8 Reasons You Shouldn’t Go to Grad School (for social sciences or the humanities)

If you’ve decided to get a degree in science, engineering, law, business, medicine, or anything important, this article doesn’t apply to you. This is only for those who are thinking of taking an advanced degree in history, languages, sociology, anthropology and a host of other fields that don’t really need to exist.

I have spent the past six years at a major research university studying history as a masters and now a PhD student. I’d be lying if I said I regretted my decision to go to grad school because I’ve had some really good times and because I have literally no idea what I’d be doing if I weren’t in my second decade of post-secondary education.

Having said that, pretty much everyone will try to sell you on the advantages of graduate school: you can improve yourself and your future job prospects, don’t have to get a “real job”, the job market is really bad right now, and a whole bunch of other things about how you’re tragically, tragically unemployable, which is totally true. But very few people are willing to tell you the truth about graduate work. I think Marge Simpson said it best when she opined that “graduate students aren’t bad people, they’ve just made terrible life choices.” And boy, did they ever.

1. You won’t make any money (ever)

           
I think I should save you some time and tell you right up front that you’re not going to make any money working in the social sciences or humanities, at least not while working for a university or the public sector. A professor once told me that the market price for a Ph.D. in the humanities or social sciences is $80,000 a year to start, but starting salaries for universities are sometimes half that. My professor went on to explain that this price discrepancy exists because of tenure. The theory goes that professors have essentially traded high salaries for job security, allowing them to say or do pretty much anything after they’ve convinced the university that they’re relatively sane (this latter part never quite works out the way people think it should).

“You all fail forever at everything! Why? Because I have tenure, bitches! Professor Beardface, OUT!”

The obvious flaw with this theory is that there are no tenure-track jobs available anymore. According to a study by the American Federation of Teachers, only one in four teaching positions are tenured or tenure-track, and most new positions are contingent employment, meaning that for many academics, tenure is straight out. Contingent jobs pay significantly less and are often only for a year or two. Here’s the real kicker though: even though these jobs suck, there are more people competing for them than ever before. There are already too many academics competing for far few jobs, driving down salaries, giving universities the option of not offering tenure, and generally allowing them to jerk us around.

I’m told there are jobs outside of academe, but good luck getting your professors to tell you anything about them or to write letters of recommendation if you turn your back on the profession because many of them think it’s a waste to train students only to have them go into the real world.

2. You won’t be the smartest person in the room ever again

Pretty much anybody who goes to graduate school is smart, unless they’re getting a PhD in education.

This is what real graduate students think of when they see you, education Ph.Ds

My IQ is two or three standard deviations above normal, which is the same gap that exists between normal people and the mentally retarded. This means that, statistically, the average person is mentally retarded compared to me. This isn’t hubris, it’s just math.

I could explain it to you, but, you know, the retardation…

All through high school and my undergraduate career, I was usually the smartest person in the room, or at least clever enough that the difference didn’t really matter. All that changed when I got to graduate school, where I easily felt like the dumbest person who ever lived. And not just in classes, but just hanging out with my grad student buddies.

Pretty much everyone in graduate school is frighteningly smart and has specialized knowledge in fields that you didn't know existed. For this reason, many graduate students suffer from something called "imposter syndrome" sometime during their career. Imposter syndrome is when you feel like you have somehow managed to fool the world into thinking you’re bright enough to get where you are, but you’re secretly not.

Like this, only less insipid and more soul crushing.

As a result of feeling out of place, graduate students frequently feel inadequate and try to prove that they belong where they are, which makes them seem like arrogant pricks, which makes people avoid them, furthering feelings of alienation. Or they just brood alone in their hovels. Basically, grad students are crazy enough that psychologists, most of whom were, at one point, inadequate graduate students, had to come up with a name for how crazy they are. Way to go, social sciences, your practitioners are now creating phenomena for you to study! 

Even though you’ll never feel self-esteem again, at least you’ll never meet anyone to share your misery with because…

3. You will never meet anyone who is even remotely datable

           
In my experience, graduate students either come in with a spouse or significant other, or they remain alone forever. Although there are exceptions, this is the rule and it makes sense. After all, during your first couple of years as a grad student, you will meet three types of people: faculty, other graduate students, and (if you’re teaching) students.

And the janitor! Ours is named Mary, and she has spurned my advances for the past five years.

Most universities have rules against graduate students dating faculty or their undergrads, and no one wants to date grad students, especially other graduate students, so that effectively winnows your dating pool down to approximately none. After every year of grad school that I was still single, I let a  friend set me up with someone. Every blind date she has ever tried to set me up on has it come with some sort of hitch, like she thinks the woman “might be gay" but that’s the dating pool available to me.

I’m increasingly convinced that I’m going to end up marrying a divorcee with three kids after I get my PhD, just so that I can join a family already in progress in order to catch up with every other person my age.

“So, Bobby, uh, what would your father do in this situation?”

“Smoke a pack of Luckies and curse at the Dodgers.”

“Oh, I… fuck it, get your coat, we’re going for ice cream.”

Fortunately, your loneliness will be tempered by the fact that…

4. You’ll probably end up on drugs

It takes a, er, special type of person to go into academia. They tend to be overachievers with slight obsessive compulsive propensities, which leads to a lot of anxiety and depression when faced with the stresses of graduate school. In one of my first graduate classes, the professor helpfully stated that many, many people end up needing some sort of drugs to get through the program, so we might as well get that squared away from the beginning. This turned out to be good advice, and the easiest way to get the doctors at the student health center to prescribe you mood-altering drugs is to lead with the vital information that you are a graduate student.

“Jesus! Just… Jesus, take them all! You need all of the drugs!”

After my first month of grad school, I was out with friends when one of my colleagues walked into the bar, sat down and stated that she was having an "existential crisis." At no point did anyone think that this was surprising or really noteworthy. We didn't even think she was being a drama queen, it just felt par for the course. In fact, it’s a widely known assertion that there are only two types of people who actually feel ennui: graduate students and the French. Of my friends in graduate school, one vomited every morning until she decided to quit, at least one faced a serious period of clinical depression, and one kept a toaster near the bathtub "for really bad days."

So which of these fonts of normality would you go for? It was the toaster chick, wasn't it? She was my choice too.

Sure, I guess you could date outside of the people you see every day, but that doesn’t matter because…

5. You won’t be able to talk to normal people anymore

Most of graduate work in the social sciences and humanities is about becoming conversant in a special vocabulary and learning to analyze issues in a special manner. When you first get there, you’re likely to be overwhelmed by the staggering amount of technical terms and shorthand that gets thrown around casually. Eventually, without realizing it, you will start to talk in this same, incomprehensible manner. But Foucault’s theories of the panopticon don’t mean shit in the real world and no one is going to get your pun on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To be 100% clear, no one knows what either one of those things are.

Sure, you might convince a couple of people that you’re clever and you might even win a couple of arguments with your newfound knowledge. I, for one, have never lost an argument wherein I used the word “econometrics,” which I’m pretty sure has something to do with the episodes where David the Gnome talked about the environment. Graduate school has convinced me that all conversations are arguments because it’s only through the dialectic of debate that we can refine our ideas.

I'm a big proponent of sharpening my knife with Hegel.

But the problem is that your friends and family won’t necessarily think you actually won the arguments, or, frankly, even know what you’re talking about. Academic debating is largely about making a statement and then defining your terms so narrowly and idiosyncratically that no one can prove you wrong. Normal people, on the other hand, just make assertions that don’t need to be based on reality and then continue to insist until the other person stops caring or dies, which is a more permanent version of not caring.

This is what all of cable news looks like to me.

No one in America likes smart people; at best, they tolerate them, and that’s really no way to spend Thanksgiving. But even worse, you won’t even want to talk to normal people because…

6. Everyone who isn’t in the academy suddenly seems dumb

Once you get used to sitting around with other grad students, debating issues and cracking wise about obscure topics like some sort of Algonquin Round Table, normal people are going to seem like idiots (I bet you needed to Google the Algonquin Round Table; I feel nothing but contempt for your public school education, extracurricular activities, and dates with real, live women). 

Admit it, though: you pictured this, didn’t you?

This reaction is quite normal whenever an in-group forms, and it’s exactly the reason everyone hates you (that and your casual use of sociological concepts). The normals don’t get it, they’re not part of your in-group. And since they don’t get it, they feel excluded.  Remember how I said that you learned a special vocabulary and ways of thinking? Well, the people you meet in everyday life don’t know anything about your special world of books and dead French philosophers. My sister, for example, still thinks I made up the word historiography. 

What kind of common ground can we have now, me with my book learning and you with your murderous rages?

This is not to say that graduate students are necessarily smarter or better than other people; their training leads them to approach issues in an analytical manner with a nuanced and a precise vocabulary (an approach that unbiased observers might define as “smarter” and “better”). These approaches and vocabulary just create distance between academics and non-academics. It’s not all that different from how car guys can never seem to find any common ground with those of us who understand internal combustion engines in theory, or how misogynists refuse to talk sports with women. Unless you have common ground and vocabulary, you literally can’t understand people. But car guys can usually talk to people about things other than cars, whereas a grad student is ruined for just about all facets of life.

By the way, there’s one group of people, who will not have been trained in your specialized vocabulary and approaches to problem solving, that you just can’t avoid…

7. You’ll have to teach

Unless you are far, far smarter than me, at some point in your graduate career you’ll have to teach. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like teaching, but seriously, some of these kids are just fucking killing me. 

"The Platonic abstraction of you has ruined my life. Now I need a drink and a good cry."

I’ve taught college level courses for five years, and almost without fail, they roughly breakdown into the following pattern: about 10% of them read the assignments and show some understanding of the material, actively take notes, show some insight and know how to write. These are the driven, motivated students that learn a lot and make my life worth living. There’s another 10% who put the same level of work in and are clearly bright, but they’re still putting things together, so they’re not as insightful; I call them the “educable,” in that they could someday become worthwhile. Another 20% will make some effort, read some of the assignments, and understand enough of the material to not understand why they’re getting Bs and they whine endlessly.

A further 40% of the class will have absolutely no idea why they’re in the room and will make the barest of efforts. They never say anything in class and I never learn their names no matter how hard I try. Their grades seem to correspond almost entirely to their intelligence and ability to remember crap they weren’t paying attention to. 10% will claim to have worked super hard and don’t think it’s fair that they’re getting Cs because they assure me that they spend way more time studying for this class than they do for their other general education courses. When I try to explain to them it’s because their work makes me feel like a 17^th century pirate captain (“I’m seeing a lot of the high Cs!”), they furrow their brows in a futile attempt to understand. The remainder is composed of foreign students who I will not characterize because that’s racist, and wrong. But they talk funny, so that’s usually worth a laugh.

To best illustrate the problem with undergraduates, I will cite examples of actual complaints from my students. Bear in mind that these are things students have actually said to me. Every year I will get some people complaining that I didn’t post my Power Point presentations on the course website (which I totally did, Susie!), that you have to read my mind in order to get a good grade on exams (mostly I’m looking for my students to repeat what I told them in a semi-intelligent manner), that I should just tell them the answers and not make them think for themselves (I swear to you, someone says that every quarter), and, my favorite of all time, your grade on the exams depends on how well you take notes.

I could tear into any one of those, but I want you to think about that last one for a moment. At first, it sounds like a truism that defines an essential part of the college experience, but the part that eats at my soul is that the student who said that was complaining. She thought that it was a A.) valid criticism, and B.) constructive thing to say to improve my teaching. Seriously, what do you say to that? “I taught you stuff and you needed to write it down in order to do well on the exams? I am so very, very sorry.” How do you even teach someone like that? No, really, I’m asking you.

           
By far the worst part of teaching is that even though you learn and grow as a person, your students will always be exactly as naïve, young, and dumb. The problem is that once you teach them just enough not to embarrass themselves, they’ll be done with your class and you’re faced with another crop of them. I’ll just say it: teaching is a Sisyphean task of eliminating ignorance and stupidity. No matter how good you are at your job, you will never win.

The only winning move is not to play, but kicking this guy in the crouch would feel pretty good.

8. Your research won’t matter

So, you’ve been stripped of your self-esteem, you’re poor, lonely, unable to talk to other people, hopped up on all sort of drugs, surrounded by idiots and students who refuse to learn, but at least you have your research, and that’s what matters. To you, at least. Here’s the kicker: no one cares. Period, end of story, full stop. What you do will. Not. Matter. At best, a dozen specialists in similar fields will read your articles, half of them will disagree with minor points and thus dismiss your entire career as being worthless, a quarter will approve but misquote and misinterpret your findings in a way that you find soul devouring, and the rest probably will give you bad reviews just so that they fit in with the crowd.

But, no, you insist that you’ll be one of the good scholars, one of well-respected, best-selling, once-a-generation academics that changes the world. You’re pretty ballsy, but I’ll play that game. First off, a historian who sells 10,000 books is considered wildly successful. These figures represent strong sales to libraries (some of which bought two copies) and status as a must-read in your particular field, by which I mean subfield because, for example, British historians don’t read anything about Africa. Ever.

"Dark continent, indeed, guffaw! Oh, what’s this? It seems I’m being told I’m a racist!”

But what does this level of success mean? Essentially, after reading your book, historians (or whatever) will never quite look at an issue in quite the same way, by which I mean that they say things like, “We need to consider ethnicity in Qing dynasty China” or “French peasants experienced the French Revolution differently than Parisians.” So, the fuck what? Sure, there are some issues in the world that benefit from a historical understanding of the problem, but most don’t. They really don’t.

But what about the really successful historians, you know, the ones that real people have ever heard of? Well, most historians hate those guys. In any conversation between historians, any mention of Niall Ferguson or David McCullough (for those who have never heard of them, those are the most famous historians I could think of) is likely to produce outright hostility or a condescending comment about how they’re important for popularizing historical topics (if you think those comments are earnest, you are mistaken).

There really are world changing intellectual figures, like Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, and Robert Merton, but even though I guarantee you are familiar with some of their ideas, you’ve probably never heard of them. Kuhn came up with the concept of a “paradigm shift,” which, I promise you, is an essential concept in theories of how scientific consensuses function, not just a buzz-word used in boardrooms. But Kuhn and the others are rare, exceptional, world-shattering figures who substantially added to human understanding, and let’s be honest: you can’t do that. None of us can.

If any of these points leave you disheartened and have discouraged you, good. I hear the army needs good people. But grad school is really only for those of us who have nowhere else to go.