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Dear Prospective Students,
 
I thought of addressing this post to my former self when I was eager to attend a PhD English program--when I was totally committed to getting in, doing well, joining the profession. But I write to you as I am. I have a new PhD, it's from a program many of you wish to join, and I have been successful publishing my work. However, after years of hard, painstaking work, I find myself living a nightmare of despair, frustration, and anger. I'll spare you the particulars, but the academic job search has been worse than any of the articles on Slate or the Chronicle can describe. It has been crushing in ways that I do not have a language to describe. You might read this as hyperbole, but you forget that this is about making a living. And the consequences that follow from not making one. 
 
I want to tell you something that you've read many other places and that you know rationally: this profession is in shambles. It's a Ponzi scheme. And it does not matter if you attend UCLA or Columbia, UNC or Duke, the opportunities for a viable career are dwindling, rapidly. Look at the academic job wiki; see the reality of what awaits after you struggle intellectually and financially for at least several years in graduate school.
 
The problem is that these doctoral programs need you to survive. And they're looking to hook you on the illusion of academe. They offer you 30k to study! To get a PhD! To have a chance at the table to role the die for a TT job. Why not accept their offer? It's a dream!
 
Here's what they're not telling you and what you're not seeing at your campus visit: the emotional devastation of making this investment and suffering the rejection that awaits an increasing number of you in spite of your faith in divine academic providence (there are plenty of Calvinists that comprise your cohorts). It might not be about a job for you now, but it will become a mad hunt for a job once you have the exact same credentials, publications, and experience that merits an assistant professorship. But academic hiring is not about merit--it is about fit. And fit means inside hires, BS searches, and lateral moves. I know that these seem like distant, vague frustrations. But when you find that there are only a handful of openings in your field to begin with, the reality of these searches will overwhelm you.
 
You can dismiss this post as a bitter rant.  However, I intend this as a sincere warning. I mean this from my heart, and I would not or will not amend it even if I find myself employed in the academy, managing the scheme. Believe me, I wish I could extol the virtues of this profession; I believe deeply in the importance of teaching and research. However, the profession often actively undermines these labors in favor of careerism, self-aggrandizement, and nepotism. These realities have been devastating in ways that I never anticipated and that I never thought I would be vulnerable to experiencing. Again, once you commit--which you have to do in order to produce work you can take pride in--you open yourself up to living the nightmare because escape becomes increasingly unfathomable.
 
Take your intelligence and your drive and your curiosity and find something that will reward you with a living. You cannot make a living doing this. The people responsible for safeguarding this profession turned their backs on you long ago; don't turn towards them now.

A full-time job in academia is by definition a dream job. This isn't the only field where that is a true statement. Like, welcome to reality?
Also, come on, I was under the impression that I'm talking to an adult with a PhD, not a college freshman to whom I have to explain essential terms. I did not call you a loser by virtue of saying that you played the game and lost. I stated a fact. In other words, you took a big risk and the big risk didn't pan out. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with mathematics. People lose all the time, and it's okay. People lose jobs, loved ones, money on the stock market - and it's all a part of life. It's not a judgment of your character, intelligence, ability, or whatever is important to you. It's also a neutral statement with regards to "the system": whether or not these probabilities are just and fair, these are the probabilities, and this time they did not work out in your favor. It's as non judgmental a statement as anyone can make in this situation. That you are a mature specimen and still can't deal with failure says everything about you and nothing about me.
It's really fucking rich that you try to paint me as some neoliberal shitlord, when you're the one who thinks this system will apparently be fixed by telling people not to attend grad school. That's sure as shit the definition of pinning responsibility on the individual and avoiding questioning the system. Maybe sex workers should starve instead of letting men objectify their bodies? The reality is, you don't understand how the system you're bashing works, you have no interest in understanding it, and as a result, your argument is tired and ineffective to an embarrassing degree. You don't have good intentions or any intentions at all outside of bitching about the bad hand life and society and professors and everyone else but yourself has dealt you. Guess what - you're not alone. 7.5 billion human beings feel the same way. It's interesting that you don't address your financial situation or give any specific examples of people being exploited, despite having responded to me with the same drivel 3 times already. Please, explain to me how you were or are exploited. Or do you have too much money where your mouth is?

Seriously, just to put a finer point on it, cool off with this type of rhetoric. Not because it offends me personally but because I think it's seriously damaging to the thousands of graduate students and adjuncts who really are being exploited. 

My cohort's still going. It was a small cohort (started at six, there were four of us after year three or so), and I'm the only that's graduated so far. I finished in six years, the rest of them are in their seventh year. 
I never talked about not my getting my dream job. I may not have been clear, but what I was after was a job with full benefits, a longer-than-nine-months contract, and some longterm job security. In other words, yes, tenure track. I applied to hundreds of TT jobs and there were definitely a couple dream jobs in there, which of course I did not expect to get. But I was, admittedly, a little shocked when I didn't receive an interview over the course of two full years on the market, including at many places that were basically the opposite of dream job. 
Quite honestly your response sounds a lot like the teacher-bashing I see elsewhere and wouldn't really expect here. It's my fault, not the system's. That's fine, I accept a large degree of responsibility here. Clearly other people got all those jobs that I didn't. And I'll reiterate, I feel pretty lucky. I came out debt free, I got to teach a bunch of great classes, I enjoyed the research I did. But the "you played the game and lost, loser" thing, while effective as a message board takedown, is just not reflective of reality. 
 
 

I guess these posts don't bother me because this is what my colleagues and I discuss constantly. Three people left the program last year (not all from the same cohort, mind you) because of concerns about the state of academia. Also, yeah, I recognize that grad school may provide more stability for some people than others. And I 100% agree: I have major problems with narratives that describe people with PhD's on food stamps as inherently more tragic than people with GED's on food stamps.
That said, I am concerned with these echoes of grad school being a great place because of funding and stability and such. Yes, it may provide more security than other positions and fields, but it's still super problematic. Mizzou grad students just straight up lost their health insurance last year. Yes, they got it back, but it's still just the mediocre grad student plan. At the same time, grad students at Emory and Arizona State lost dependent health care. So if you're a single parent and in grad school, then you're fucked. Many stipends are below the poverty level for the geographical area. As my friend says, we are overworked and underpaid and preparing for jobs that don't exist. Because adjunctification is real, and it's devouring the academy as we know it, hurting both adjuncts and undergrad students. 
In other words, things are messed up. But my plea isn't to tell folks to get out. I'd be a hypocrite to do so, and part of me still holds onto hope that we can collectively change the direction of higher education. Instead, my question is always: what are you going to do about it? Be alert to the exploitation of academic labor, and all the unpaid labor you will be asked to do in your program. Be alert so, when an opening arises, you can organize and make your program a better place for you and for future academics. Be alert because, as stipends and tenure lines decrease, these changes will hurt the most marginalized scholars and potentially dissuade them from pursuing a career in academia. But we need a diverse professoriate! We need to make sure that our grad students can feed and house themselves. And we need to situate our labor concerns with larger criticisms of exploitation and poverty: what are the hourly workers on your campus making? At UMD, hourly workers can be paid less than the state minimum wage. How can we leverage our educational privilege and our anger about the turning tide of academia to make real institutional change?

Great point! Part of the problem is that TT positions are being replaced with contingent positions (renewable lectureships, VAPs, adjunct work), rather than TT positions. Consequently, even if grad schools reduce the size of each cohort, it may not help since you can no longer assume that when one TT person leaves, they'll be replaced by a TT person in that same department. At many institutions, TT positions now go into a pool and if a smaller department loses a person, "their" line may go to another department. That of course isn't something a grad program can anticipate or plan for.
There have been a bunch of posts related to this on VersatilePhD over the past few years. I highly suggest you start reading them now to understand what you can do to mentally prepare for a non-academic position.

I'm doing this because I'm getting paid good money (considering my cost of living) to do what I enjoy.  I'm fully aware that my options may be limited to instructor, lecturer, or adjunct when I go on the market, and because my passion is teaching, and not driven by a capitalist impulse to excess, I'm completely okay with that.
Btw- your bitter is showing.

Cool, thank you. That seems like a smart way to approach things. Good luck. 
By the way I don't mean to imply that people's defensiveness or dismissiveness in response to my OP is unjustified. Like I said, it's certainly the reaction I had for a number of years. But I've watched so many people crash and burn around me, and have experienced my own fair share of crushing defeat and misery as a result of academia, I'd feel bad just not saying anything. Of course, I recognize my anonymous voice doesn't amount to much, particularly when there's an ever-growing bibliography of 'don't go to grad school' think pieces to choose from.
But, if it's useful to anyone, particularly those of you who haven't yet started grad school, I am happy to answer questions about my experience, what led to me leaving academia, etc. 

Actually it would mean a great deal to me if I were able to convince one person considering this path to choose some other way to spend the next 6-8 years of their life. I really wish someone had tried to convince me of it. 
Furthermore, I believe that PhD programs are pretty shameful in their inability or unwillingness to address this issue with current and prospective students. Recently I was asked to attend my school's admitted students day (I work as an adjunct at the same school I got my degree from). Couldn't do it in good conscience. By the same token, I can't just sit here silently and watch others walk right into the same disaster that I did. Of course you're free to ignore what I'm saying, but maybe someone else won't. 
What the person in the 'ponzi scheme' thread was trying to say, it seems to me, is true, and worth considering: These universities will exploit you, and that's all they'll do.
For what it's worth, I'm going to be fine. I've carved out an alternative path, and my life isn't ruined forever. I'm lucky that I don't have debt. But I regret getting a PhD. The whole system is set up to damage people, and I wish I'd known that going in. 

To all admits,
 
If you don't mind disclosing the funding packages you received from programs that admitted you, please take a brief moment to fill in the spreadsheet in the link below. I have been looking at the spreadsheet from the English, Rhetoric and Composition thread to get a very general idea of how generous the schools are, but realizing that what I get is not department-specific information, I figure this should help a lot for next year or (hopefully) future applicants. So thank you the ERC thread for the initiative !
 
Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10XIYhIw4fCbUend2WkA3iujfftu9TrXwR-YKcgr3JKo/edit#gid=693576939
 
 

I don't give a thought to be fearful of the academic job market because I entered in my PhD program with two tracks in mind-- academic and research (in think tanks, museums, etc).  My adviser has been amazingly support in this respect and has made sure that I'm broadly trained every step of the way thus far.  A lot of that thinking came from spending YEARS knowing I wanted a PhD but did not want to be a professor. 
You know, there's a whole world out there that needs historians or people with excellent writing/critical thinking/research skills.  The only difference is, you just can't always work on your own research agenda, that's all.

My advice is to resist building your entire identity, community, and career around academia.  Develop outside interests, contacts, and related skills.  
I've observed people work hard with the tenure-track in mind only to fall flat and then feel like they have been cut off from their entire lives as they knew them. It's better to retain an awareness that you might have these 5-7 years in the university setting, and that'll be it.  Develop a fallback (or two) that you can feel happy about.

Hi Storia,
I PM'ed you, but I thought I should copy part of my reply for everyone.
The first reason you should seek out students beyond Visit Day events is that anyone is bound to be more candid when they are not at official department events, in front of faculty and other students.  The visit days are, after all, intended to convince you to go to the institution. So, talking to people on the phone or off-campus on coffee often elicits different perspectives.  Even about the great things, students can't share (I'm not going to say in front of other faculty that I think my adviser is the most committed one in the department, even though he is).
The other reason is that oftentimes, students participating in visit day are in the first few years of the program.  They can tell you a lot about coursework, advising, even quals -- but they are unlikely to be able to say much about the job market, funding for final years, dissertation advising, etc.  Dissertation advising, research, funding, etc. can be very different than advising, research, and funding is in early-grad school -- so you want to talk to people at all stages.  It's best to contact several students of your adviser's and/or in your field, and make sure to talk to those on the job market and/or prepping for it -- that will be you in a few years, after all!
The more people you talk to, the better - and the more varied perspectives you hear, the more complete picture of a department you'll have.
 
 
 
 

Graduate students are happy to be honest because, well, they know that the PhD is tough.  They do want to support people who want to give it a shot but offer plenty of warnings.  We all know that there are opportunities beyond the PhD that pays far more than what graduate students make.  So why be unhappy and make $15,000 when you could be making $75,000 elsewhere instead?
Listen carefully to graduate students-- ask them point-blank how they're being funded in order to finish.  Some will be ashamed to admit to taking out loans because we ALL know that we aren't supposed to be paying for a humanities PhD and will not admit anything.  Ask them good questions about their expenses (there is a huge difference between having a car and not, having kids and not, and having a roommate and not!).   If you hear a lot of students talking about fellowships/grants, then you know the department has a good track record (though just pay attention to their fields-- some fields are better funded than others).
Ask grad students which faculty members they love and why.  Ask them who to avoid for seminars and why (believe me, we are opinionated in this as it's already torturous to sit for 2 1/2-3 hours).  Ask them what they like about the city and recommend some favorite venues/restaurants/etc.  If they seem "meh," ask them where they lived before (I lived in big cities before coming to my PhD program so I don't have the *best* view of my current city ).  Get to know them. 
Yeah, definitely ask about their teaching responsibilities and the undergrads they work with.  There is nothing like being a TA that will rouse conflicted feelings out of them....

I'd  second ashiepoo72's recommendation to seek out the general mood of grad students.  In particular, it's important to talk to grad students beyond the ones volunteering for events -- those are often early in the program and cherry-picked for the task. To get a real sense of how the whole program is going to work, it's really important to talk to students at all stages of the program and seek out some that aren't selected to participate. I did this with some top schools as an admit (Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago), and I was somewhat stunned by the differences of opinion and experience.

Don't book until you are admitted.  Departments can work with each other if you have overlapping visits.  You will be given sufficient amount of money for travel.  You will (usually) be able to stay with graduate students.  For most part, you will be fed.
 
You will be best served to ask such questions to graduate students who are going to be much more honest about these things than the faculty.  Graduate students will offer a more consensus view of the department's relationship to the University and the Graduate School.  If you want to ask someone who isn't a grad student, then the graduate coordinator is actually the best person of everyone you will meet to answer those questions because s/he deals with the administrative side of the program.  The DGS mostly focus on the interpersonal relationships and has really little power to effect change with the higher ups.  There are varying degrees in which the faculty are committed to their advisees, other graduate students, and the program as a whole.  It is definitely worth asking about their philosophy on graduate education and what they like and want to change about the graduate program.  If they mention "changes," then listen because those ideas will come in form of direct advising (some form of defiance  you might say ).
But I wouldn't go in the nitty gritty of the bureaucracy (as in regulations) at this point because, frankly, bureaucracy sucks no matter where you wind up.  And nobody likes it.

Quickmick - I agree with you, except your last point: "Besides that, the cream rises to the top."  I think that it's great to get a PhD in history and any other discipline you're excited about.  I do not think its great to continue to tell students that if they're talented and hard-working, it will work out.  There is no evidence to support that claim, especially in the dominant fields. The AHA has repeatedly said as much:
http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/the-troubled-academic-job-market-for-history
I think that the AHA has done a good job of responding ethically to this issue. They are doing what Prof. Anthony Grafton recommended and highlight the new Plan A for history PhDs: careers beyond the professoriate. If departments and professors want to admit students for 5-10 years of rigorous study and very low-paid, but rewarding work and make clear to students that they are unlikely to become professors, by all means, they should.  If students want to enter with the knowledge that they are being given the opportunity to write a dissertation and little else, they should.  What I object to is not the PhD, it's the inclination to paper over the job issue and advertise the idea that "the cream" will be ok. I especially object to the presentation of evidence about the job market as "negativity". The only reason that the evidence of declining jobs and increasing PhDs will read negatively is if the profession, the departments, the professors, and the students continue to think that the right outcome for doctoral students are TT jobs, and that those who are deserving will get them. It is equivalent to blaming the unemployed for being so during a recession, and then dismissing labor reports as "doom and gloom."
I think this is particularly difficult for students, unlike Quickmick, who do not have clear alternatives, access to back-up funds, or family security.  In my department, those most likely to drift into adjuncting are those without spousal support, parental support, or a previously lucrative career.  I find that problematic - and something that the profession needs to address.