Don't Do a Ph.D. Now

At least in the United States

It’s a sunset, not a sunrise.

As a professor, I’m often asked by students, alumni, and people who know me through social media about whether to get a Ph.D. My response usually includes the following points:

• Getting a doctoral degree requires a tremendous amount of discipline, willingness to sacrifice, and extremely long time horizons. You have to be willing to work long hours independently in a position in which failure is ubiquitous and rejection is the modal outcome, followed by insulting rejection. All of this at the expense of, essentially, your 20s.

• The payoffs are much, much lower than they were a generation ago. The crash of 2008 permanently altered the trajectory of many disciplines. Salaries may not have kept place with inflation; they have definitely not kept up with the growth in comparably, or less, selective white-collar professions. I am not alone in observing that my own professors in undergrad not commonly but also not infrequently had second-home levels of wealth, but this does not describe my U.S.-based peers. A full professor in political science makes, on average, $115,000—which sounds like a lot if you don’t know what money is but really just isn’t a lot of money for someone in their peak earning years.

• The odds for getting a permanent faculty job are much lower than they used to be—not just compared to the halcyon days of the 1960s but even when I was first on the job market. Not only are there somewhat more candidates, but also the records of those who are hired tend to be far more competitive than earlier—in particular, whereas it was once common (in political science) to be hired before completing the Ph.D., this is increasingly rare, meaning that candidates for junior jobs already have substantial postdoc or visiting professor experience before they are hired.

• It is much harder to get into a Ph.D. program than it used to be. My previous department’s Ph.D. program was not exactly Harvard’s, but even there applicants needed substantial independent research experience to be competitive for admission. No longer is it the case that people can (routinely) “find themselves” admitted to a graduate program — ideally, you’d have identified potential themes or methods for your broad research program by, say, your junior year of undergrad. (Many people lament this, but the incentives are clear: would you rather hire someone—and it is hiring—who has already shown they can do the job you need them to do or spend several hundred thousand dollars on someone who might wash out?)

• Graduate education in political science (and many other fields) has almost no relationship to the popular image of the discipline and even to what most undergrads are exposed to. I cannot roll my eyes hard enough when people imply that political science majors are all aspiring presidential candidates—being elected fraternity president (or student government president) is a better training ground for learning how to do politics than taking a course on, say, IR theory. And undergraduate curricula tend toward being far more substantive and applied than graduate curricula, which emphasize theory and methods training to a degree difficult to convey to outsiders. (One of the more gossipy outlets in the discipline is a Columbia statistician’s blog about data science and misconduct.)

A Ph.D. might be the right choice for someone even given all of that, but considering everyone who has thought about doing a doctorate it is the right choice for just a few—and only a fraction of either group has the relevant information necessary to decide if it is right for them.

I hope, bluntly, that the net effect of my talks is to discourage people from applying. I don’t want to discourage everyone who talks to me from applying, but I do want to prompt serious reflection about why a doctoral program would be a good next step—rather than it being a default choice for someone who has done well in school for the past seventeen years. For many people who, say, like studying international politics but do not like-like it, they are better off going to a master’s program for two years and spending the three to five additional years they would have spent in a doctoral program actually being in the field—it is more valuable for career advancement in policy and politics to get known and do stuff than to run another damn regression.

My advice now is even blunter. Everything has gotten worse and nothing has gotten better when it comes to U.S. doctoral admissions or the likely experience of a five- to seven-year commitment during the Trump administration. University budgets are strained to the breaking point. Federal funding sources are being cut to the bone if they are not eliminated. Enrollments across the sector are stagnating and international enrollments (a financially crucial segment) appear to be being particularly targeted. Research and teaching into entire areas are jeopardized by political factors. For foreign students, legal authorization to remain in the country is much less certain than it has been perhaps ever (and certainly in any relevant timeframe). The advent of AI slop means that instructors (and TAs) must either endure the slings and arrows of em-dashes or take arms against a sea of cheaters—a battle enormously costly in time and effort. In many states, legal protections for academic freedom in public universities have been effaced.

On a daily basis, the job is far from the contrast that it used to enjoy with other white-collar positions. Institutions under financial strain can make faculty feel like customer-service reps, not scholars. Texas now even makes you work from the office five days a week—and population changes make it more likely you’ll work for a Texas public institution than a New England one. Tenure only matters if your institution exists—and some share of them will not soon. And in a good-news/bad-news situation, the rest of the world now produces pretty good-to-great English-language political science—meaning that it’s way, way harder to publish now than even ten years ago.

Taken together, these factors mean that the experience of getting a Ph.D. has become much worse and the odds of reaching “success” much higher even as victory in the academic jobs Hunger Games gives you a chance for an objectively less appealing job—a job that has in material terms become worse and in status terms much worse. Simultaneously, the alternative employment outcomes have also become worse because many of the agencies and contractors that might have been interested in you are now defunct—and those positions that are hiring are being fought for by everyone who lost their jobs at USAID to DOGE.

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There is an argument, which I take seriously, that if the United States were to come out of Trumplandia, the rebuilding of the federal government would be a boom time for doctoral holders—especially in international relations and political science. Perhaps. But my own time, under much happier circumstances, in graduate school was not something I would care to repeat, not least because if I had to do it over again I would have to cut out much of what made it emotionally bearable to become more competitive on the job market.

Furthermore: if. What confidence should you have in if? For a renaissance in U.S. higher education (or “the academy” plus academic-adjacent institutions) to take place, not only would a Democrat have to win the White House, but also an ideologically favorable Congress would have to be in place as well, and then they would have to hold power for a long enough time to rebuild the institutions — one term will not cut it; three is probably necessary. If you’re playing long odds, why not play long odds for better rewards in another career?

None of this is what I wish would happen. I wish we could all do one thing today and another tomorrow: code in the morning, write in the afternoon, teach classes in the evening, review papers after dinner, just as we have a mind, without ever becoming coder, writer, teacher, or editor. But we do not make the world as we please—rather, we act under circumstances actually existing.

More to the point, even if it is good for society that intellectual cadres be trained, it is hard to assure anyone considering that path that they would find the resulting path anything but a long march with many dead careers lining the side of the road. Sometimes, there are lost generations; this will be one of those times. If it is good for those already well advanced along the path to finish, it is hard to assert it is a good time to begin—at least, in the United States. At the very least, people embarking on the path should be informed—and they should be much more willing to walk away or to ensure that a potential academic home is the right one for them.