So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?

To be blunt, graduate humanities education should be treated as a dangerous life choice by default. While people making this choice are old enough and should intellectually "understand" that it is not going to be a lucrative path, I suspect they are mainly not equipped to really get what that means.

It's one thing to say "I am going to make less money than my orthodontist dad by going the humanities route" but it's not the same as viscerally understanding what it means to lack financial security, struggle to afford housing, vacations, etc. for the rest of your life. People who've never known poverty are not able to adequately understand what it means to condemn themselves to it.

I can't blame them. We all know "there's no money in humanities" the same way we know that "smoking's bad for you" but many of us don't really get what it means until real sickness/poverty explains it to us. This is proven by the relative over-representation of immigrants and first generation Americans in "practical" majors - people who have tasted poverty and struggle are likely to seek education that helps them avoid it.

This isn't limited to humanities. I always remember interviewing a "kid" who just got his PHD in chemistry at Case Western, realized there was nothing in chemistry he could/wanted to do, and was thus applying for entry level programming jobs, for which he would have been equally qualified 10 years earlier out of undergrad. The years he spent getting his MS and PHD shielded him from confronting reality, so now he was competing with kids almost 10 years younger, who were frankly more qualified, energetic and less in debt than he was. His graduate education was purely a waste of time and money.

Lest I seem anti-education, I have 2.5 masters degrees which served me very well. My wife is working on her second masters part time. My grandmother is a professor of Russian Literature, my grandfather was a professor of Mathematics, both my parents have masters' degrees and my cousin just defended his PhD in bioengineering. I see the benefits of education all around me, the only point is that we need to be thoughtful about it.

Placing a "tempting" grad school path in front of young people who aren't able to appreciate the implication of this choice is inherently going to lead to bad outcomes. The fact that it's possible for a person to be almost 30 and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before they get any taste of their professional and personal life is crazy.

I spent some time in Israel and I think their model works much better. After high school, Israeli kids spend a few years in the army. This is a mainly "not fun, working experience" which exposes them to different career options. After the army, they are starved for fun so they spend 6-12 months backpacking India or South America. By the time they're back in Israel, they are more mature, got their "fun times" out of the way, and can think about what they want to get out of their college education. They don't look at college as a chance to have fun or find themselves since that's already done, but simply to enable them to have whatever career they desire. Sometimes that choice leads them to humanities and professorship, but they are making that choice more wisely.

My 2.5 graduate degrees were earned part time, starting a few years after I begun my career. This allowed me to be very thoughtful about what I want to do, and how to get an education that enabled that. The sum total of my advice is that it almost never makes sense to go into grad school directly out of college - unless you're very certain you want to be a doctor or a lawyer and you can't experience those fields without doctorate level education. For almost everything else, I strongly advise working at 2-3 years, experiencing the field and what the lifestyle of that field is, before you double-down the years and money on graduate work. I bet the decisions made 2-3 years later will be very often different and much better.

And most good life sciences departments do not offer a Masters program -- you get a masters if you decide at some point to stop pursuing the PhD. Most Master's programs cost money, and, at least in the life-sciences, you are better off working in the field (CS may be very different).

Fortunately for science and engineering Ph.D.'s there are usually decent opportunities in industry.

OTOH, some aspects of this post are crazy to me. We get paid $36k/year, way more than the $16k/year he mentioned. Also, our insurance is decent: mental health visits are 100% covered, and visits to other specialists (for example, a dermatologist) are just a $15 copay/visit. I think the insurance costs us just a few hundred dollars per term - annual costs are definitely less than $1k/year. Job prospects are very good - at least 15-20% of our PhD students eventually land a faculty job, often at top 20 institutions. Also, industry jobs pay well; my friends who did ML now make $300k/year straight out of their PhD. Finally, working 80 hours per week is definitely the exception. Most students I know have much more reasonable hours - in fact I think it's possible to do a decent PhD while putting in only 40 hours per week (on average; weeks before conference deadlines are intense!).

People often write about how painful the PhD process is. While it certainly can be awful, I think CS PhD programs at top schools provide much better living conditions and ROI than the humanities programs he describes.