PhD? Maybe going the way of the white buffalo...

So I have been laboring at the actual thought of entering a PhD program and the implications it would have for my future. I was first warned against this by Dr. Chambers, my ancient greek history professor at sac state. Then, more recently, by Dr. Janiskee who is the chair of the political science department at san bernardino. Both professors pointed out to me the ultra-competitive job market for people seeking university teaching jobs in the humanities. That the long hours of graduate school combined with the reality of going $40,000-$50,000 dollars worth of debt is not worth it. That you are extremely over-qualified and extremely under-paid for the work you do. At the time, my thought process was such that I acknowledged these problems but brushed them aside and continued to blindly pursue this idea I have of being a PhD holder. Thats one of the main things I have been worrying about lately. I have an IDEA of what I imagine it to be like in a PhD program and how the job market would just open up to me afterwards.

So I have been scouring the web researching this topic. I have read the blogs of the now-departed Invisible Adjunct. I also follow a few other blogs of professors who write explicitly about this. The outlook is extremely grim. Across the board, the number of tenure-track university positions has declined dramatically over the past 20 years. Adjunct professors who work part-time with no benefits are becoming the norm at universities, with many of these professors teaching at 2-3 different colleges a week to make ends meet. A predicted expansion of PhD jobs that encouraged an explosion of students to get their PhD's never came to fruition; which produced a saturation of PhD holders in the job market. In other words, there are X number of PhD academia jobs and X+1,000,000 job applicants. While competition alone isn't enough to scare me away, there are other mitigating factors.

1. Without funding, I would go deep in debt (roughly $50,000 dollars) and as an adjunct would make $30,000 dollars a year? No thanks.
2. A PhD program would take a minimum of 4-5 years, putting me at 29 years of age before I even enter the job market.. thats a lot of lost time and opportunity. Not to mention, I could easily spend another 4-5 years and countless moves trying to find a tenure-track position and NOT find one!
3. While the thought of being a PhD student has a certain amount of prestige and romanticism to it, the reality is that I will spend long hours in isolation: researching and writing, helping professors with their research, and rubbing shoulders with a certain type of person which I'm not entirely sure I care to spend a lot of time around.
4. I don't have a financial net to fall into; my family is not available to help me financially. So, if I was unable to get a job, you could see me in the streets living in a cardboard box.
5. There are a few others I was thinking of last night, but can't seem to come across them at the moment.

Now I have other options: High school and community college most notably. Also, If I don't enter a PhD program I have the flexibility of choosing where I want to go and what I want to do. A program would lock me into a location for 4-5 years and prevent me from pursuing other goals. Not to mention, what if I went halfway through a program and decided at that point I no longer wanted to do it? What a waste of time. I have spent many hours and nearly $1,000 dollars completing my 10 applications for programs, but that defintely will not be a deterrent to me if I decide I do not want this. I have never been afraid to walk away from something, and this is no different.

Now just in case someone is reading this and getting depressed because their life goal has always been to get a PhD (it has never been one of mine, which makes this realization probably easier to bear), There are exceptions. My older sister Shannon is getting her PhD in Clinical Psychology because it is necessary to have this qualification in order to have job options. People in Engineering, Math, Medical, and the Sciences will have no trouble finding jobs with a PhD. If you are in the humanities: it really comes down to teaching or if you are in Political Science like me working for the government, or a Non-Governmental Organization. I don't really have the desire to work for the government, and NGO work can be difficult to break into without having the right connections.

Basically, these are the thoughts I am having while waiting for my acceptance rejection letters to arrive. This could all be moot point, because to be honest I am not expecting to get into more than 1 or 2 programs if I'm lucky. Its all really a crapshoot: getting accepted, making it through the program, and finding a job afterwards. And then there is this, I am not sure that the thought of constantly reading academic work, researching, and trying to get paper, articles, and books published is something that exactly thrills me. While I have been fortunate to have a few publishments now and its very exciting, they were papers written for classes, not because I was trying to get published. I like reading academic and intellectual stuff when I want to learn it and its exciting, and I like learning in general when it comes to that. But its the idea of teaching, instructing, and interacting with students and other intellectuals that really draws me to teaching. I am a pretty social person, and I don't want to have to lock myself away from my family because I have some deadline I need to hit on some paper or something. Plus, I really want to be able to coach football again (something I love dearly) and the thought of never doing that again is something I am not really comfortable with.

Just on my mind, felt like I needed to write it out after thinking about it for a few days. I can see a scenario where even if I get accepted to some places, I just turn them all down and walk away from it. I need to start looking back into finishing up another bachelors (so I can teach at a community college) and finishing up my high school teaching credential. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to post.