As a former graduate student who M.A.'ed out of a Ph.D. program, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for people at the C. Phil stage of their graduate career. By the time a grad student qualifies, they should be well-aware of the current exploitive state of academia. Grad students at this stage of their career are treated as cheap knowledge labor by professors who are either motivated themselves to achieve tenure, or simply to do as little of their own work as possible. They are severely overworked and underpaid, and in STEM disciplines generally have all the knowledge and training they need to live a very comfortable life for themselves in private industry, instead of propping up the comfortable lives of their advisors. More and more, as publication platforms democratize, the knowledge academics provide has as much of a chance of being recognied or adopted by industry and even academia if it were blogged as if it were submitted to a scholarly journal. And let's not even get started on journals, which have their own litany of unresolved issues that endanger the true furthering of knowledge (in a word, Springer).

So grad students make peanuts, professors do less and less work as they age; fewer and fewer professors retire, and more and more unnecessary administrators demand a cut of the budget. Academia is broken in a way that would be very entertaining to someone like Karl Marx (who was, ironically enough, an awful scientist). The means of production is being exploited by those who have the power of prestige, budget, and the rather arbitrary ability to tell you whether or not you can graduate. This system is a lot like indentured servitude, except there is no set period of indenturement -- a committee arbitrarily decides whether they feel they have gotten enough cheap work out of you, whether they have gotten their names on enough papers they did minimal work on, etc. I've seen this take a lot of good people's lives. You can actually see what fatigue, hopelessness, and sunken costs looks like on an person's face when someone asks them what "year" grad student they are, and it's revealed that it's been eight or more years working 80 hours a week and living off of ramen, going from department to department in search of free pizza.

So being a doctoral candidate is in many ways like being upside down on your house. But it's been this way since I was in grad school from '05 to '08. So for people who are just starting out, make a plan for a master's and run. The real world is scary, but what's even scarier is finding out you went to grad school for 8 years just to end up a post-doc, which is -- surprise! -- exactly like grad school, but with a relatively meaningless title after your name. And that's what will happen, because baby boomer professors simply refuse to retire. They like the prestige and the money, along with the platform to pontificate, which they are so used to having by now. Then you realize why associate professors are so desperate for tenure, and by that time, it's really too late to change careers. You will be mired in a bad deal, generally unrecognized outside of your discipline, and continuously exploited by university administrators. Your only choice will be to take part in the exploitation and continue the cycle.

Sorry for the rant. Get out while you can.