There is a very good essay titled "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" that gives a really excellent description of the mindset that exists when

There is a very good essay titled "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" that gives a really excellent description of the mindset that exists when young people go to graduate school. This described me well when I was floating around in my early to mid 20s. I enrolled in a doctoral program in industrial engineering and (ended up leaving with a masters) rather than humanities, but still, I see a lot of myself in what this article describes. http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/44846/ http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/448... All this is a bit less applicable to some fields. I've heard that employment is good PhDs for CS and some other engineering fields - but then again, so is employment with an MS or BS. Economics may be a good field for a PhD. One other factor is that getting a graduate degree from a US based university can be a path to immigrate to the US. There really aren't many options for people who don't have family reunification as an option, so going to grad school in a STEM field in particular may have value that isn't captured in pay relative to fields that don't provide this path to the same extent. The article mentions that enrollment in PhD programs hasn't declined like it has for law schools and historically hasn't been a path to immigration. One way to measure this would be to see if there has been a substantial decline in enrollment in PhD programs from people who already have the right to live in and work in the US.