Why do we treat people with PHDs as idiots who in their 10 years of collegate level study don't ever think about their debt, their job prospects or their lives as they do it.

Do you think that grad students don't read articles like this? Do they understand points that author laid out?

If they do as a group stop applying for PHD programs knowing that their job prospects are abysmal? If so, why don't more people either a) cut their losses or b) not pursue a PHD in a wholly oversaturated market?

The exploitation argument works if you have completely illiterate and uninformed workers who work on the promise of advancement or pay that never comes. This doesn't hold water for professionals who literally spend every day working with the people they are trying to become.

The question then begs why do all of these intelligent, well educated people go through such great hardship, knowing full well the level of poverty involved. Every grad student I've ever known has joked about how poor they will be, how little they get paid, how miserable they will be on the other side.

Here's a radical idea; intelligent people are choosing this hard life because they value something in it more than the hardship they are going through to get it.

Now, you may disagree that the hardship is more than what they will get in return. You may also make the point that by definition, most of them won't even have the opportunity to achieve their goals. You may even make the point that colleges don't prioritize academics. I would agree with you on those points, especially the last one.

What's clear though is that they are people making this decision deliberately. College isn't the kind of thing where you just fall into like some academic gulag. At every step of the way, people applied, got loans or secured financing, moved across the country and put in hard work to achieve. All of this to say that somehow they were tricked by the "system" that's against them and is out to exploit them and their labor?

Now people are saying that colleges and society needs to put out a helping hand to all of these poor souls who find themselves in a position after a decade of deliberate decisions. If people put more support for this and made English PHDs more sustainable, I predict that you would see ever more PHDs and even more people trying to get into the field.

The problem lies in the fact that some people will make irrational decisions. Some things cost more (in money) than will give out (in money). Some people will get caught up in their love of books and academia and pursue a degree for the joy of literature but, then complain that a decade or professional reading and writing has yielded a mountain of loans and little else as prospects in the job market. It may even be that well meaning but, nefarious English professors are inspiring students to fall in love with Literature and teaching and speaking and this infatuation is causing a glut in the job market.

I would be more sympathetic if it weren't for the fact that this is a decade long process and you are doing in the very environment you are trying to enter. It'd be one thing if it took a decade to become an astronaut on Mars and we had a professional industry for training astronauts that lied or hid the fact that there aren't astronaut jobs available.

But, people see struggling grad students for four years in undergrad, and spend a decade being a struggling grad student. All the while pressing on. I have no sympathy for smart people making dumb decisions all the while studying books. The loud suffering of people who have made bad decisions is an important vital thing to listen to.

Allow people to keep making these decisions. Post this article and send it to every current and prospective grad student. Let them know that the road to a PHD is paved in suffering and misery (as if they don't already know).

Watch how few of them actually change their minds and alter their course. They are adults and are making decisions for their own lives inside dynamic systems that will work against their favor. I don't want to impose artificial limitations on the freedoms of a system because so many people make irrational (by my perspective) decisions for their own lives knowing full and well the consequences.