CHE: Why I’m Planning to Leave My Ph.D. Program

[simpleSimon]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-im-planning-to-leave-my-ph-d-program

Most graduate students can identify with the author of this article and his lament, "My family can't live on $17,000 a year" but his story raises two questions in my mind:

• you knew what the stipend was when you enrolled in the degree program so why is it now so problematic that you feel the need to withdraw after four years in?  Leaving might make sense after the first year; you may rightly conclude that "this is not for me" and walk away, but leaving after four years?

• the author does not say, but leave the program to do what exactly?  What is the better or more attractive option than completing your degree?  Few employers are aggressively recruiting PhD dropouts so what does he plan to do now?  As the sole bread winner, he still has a wife and child to support.  I confess that my imagination is limited, but it is difficult for me to envision a professional path that makes more financial sense than finishing his doctorate.  Leaving school might make sense if you have family money to draw on, or if you have funding to launch your own internet start-up, but clearly neither of those are available to the author.

Your thoughts?  If you know people who leave a degree program after several years in where do they land?

[marshwiggle]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-im-planning-to-leave-my-ph-d-program

From the article:

Each semester had been growing in financial difficulty, but I never wanted to admit that I might not make it to the end. While there's relief in not having to test the nearly nonexistent job market, what I mostly felt in the moment was failure.

When did this person realize that the job market was "nearly nonexistent"? Was that before or after going into debt to be in the program? Why not just buy lottery tickets instead? One could spend the same amount of money but not have to waste the time and could find some modest employment while waiting for the draw.

[jerseyjay]

I cannot speak for the student, and in fact, since I have an adblocker installed, I cannot actually read the article.

That said, I can come up with answers to your questions.

What has changed? Well, perhaps living on $17000 rather than just thinking about living on $17000 has changed the student's opinion. Maybe something has changed in his life (e.g., having children) or his partner's life (e.g., losing a job). Maybe his  fellow students from university or his friends have got well-paying jobs, so the difference between him and his peers has grown. Maybe the student has become less enchanted with the degree itself, making the benefits of sticking it out less obvious. (It is one thing to grin and bear $17000 a year for the sake of a career one loves, but to do it for a career one is ambivalent about is much harder.)

Where now? Without knowing what the degree is in (and whether the student gets a terminal master), I cannot say for sure. However, it in many fields it is not "difficult for me to envision a professional path that makes more financial sense than finishing his doctorate". I am in history. I went though several years in grad school barely earning anything. Then I went through about a decade after grad school ranging from barely earning anything (as an adjunct) to making mediocre wages in an insecure job (as a visiting professor). It is only almost twenty years later after earning my doctorate--and some 25 years after entering grad school--that I have a decent salary and job security.

If I had dropped out of the grad program in history after four years, I could have gotten an office job, or learnt a trade, or various other things--the same thing most of my non-grad-student peers from university did.

While I am happy in my current situation, it would be wrong not to recognize two things: 1) I would not have got where I am now without a lot of hard work, but also quite a bit of luck; 2) it would have been more financially sound to have never gone to graduate school or to have gone into another profession.

I say good luck to the student.

[ergative]

I'm with jerseyjay here. It's a sunk cost fallacy if you don't see an employment outcome that is better with the degree than your options without it. Extra years on the degree without a benefit means fewer years earning full time cash and more years accruing interest on debt. One of the wisest things my mother told me when I started my PhD was that, if it wasn't working out, I should quit. I shouldn't waste years on it if I had other opportunities. She gave up opportunities in journalism (back in the 70s, when journalism was a viable career path) to pursue her degree in English literature, and in the end never finished the degree anyway. She always regretted that, and didn't want me to make the same mistake.

In the end I did finish the degree, get the academic job, etc., but it was helpful to know that my family would always have my back if I decided not to finish. Sort of 'permission to quit' always in my back pocket if I needed it.

[filologos]

I agree that the author should have realized some time ago that supporting three people, including a child who needs daycare, is absurd on $17,000 per year. But $17k in 2018 is the equivalent of about $20k in 2022, so the author's pay has effectively been cut over the course of his program. (Do any PhD programs give cost-of-living increases? I've never heard of it if any do.) Add the birth of a child, which may or may not have been planned, and the financial picture has changed significantly over four years -- but perhaps just gradually enough to create a boiling frog scenario.

In my own case, I attended graduate school full-time, always with a stipend, while my spouse worked outside the home. That meant our average per-person salary was adequate to support ourselves and our dependents. Otherwise I simply wouldn't have gone to graduate school.

[dismalist]

Whatever the merits or demerits of the small stipend, it seems from the article that the person in question really wanted one hell of a lot: Married to a non-working spouse, has child who requires daycare and all at a very young age. He seems to have many wishes, only one of which is earning a PhD. He is wise to quit.

Going to school is like being married: If you're going to drop out or get a divorce, do it early!

[One thing I found puzzling was the university's requirement that one not work outside while dissertating. It wasn't all that long ago that it was normal to finish one's course work and then got a job and dissertated while on the job. More recently, one could do that, even if one wasn't forced to do that.]

[filologos]

[One thing I found puzzling was the university's requirement that one not work outside while dissertating. It wasn't all that long ago that it was normal to finish one's course work and then got a job and dissertated while on the job. More recently, one could do that, even if one wasn't forced to do that.]

At the risk of a slight derail, I'll note that my university has a classification that allows ABDs to do whatever we like while finishing the dissertation, but at the cost of losing our full-time status, university-sponsored health insurance, funding eligibility, etc. Library access and email are about the only things we keep, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, it costs only a couple hundred bucks per semester. I'm currently using it to finish my dissertation while employed full-time at another institution. So it is still possible, at least at some places.

[Hibush]

The author appears to be very blindered. While it is nice to have students who fully focus on their dissertation research, but if the focus is so extreme as to preclude awareness of the surrounding world the student will be in big trouble. The department might be trying to ease this student out of the program if the latter is the case, and the student isn't quite getting the drift.

CHE, and especially IHE, seem to like publishing opinion pieces from grad students and recent grad students who get stuck in this wilful ignorance. Do the pieces serve as warnings of patterns to avoid, or do they build solidarity among the like-minded?

@filologos: Yes, we increase our graduate stipends annually to adjust for COL, as do our competitors. As a consequence, typical stipends are twice what this student is getting. That is the norm in my part of academe.

[apl68]

The author appears to be very blindered. While it is nice to have students who fully focus on their dissertation research, but if the focus is so extreme as to preclude awareness of the surrounding world the student will be in big trouble. The department might be trying to ease this student out of the program if the latter is the case, and the student isn't quite getting the drift.

CHE, and especially IHE, seem to like publishing opinion pieces from grad students and recent grad students who get stuck in this wilful ignorance. Do the pieces serve as warnings of patterns to avoid, or do they build solidarity among the like-minded?

@filologos: Yes, we increase our graduate stipends annually to adjust for COL, as do our competitors. As a consequence, typical stipends are twice what this student is getting. That is the norm in my part of academe.

At any rate, the student had a dream that he wanted to pursue so badly that it led him to make some very poor choices.  Walking into a program knowing that he would be trying to start a family while making $17,000 a year?  His family deserves better.  And in this time of low unemployment, he ought to be able to do better, with his level of education and presumed research and writing skills.  Sorry about the lost dream and sunk opportunity cost, but you've got to do what's right for your family.  I didn't even have a family to support when I finally had to admit that PhDs aren't for the likes of us who have no family wealth to fall back on.  You can have a good life without the degree.

He's right to point out the scandalous disjuncture between what his institution charges in tuition for providing an education, and what those actually delivering the education are paid. 

[Wahoo Redux]

I've posted it before and will post it again:it is hellishly difficult to talk young wannabe academics out of rolling the dice.  The stars are just too bright at that point.

[jerseyjay]

My guess it would have been more rational to have not begun the PhD program to begin with. The poor student has sunk time and money into an expensive and questionable endeavor with only the experience and (maybe) a terminal master's to show for it.

But while it might have been better to have not begun the program, that doesn't mean it is still not wise to stop now.

[simpleSimon]

My guess it would have been more rational to have not begun the PhD program to begin with. The poor student has sunk time and money into an expensive and questionable endeavor with only the experience and (maybe) a terminal master's to show for it.

But while it might have been better to have not begun the program, that doesn't mean it is still not wise to stop now.

Maybe... but after four years in the oven one has to wonder why he doesn't just suck it up and finish.  How much longer was he planning to be enrolled?  Certainly not another four years.  He should be finished in one more year.  Quitting that close to the finish line is a big mistake in my view—especially in the absence of some extremely attractive alternative.

[filologos]

My guess it would have been more rational to have not begun the PhD program to begin with. The poor student has sunk time and money into an expensive and questionable endeavor with only the experience and (maybe) a terminal master's to show for it.

But while it might have been better to have not begun the program, that doesn't mean it is still not wise to stop now.

Maybe... but after four years in the oven one has to wonder why he doesn't just suck it up and finish.  How much longer was he planning to be enrolled?  Certainly not another four years.  He should be finished in one more year.  Quitting that close to the finish line is a big mistake in my view—especially in the absence of some extremely attractive alternative.

The author is in English. Five years would be blazing fast in my humanities field (not English). He could be looking at 2 to 4 more years, depending on how much his program and advisor value reasonable completion timelines.

[Parasaurolophus]

And how much he's already completed, which may not be much, or much of much value. It's a fine time to quit, provided you aren't actually close to done.

But trying to suppoet three, one of them a newborn (which is hella expensive) on a single stipend is insane. Trying to add in daycare on top of that just isn't going to work. If you want to swing it, you have to be the daycare.

[jerseyjay]

Yes, if he was four years into an English PhD, he had at least two--and probably three or four more years to go. And the prize at the end could be working as an adjunct, which makes being a grad student look good (because as a grad student you might get health insurance and subsidized housing).

Probably it did not make a lot of sense to start getting a PhD in English to begin with. But I would still probably advise him to quit, if he wanted to. And I am not sure an aborted PhD in English is any less employable, generally thinking, than a completed PhD in English. The only real jobs that would require a PhD are tenure-track professorships, and how many of those are there these days?

For what it is worth, many of the more ambitious people in my PhD cohort dropped out and did something else. And most of them did quite well for themselves.