutely CERTAIN of his chances ... and sure enough, he got in to the most prestigious university in the country. Later it came out that his adviser had really pulled some strings.) 
-I know someone who started off at a community college but managed to transfer those credits to a very prestigious public university in their state. Again, they made connections at this university. Working with somewhat famous faculty, they published a paper and won a major undergrad research fellowship. They ended up getting into three Ivies. Also had sky-high (nearly perfect) test scores.
 
By contrast, most of the people I've known who went from prestigious undergrad institution to prestigious PhD institution rarely had to show the same kind of "evidence" of their brilliance. Not that they weren't brilliant--but they certainly weren't published or winning research fellowships by the time they were seniors in college. But it was accepted that they could hack it at Penn because they were already at Swarthmore, etc. 
So my main takeaway is that it's possible for people from more modest backgrounds to get into elite programs, sure. But many of those people often had to work much, much harder, score higher on those stupid tests, and make valuable connections along the way. In sum, their application package had to be near-flawless to merit serious consideration at the nation's top schools. 
Some other reading on the topic:
https://sarahkendzior.com/2015/03/06/institutional-bias-in-academia-hiring/

Okay. Several major problems with what you're saying here. 
No, adjuncting is not your "only option" to stay involved in academia, and not everybody has had to adjunct at some point or another. In fact, again, I would recommend that you do not do this unless you absolutely HAVE to (as in, "I need to stay alive and adjuncting is the only way I can buy food this month"). Yes, the system is exploitative. Yes, the universities are to blame. But no, you are not somehow obligated to be exploited simply because you need to stay in academia and you have an English degree and boy oh boy what are you supposed to do now. 
More importantly, a degree in English is not some kind of sentence to working at Office Max or Starbucks. To say that is just wrong, and it also hurts us in the long run. Part of the reason the academic job market is so bad--especially in the humanities--is because of the near historic decline of people majoring in the humanities. The school where I got my PhD is busy dismantling the English department as we speak, replacing required lit classes with business writing and creative writing. (And this, by the way, is a "top 30" program, though I doubt it will be much longer.) Part of this decline is due to the fact that people buy into the bullshit that getting a degree in English or history or French will doom you to a lifetime of pouring coffee, and therefore no one is allowing their kids to major in the humanities anymore. When we talk about having to work into Office Max, we perpetuate that myth and do a terrible job of selling our line of work to the next generation of students. A degree in English is actually super useful and can be lucrative. In fact, it may actually be more lucrative in the long run if one decides to go into private sector work. Here's the notoriously conservative "The Hill" on the subject: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/411925-a-humanities-degree-is-worth-much-more-than-you-realize
I got my (fully funded) master's in a humanity at a time when the economy was tanking--in a much worse place than it is right now. I decided I didn't want to continue to a PhD at that point. I applied for jobs--both adjunct and professional jobs. I landed my first professional editing job making $40k a year with excellent benefits (they wanted an English major!) ... on the same day I got a call from the community college offering me a couple classes for $1100 each. Obviously I chose the editing job. 
I have never worked as an adjunct. 
I managed to get into a PhD program several years later; not being part of academia didn't keep me from getting back in. Sure, it was harder in terms of the fact that I didn't have access to JSTOR from home, but I had several public universities in my area where I could go and make copies of articles and use databases. 
And even if you don't land a professional job, no PhD program is going to care that you worked at Office Max or mopped floors at Wendy's. They just are not going to care!
I would also add--and this is super important to keep in mind--that it's necessary for humanities PhDs to cultivate skills outside academia. Because, as others have pointed out, even if you get your PhD at Harvard, that's no guarantee of academic employment. The copy editing or technical writing you did for a couple years between degrees might come in handier than you realize. 

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

If those are the types of skills you mean, I am not sure why you advocate for some involved selection process - you can learn these skills at any job.

Not really:
1. Trying to predict what will happen 5-10 years from now is a fool's errand. You can make an educated guess, but the degree of field-specific perspective you would need to do that is not typically available to the average entry-level applicant. Also, in 5-10 years, any technical skills you have will be out of date anyway. 
2. The vast majority of jobs don't require any special skills, or require such that are easy to pick up in a couple months. 
3. Just in my personal experience, the bigger benefit of having work experience as an applicant with a PhD is that it gives employers the confidence that you can work in an office. Hiring is a risk-mitigation activity, as in employers are not so much interested in hiring the objectively best-skilled person as they are interested in hiring the person that minimizes their risk of a problem employee or having to repeat the search, and that's why stuff like employers fretting about PhDs being overqualified comes in. Something in the same vein that gets discussed less is the inherent contradiction in hiring someone with a terminal degree, who is likely highly technically skilled (even if those skills are transferable), but having no empirical evidence that the person can navigate an office environment - something that most people learn as interns or entry-level employees. It feels silly to hire this person on to do entry-level tasks, but at the same time, when you have no confidence that they can do basic but critical things like appropriately interact with their boss, appropriately interact with the client, etc, you can't hire them on to higher-level roles where the cost to the company of them messing up is much higher. So that's really why it is important for PhD applicants to invest time in getting "real-world" work experience - to demonstrate that they have the basics down.

Just want to chime in to second Bumblebea on the point that you don’t need to have “relevant” job experience. The modern economy changes constantly and is forever inventing new positions and even just new names for positions that sound trendier. (My old position has about three different names, and I made a point of putting all of them on my resume, lol.) It means jack. Everyone, even people who currently have jobs, needs to be updated in a general sort of way about where the industry is going, what the new (and generally idiotic) lingo is, and what software skills are required going forward. Some tech valley nonsense startup might be calling a perfectly viable position for you “Solutions Ninja.” You never know.
(This reminds me of one of my most Office-Space-y stories, where one of the absolutely essential members of my department at a very big company, a web developer, told me he’d been on contract for seven years because he hadn’t realized that they were calling web developers “Communications Analysts” for some reason and hadn’t seen any benefitted web developer positions available at the company!)
You don’t need to overcomplicate researching jobs. Just literally go into Indeed and type in keywords of skills you have. “Writing” and “content” are a good start, but don’t shy away from learning some basic software so you can do something more specialized or getting a certification. You just do need some kind of job experience, so get that for yourself one way or another.

Well, a few small quibbles with your quibbles. 
I don't think this is really necessary, unless you have your heart set on a very specialized field. It's very difficult to predict what the nonacademic world is going to value in ten years, and I would argue that work experience for the sake of work experience is valuable enough. Full disclosure: between getting my Ph.D., doing a postdoc, and teaching for five years, I was away from the nonacademic workforce for a whopping twelve years. The job I worked after graduating college? No longer exists. But it gave me some transferrable skills and, more importantly, it proved to employers that I wasn't just some "Ivory Tower academic" who didn't know how "the real world" worked. (It's an unfair perception, but one that a lot of employers still hold.) 
Having said that, I did do a few things after I lost my TT job to "freshen my skills"--I took some online courses through the Society of Technical Communication. I also volunteered to write press releases and copy for some nonprofit orgs, just so I could start to put together a portfolio of more recent "deliverables" (I hate that word, but that's the word we use). I reworked an academic paper to make it a "think piece" that got published in a major venue--another thing for my portfolio, and one that raised my profile.  
If you're nearing the end of grad school right now and aren't sure what you want to do next, I'd recommend looking through your old papers, projects, and syllabi, and think about what can be remade as public writing or "copy" that you can put in a portfolio. Especially syllabi blurbs and course advertisements, since we spend a lot of time pimping our classes to uninterested undergrads--something I stressed in interviews ("oh, you want someone to write copy? I persuaded 40 students to take a class in 18th-century literature by doing X, Y, and Z!"). 
I did not mean to imply otherwise. Adjunctification is a long, slow process that started a few decades ago. My point was simply that many of us who entered grad school around the time of the recession were told that things would turn around in four or five years and there'd be a big hiring boom once the economy came back. That never happened. Universities just learned how to exploit people better, and the number of TT jobs dropped while the number of NTT jobs ballooned. Even after the economy rebounded, university hiring did not. And why would it? With an army of adjuncts and lecturers to exploit, they have no incentive to act ethically or humanely.
Having said that, I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe hiring will come back in five or ten years. But based on past experience, I'm guessing that this pandemic demonstrated to universities just how much they can get away with in terms of labor exploitation. Hopefully I'm wrong. 
Interestingly, this hasn't yet happened on the scale that people predicted. Last year, everyone predicted mass closures of smaller, less-elite colleges. It didn't happen. Universities are apparently more resilient than we thought. This article from the Chronicle really lays this out: 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-havent-more-colleges-closed
It was predicted that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 colleges would close due to the financial strain of the pandemic. Only ten have closed so far. It's possible that more will close, but so far universities have proved to be pretty durable.
That being said, financially "unhealthy" institutions tend to not spend a lot of money hiring humanities professors. This paragraph sums it up: 
Colleges have also reduced or transformed certain programs and practices in response to evolving environments — as well as to reduce their costs. For example, over the years, the proportion of tenure-line faculty has declined while the proportion of lower-cost contingent faculty has increased. Colleges have also eliminated or restructured departments and degree programs to make their offerings more marketable to prospective students. In short, institutions have proved they are willing to make adjustments, reorganizations, and even substantial cuts to lower expenses and keep up with market demand. This willingness to adapt has no doubt been a factor in keeping many colleges financially afloat. 
I think it's safe to say that, as long as institutions remain financially unhealthy, we won't see a lot of growth in programs such as English, history, philosophy, religion, or classics. But these institutions will probably remain in business because they've learned that they can just yell "we're running out of money" and shrink humanities programs while growing their more "professional" programs. 
There's also the Johns Hopkins situation. A year ago, JHU proposed a series of budget cuts and austerity measures in response to the pandemic, including cutting benefits and laying people off. Faculty called bullshit on the idea that the university was running out of cash. As it turned out, the faculty were right. They demanded a forensic audit, which revealed a much rosier picture of the university's financial health than the administration had tried to paint. 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-era-of-artificial-scarcity
Obviously, Johns Hopkins is a major prestige university. It's not Caldwell University or Ohio Dominican or some other college that's barely hanging on, so JHU professors have a lot more clout to throw around ... but the situation demonstrates how universities often justify making cuts--by telling everyone that they're on the brink of financial ruin. And faculty tend to fall in line. JHU represents one situation where the faculty didn't fall in line, and they discovered just how badly the university administration was lying to them.
My point in all this is to say that the hiring situation in the humanities seems to operate independent of whatever the economy is doing, and more in tandem with how people perceive the humanities to be doing, and, more importantly, with what administrators can get away with. And right now? Administrators know they can get away with murder. They can get away with paying professors very little and making deep cuts to the humanities under the banner of "we don't have enough money and not enough people are majoring in history/English/foreign language." 
But all this is beside my point. What I want to say to prospective graduate students is this: It is totally your life. If you decide you want to go to graduate school despite the dim forecast, then that is your choice and you have every right to make it. If you decide not to go, then that is also your choice. Probably a wiser one! But you won't ruin your life by getting a PhD. Now, when you graduate into nothing, you might feel that way. You may indeed feel like "I have ruined my life by giving up seven years for nothing." But you'll be okay. If you can write a dissertation and survive grad school politics, lol, then you can weather the nonacademic job market. Trust me on that one.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

Three very slight wrinkles to this outstanding post.
First, if you seek work experience before going to graduate school, find a job that will teach you skills that will be relevant five or ten years from now. AI and ASI are raising the bar on technical jobs while simultaneously pushing many roles towards obsolescence. As an example, during and after the Great Recession, there was demand for "medical coding." Now, it seems that insurance company platforms have it all figured out.  Knowing how to do more with ever less, how to manage projects and budgets and risk, how to get along swimmingly with everyone from the C-Suite to the mail room, how to solve ambiguous problems under pressure, and how to do a job with minimal training are have been consistently sought on job listings since the Great Recession.
Second, at least in history, the internal outsourcing of academic jobs started started in the early 1990s. My two cents are the outsourcing is the byproduct of the end of the Cold War, the unending "culture wars," America's unceasing anti-intellectualism, and, to be fair, ongoing mistakes made within the Ivory Tower. The pendulum may swing back eventually but will it in the lifetime of anyone on this BB is anyone's guess.
Third, the pandemic exposed the impoverished status of financial and strategic planning in the Ivory Tower and has accelerated the impact of lessons unlearned from the Great Recession. Some institutions have thrived and will recover while others may end up failing utterly. The point here is that if you're a current or aspiring graduate student trying to figure out how "marketable" your expertise may be by the time you graduate, there is so much going on in the background that even if you're a rockstar who is going to put asses in seats, publish game changing works, and appear on nightly news shows, you still may not find a job because the bean counters are measuring completely different key performance indicators. And down the line, the job market @Bumblebea forecasts may include newly minted holders of Ph.Ds competing against displaced professors with proven track records of publishing, committee work, and teaching.

@Bumblebea This is all very fascinating to me. I read your post with great interest (although I am not in the humanities, it is always interesting to read others' accounts who have also braved the academic job market). I definitely agree with you that aspiring faculty should give themselves a time limit for amount of time they are willing to be on the academic job market. In my field, it is commonly the case that PhD graduates need to do a postdoc or two in order to land a TT position. In my specific field, I would strongly encourage PhD alumni to weigh their other options if they come up empty-handed on the academic job market after a second postdoc (~4-5 years out of the PhD). This is not to say that my field is comparable to English lit, but in any field, there does seem to be a time limit before a PhD becomes too "stale," and it's best to cut your losses.
I also agree with you that it may be worthwhile to pursue a PhD even with all of the sunk costs, but it is also important to have realistic expectations re: job market and not to romanticize the professorship (or any job). There can certainly be a lot of tedium in academia, just like any other job, and I often have to devote a substantial amount of my day-to-day doing paperwork and working on things unrelated to research/teaching. And you do have to deal with constant rejections (rejections for articles, grants, book contracts, job applications, etc.). I think this can be tough for some people's egos, if they are used to excelling in school. I've gotten used to it by now, but it was really demoralizing for me at first. 

Anyway, I don't want to venture "out of my lane" too much. But I wanted to say that I really appreciated your detailed post, and a lot of the things you said ring true universally in academia, not just in English lit!

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.