For undergraduate and master’s students with clear research interests, a PhD may seem like an obvious choice. Your professors look like they have pretty great jobs—flexible hours, meaningful work, and they don’t have to work summers! Who wouldn’t want to do this job!?
If you’ve already considered alternatives to a PhD (if you haven’t, check out our guide for thinking about grad school options) and you’re pretty sure a PhD—not a terminal master’s degree or other option—is what you want, let’s explore some realities of academia to make sure you’re on the right path.
First, depending on where you went for undergrad, your perceptions of academia may be quite different from where you will need to go for grad school or where most recent PhDs get jobs. There are several types of universities in the United States, and many additional variations beyond the US. A common, three-category way of discussing US schools is “R1s,” “R2s,” and “SLACs.” An R1 is a university with a large number of PhD programs and a strong emphasis on faculty research. R1s can be public schools, like The Ohio State University, or private schools, like Harvard University or Notre Dame. R2s have some PhD programs and a large number of master’s programs, they and put significant emphasis on faculty research. “SLAC” is an abbreviation for “small liberal-arts college,” although many schools in this group don’t technically meet that definition. When people in academia refer to a university as a SLAC, they generally mean a school is on the smaller side, is focused on undergraduate (rather than graduate) programs and—compared to R1s and R2s—emphasizes teaching over research in terms of faculty priorities. (There are many fantastic professors who care about teaching at R1s and R2s, but they are evaluated for tenure more on research than teaching, leading to the phrase “publish or perish.” At a SLAC, professors must have a research agenda; they may be required to publish a book or several academic articles to earn tenure, but teaching is a bigger part of their job description.) At a SLAC, professors teach more courses per semester than R1 or R2 professors; they also typically don’t have teaching or grading assistants and therefore have more students whose work they personally grade. For instance, a professor at a SLAC may have a “4:4 load,” meaning four classes in the fall semester and four in the spring semester, compared to an R1 professor who likely has a 2:2 or 3:3 load. For undergraduate students, one type of university is not necessarily “better” or “worse” than another; that is why each category has its own set of rankings. R1s and SLACs are a bit like apples and oranges, with different priorities and offering different benefits to undergraduates.
Why does this matter? The university where you attended undergrad likely shapes your expectations of graduate school and a career in academia. The lack of graduate programs at SLACs means you will need to attend an R1 or R2 to earn a master’s or PhD. So, if you completed your undergrad at a SLAC, you would need to acclimate to a different type of university for grad school. If you completed your undergrad at an R1, you’re probably already used to a larger school, but there’s a catch—R1s, while large, are actually a small proportion of universities and, as a result, faculty jobs. If you attend grad school, earn a PhD, and land an academic job, chances are you’ll be at a SLAC, not an R1. There are huge variations among SLACs, but if you were expecting an R1 salary at a large school or in a large city in a particular region of the US, you will likely experience a very different reality as a new professor at a SLAC—a higher teaching load, a lower salary, and fewer “perks” (like research budgets and regular sabbaticals) than the professors with whom you studied back in undergrad.
This brings us to a second reality—and the most important one for you, a potential grad student, to consider. A grotesquely small proportion of people who get PhDs—especially in the humanities—actually get tenure-track jobs. (These pages from the University of Connecticut and Denison University explain “tenure-track” and other academic job titles.) While job rates vary by field and subfield, they are bad and getting worse. In 2016, the American Historical Association (AHA) reported on several ominous trends for job-seeking historians, including a declining number of academic job postings overall as well as a declining proportion of tenure-track jobs, even as the number of history PhDs rose.
According to the AHA’s most recent jobs report (from 2023), academic history job availability—after an unusually bad year during the pandemic, followed by unusually good rebound year—has “returned to the steady but insufficient state of the late 2010s,” but with a pronounced “decrease in the number of jobs that come with the possibility of tenure.”
This cannot be emphasized enough: you cannot will yourself, work yourself, or network yourself into a job. Everyone who finishes a PhD is hardworking, smart, and ambitious. People who have earned PhDs have already beaten the odds by completing a master’s, completing PhD coursework, passing their comprehensive exams and dissertation prospectus defense, and completing the dissertation. Each of these stages weeds out graduate students. Recent PhDs are qualified, committed, and impressive. But there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone. This means you can do everything right—be prepared for class, teach effectively, work well with professors, win research grants, network at conferences, present at leading conferences, publish before graduating, do a national job search—and still not get a job. There simply aren’t enough jobs for all the qualified, impressive, hardworking people who apply for them. Of course, there are things you can do to make yourself more attractive on the job market, but most of your peers are making the same calculations. You may get lucky; you may beat the odds and be the one person from your PhD cohort to get a job, but it is unlikely and increasingly so.
It is tempting to think, “I’ll be the one who gets the job.” Maybe! But know that everyone thinks this. It’s also tempting to think “I don’t care. I just want to study history, do research, stay in a campus environment, read and write, and I’d rather do this for an extra 5 years than enter the workforce right away.” Before you commit to this, however, consider that the years you spend in a PhD program are years you can’t get back. Many people finish their PhDs and look back on those years positively, even when they don’t land academic positions. But others express regret. As a PhD student you may see friends and family members who establish careers, buy houses, and hit other important milestones while you are in a graduate school, pre-career phase. In that vein, below are some additional considerations.
Money, in the short term
A PhD may take 7 or more years. If you are funded for all 7 years (a big “if”! Many programs will provide funding for 5 or 6 years) that funding is likely far lower than your peers outside of grad school will be earning. You may think, “I don’t care about money,” but we are not talking about living like Jeff Bezos vs. living a middle-class lifestyle; instead, we are talking about potentially living on less than $20,000 per year. That will affect your lifestyle in a host of important ways that are far from superficial. A graduate stipend may impact your diet and exercise options, your ability to financially help family members in crisis, or your ability to care for a pet.
Four huge caveats are in order here. First, if you grew up in poverty, graduate funding may mean greater financial security than you are accustomed to; discussions of money are always relative to upbringing and experience, and grad school funding is no exception.
Second, certain universities that have enormous endowments have greater ability to offer not only more generous stipends to graduate students, but also more financial resources in general. When considering grad programs, try to find out not only what the yearly stipend is, but also if a program offers research support and summer teaching opportunities to graduate students. If so, how do you acquire research support? Does the university offer summer funding? How easy is it to land summer teaching? And can you teach in consecutive years?
Third, location matters! A program that offers you a $30,000 stipend to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country may actually provide you with less spending power (after you control for rent, groceries, and other living expenses) than a program offering you $19,000 to live in a less expensive location. You should carefully research cost-of-living, including transportation. If you have a car in good condition and parking is inexpensive in location A, that’s important! If you don’t have a car and don’t want one, and location B has excellent public transportation, that might be a gamechanger. Do your research and be realistic about costs.
Finally, international students should ask lots of questions about costs. Even if a program offers you a financial package that covers international tuition (which is more than domestic tuition), you should inquire about student fees, which you may need to pay out-of-pocket, and which may be higher for international students. You should also ask about work opportunities. International students likely cannot work off-campus in the summer and may not be eligible for the same external research grants as domestic students, so be sure to ask about the extent to which fees, grants in your field, and on-campus work opportunities differ for international students.
Location
Grad school can look pretty sexy when you imagine living in the city of your dreams, attending the school of your dreams. But if you are serious about grad school, you’ll need to apply to a number of programs, and you may not get into any of them the first year your apply, you may get in but without funding, or you may find yourself funded at one school in a less-than-ideal location. Grad school ties you down. Yes, some people live an hour or more from their graduate institution and commute. Yes, some people move after they have completed coursework and write their dissertation from a different location. But if you need funding, you may need to live close to your graduate institution for years. How will you feel about being tied to a location, possibly far from home, as parents age, friends get married, and siblings have kids? Do you have the financial support to relocate closer to home (and forego funding), or will you need to live in city where you’re attending grad school? Do you have the financial support to physically go home (which may require a car or airline tickets) for holidays and summers, or will you need to stay on campus during summers to earn money through summer teaching? Have you considered that you may need to conduct research over the summer, further limiting your ability to spend time with far-away family and friends?
Life events
Depending on how old you are when you start grad school and how much financial support you have, grad school may force you to pause life events or make difficult choices. For instance, if you want to get married, have a large wedding and take a costly honeymoon—and you don’t have significant financial support—these priorities may conflict with being on a graduate student stipend. Is it important to you to become a homeowner? If so—and if you don’t have significant financial support—are you willing to put this off until you have completed grad school (and likely beyond, because your post-grad school savings may be next to zero)? And—especially if you are planning to have kids—how will years of grad school impact your family planning? If you plan to have biological children, are you willing (and financially able) to attempt grad school while you or your partner are pregnant and while you care for a newborn? Are you willing to put off trying to become pregnant until after grad school?
Money, in the long term
We are not talking about forgoing being a billionaire; rather, we are talking about the possibility of forgoing being financially comfortable. If you spend 7 years in grad school, how far behind your peers—financially—will you be when you graduate? If you have put off buying a house, building a family, traveling, getting a car, paying off undergraduate student loans, and saving for retirement, how will you feel about starting several of those things at once 7 years from now, with those years of earning power gone? Even if you don’t have undergraduate student loans, don’t want to travel, and don’t plan to have a child, will you be able to save enough to retire at a reasonable age? And, crucially, will you be able to do all of this if a tenure-track job doesn’t materialize and, instead, you enter the workforce in a non-academic role, one that probably doesn’t require a PhD. Will the years of lost earning, lost retirement savings, delayed life events feel like a mistake, or will they seem worth it for the experience, knowledge, and satisfaction of completing a PhD?
While this is a pretty bleak forecast, the flip side (which you already know as someone considering grad school) is that a lot of meaningful careers are difficult to get into. For students interested in grad school in the humanities and who identify as “right brained,” it may seem like every attractive job comes with a giant, flashing warning sign, with everyone in that career telling you not to even try. If you’re someone who has considered a career in the arts or journalism, you’ve probably been hearing your whole life that there are “no jobs”—yet people keep making it as musicians and as writers, and professors keep getting hired at your university.
Please know that when we—professors, recent PhDs, and senior grad students—warn you about going to grad school, it isn’t because we don’t think you’re good enough. It isn’t because we got through the door and we’re slamming it closed behind us. And it isn’t because there are literally no jobs. It’s because there are almost no jobs. And it’s because we know that what used to be a fairly straightforward path—grad school, national search, job—no longer exists. We know countless people who are just as talented, smart, hardworking, and ambitious as us who didn’t get jobs. We also know countless people who didn’t realize just how bad the market was until they had invested years of their lives in graduate school—and some of them really, really regret it. And we know that the academic history job market is getting worse. At the same time, we don’t know who is going to land a job and who isn’t. We can’t reliably predict who will thrive in grad school, and we certainly can’t predict the job market. Above all, we sincerely don’t want to give you bad advice or false hope. We simply want to help you make an informed decision about your future.
Having considered important implications of attending grad school and a dire forecast for academic jobs, you might consider alternatives to a PhD, such as a terminal master’s degree. This guide can help you explore possibilities and career paths outside of a PhD and academia. It may help hone your sense of what you really want to do—teach? expand the public’s understanding of history?—and figure out the best ways to get there.
If you’re still all-in on doing a PhD, be sure to check out our Surviving Grad School series, which is designed to help grad students navigate all aspects of the master’s and PhD. And know that you have started a process that, while daunting, is also important and can be extremely gratifying.
Feature image: Created by author; modified from original available at “A Day in the Life of a Successful PhD Student (You Need To Know),” R3ciprosity.
Clio and the Contemporary 
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