tenure-track teaching faculty," as Nowiskie puts it. Fewer taxi drivers than you might think One thing that might be surprising here is the relative absence of taxi-driving PhDs/"grad school drop outs". This is not to say that they don't exist (and perhaps now more than ever during the Great Recession). But it is to say that taxi-driving and similar jobs were not a major employment outcome for either graduates or "leavers" of elite Humanities PhD programmes (at least) during the decade preceding the current recession. More professional/management positions The other thing that might be surprising is that the relative outcomes for "leavers" looks on the whole like they might be better than for graduates. While love of teaching and working in universities can be its own reward and while you can't speculate too precisely about job quality on the basis of the categories this study uses, it looks like about 20% of the graduates of elite universities surveyed as part of this study were employed in what appear to be relatively insecure para-professorial jobs (sessional teaching, adjunct and visiting professorships, and postdoctoral positions) for years after graduation (which in the case of the humanities also means well into their mid-to-late 30s). This also agrees with my own experiences as a graduate (and one who was lucky enough to find a tenure track position) in the mid-1990s. As a PhD student at Yale who lived in Amsterdam while writing my dissertation and who taught in para-positions at the University of York