"A doctorate in English that probably took you 10 years to earn is something you will need to hide like a prison term while you pay off about $40,000 to $100,000 in loans."

The latest don't-go-to-grad-school entry, from William Pannapacker (via Jacob Levy), claims to be about reforming higher ed, not convincing undergrads that grad school is a mistake, but is nevertheless a straightforward-enough addition to that genre (as well as a good source of links to the rest of the genre in recent years, including more by Pannapacker). And much of this latest one makes sense. Stats about placement should be a much more transparent element of the process. And it should be more openly acknowledged that not every grad student - not even every well-funded one in a top program - can, will, or should end up a prof (unless they radically reduce the size of departments). Job-market guidance needs to be informed by this, by the fact that many students will and by all accounts should take a library/research/secondary-ed/administration/etc. job in a town where they want to be, perhaps where they have a spouse and kids, rather than move across the country or abroad to be an adjunct, and should consider uprooting their families only for a permanent position. So items 3, 4, and 5, yes, yes, and (1,000x) yes.

Item 2 seems reasonable enough, but ignores the fact that only academics themselves care about the job description and rank of undergrads' instructors. The eternal fallacy of employees imagining that those they serve both know and care about the inner workings of the organization. Sure, "[p]rospective undergraduates and their parents should be able to choose institutions on the basis of who is actually doing the teaching," but even if they were able to do so, they'd still want to go to the most name-brand school and/or the one offering the best aid package. If this ended up factoring into rankings, great, but what would be the impetus for that shift? "If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged — at such great expense — they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching." Yet aside from profs and grad students, oh and maybe some conservative critics of academia who've run out of on-campus orgasm workshops to complain about, no one cares who's teaching undergraduates. Certainly not undergraduates themselves - and speaking as a former undergraduate, most of my best college instructors were of the 12th-year-grad-student-adjunct variety. (It's not that kids, as one Slate commenter claims, aren't there to learn - it's that college students who are there at least in part for that reason - and no shame in also wanting to be employable later in life - don't necessarily find that someone with 20-plus years as Expert can teach better than someone well-prepared and engaging but less-established.) And not the parents, either, who, unless massively wealthy, are just concerned that their kid makes a choice they can afford, has a decent time, and will get a job at the other end.

Item 1... makes sense insofar as it wouldn't hurt for there to be more centralization if that meant more transparency, but I had to check that I'd read right when I got to the part about the outcome for humanities grad students being "an unconscionable waste of talent (comparable to allowing 90 percent of neurosurgeons to work as bartenders)." I'm all about the Humanities Anti-Defamation League, but no, being able to make sense of Proust is not the same as the ability to do brain surgery. Nor, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability to do complex math problems brain surgery, if the math is not in any way applied, and I think the humanities are mocked in ways that other equally-impractical but more gendered-masculine pursuits are not. But brain surgery? No. But I guess Pannapacker has a history of overdramatizing the issue - in an earlier such piece he himself links to, he explains, "You can't assume any partnership will withstand the strains of entry into the academic life." Gosh, how foolish of any of us grad students to get married!

It's Item 6 - the classic 'don't go to grad school, you talented, fresh-faced youth' - I find least persuasive. At a time when it's tough out there for even those with practical-sounding lines of work to earn a living, should a college senior who majored in Comp Lit, who was never going to make it as an engineering major in the first place, who has a five-year offer of funding and health insurance and will have to teach a couple of the years, yes, but may well turn out to like teaching, something worth figuring out, after all, if you're going to be a prof, and who's also going to be paid, if not much, enough, to read books and write papers on a topic of his choice, should this senior turn that down in favor of the "real world"? And if so, do tell, which industry that would be happy to have him has he rejected in pursuit of the frivolous life of the mind?

Grad school probably is a worse bet than, say, inventing Facebook, but how does it compare with being one of 800 applicants for an admin assistant position that if you even get it in all likelihood pays not much more than what grad school does, with far less flexibility in terms of work hours, and with required purchase of business attire? I mean, my goodness, Emily Yoffe's article, and then her interview on NPR... It seems the way to get employed after a gap is to take people out for coffee or a meal all the time and pay - not just for yourself, so as not to be a burden - but the whole bill. This, apparently, constitutes "networking." How is it sustainable? Depressing, at any rate. And law school, fine, is a good choice if a top-10 school wants you and you want to be a lawyer, but otherwise? Between those two requirements - the ability to get in and the interest in/ability to thrive at a big law firm (because if we're talking a law job that pays $30k...) - that no doubt leaves many who have respectable offers from doctoral programs, but who wouldn't be well-advised to go the law-school route. Journalism, publishing, need I say more?

Point being, if by "grad school in the humanities," what's meant is a multiyear contract with a livable wage and health insurance, not to mention the added bonus of an interesting new peer group to hang out with (plus maybe even a future spouse), Pannapacker never makes clear what the preferable alternative is to that. Such programs exist, and sometimes those in them effectively could not be employed more effectively without redoing all previous life choices, inclinations, and talents, i.e. without rewriting their life stories and becoming engineers.

Of course, these articles never specify - Pannapacker mentions 10 years to degree plus massive debt, but does not say anything about the difference between that situation and programs much shorter and better-funded. The equivalent genre re: law school generally distinguishes between the few who should go and the majority who go but should not. Pannapacker says that you should only go if you're independently wealthy or the child of an Ivy League president, which suggests he doesn't think any programs are worth the bother... but describes a worst-case-scenario admission package.

No one's entirely clear what's being discussed. So you get people commenting about MA and PhD programs, about how it's better to get a doctorate in the sciences because at least those programs are funded (!), about how some "funded" program barely covered the tuition (!!), ignoring that funding ideally also covers tuition. If once, just once, one of these articles would spell out a) which routes are being discussed, and b) what alternatives are out there, in the job market that actually exists, not merely for The Young Person, but for the sort of people who are considering becoming fully-funded humanities grad students. If the answer is that it's dumb to major in anything impractical in the first place, so be it, but then that needs to be stated, and the change would need to occur well before a college senior is comparing his offer from Yale with one from Starbucks.