gdnittis

This spreadsheet has very limited implications. You include curatorial assistants and the most recent hires among them have PhDs. That should tell you all you need to know about whether or not you will need a PhD to be competitive on the modern/contemporary market. A more productive data set would order these hires chronologically. While it was - and to a certain extent, still is - possible to become a curator of contemporary art without a PhD, the trend has shifted towards increased professionalization and academicization. There are plenty of online resources that catalogue press releases for recent hires - theirs is the education you should model. Your peers (and competition) are not curators of contemporary art who were hired with a CUNY MA fifteen years ago. If you look through the openings for curators of modern and contemporary art on AAMC, you'll see that over half the assistant-level and nearly all of the associate-level jobs now list "PhD preferred." It seems like you've already decided not to complete a PhD and you're looking for justification. Your education and professional career are yours to pursue, but you are working from flawed data. I am based internationally and many of my peers have two-year graduate degrees, but without native or near-native fluency in a language other than English, that route is a wash. The PhD is becoming a pre-requisite to be competitive in the United States beyond entry-level curatorial positions.