<p>...The journalist and writer Anya Kamenetz once said that graduate students are "really smart suckers," and I—as a Ph.D. who teaches at a liberal arts college—couldn't agree more. It's my view that higher education in the humanities exists mainly to provide cheap, inexperienced teachers for undergraduates so that a shrinking percentage of tenured faculty members can meet an ever-escalating demand for specialized research. Most programs are unconcerned about what happens to students after they graduate, and it's not pretty. In all likelihood, a humanities Ph.D. will place you at a disadvantage competing against 22-year-olds for entry-level jobs that barely require a high-school diploma. 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. Your consolation: deep thoughts about critical theory....</p>
<p>It really does depend on the subject though. PhDs in the sciences are very useful to have and are often fully funded one way or another (meaning zero loans to pay off).</p>
<p>Do the negatives of an non-technical PhD include opportunity costs and an aura of overqualification? A PhD even non-technical should be free and sakky (in other threads) have said that you can simply not mention it if you think a PhD will cause you to not get the job due to overqualification. So the only real costs should be the opportunity costs.</p>
<p>I believe the opportunity costs are indeed the key to the analysis. Anybody with the intellectual capability and - more importantly - the work ethic to complete a PhD could have surely learned plenty of other marketable skills in that same timeframe. Let’s face it - it’s really not that hard to learn such skills as software programming, information technology, bartending, hairstyling, or other such vocational skills, and while they may never make you rich - although apparently software programming just might make you the world’s youngest billionaire along with being named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year and becoming the focus of a critically acclaimed film that probably should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture - you’ll still be able to put food on the table.</p>
<p>I personally think the most egregious lacuna regards how more PhD students aren’t able to earn high school teaching certificates as an easy add-on to their degree program. Plenty of high school teachers don’t even hold bachelor’s degrees, let alone PhD’s, in the subject that they teach; we could surely upgrade the intellectual talent pool of teachers by having more PhD’s. And while surely plenty of PhD graduates would not become good teachers, let’s be perfectly honest, many existing teachers aren’t exactly good teachers. While you’ll never become rich as a teacher, it’s still not a bad job - you can enjoy the summers off, winter breaks off, and many school districts will grant tenure after a few years which effectively makes you unfireable.</p>