> Probably Ph.D. graduates should consider teaching at a university as a sort of popular avocation like music, art, sports, or video games. Maybe you can make s

> Probably Ph.D. graduates should consider teaching at a university as a sort of popular avocation like music, art, sports, or video games. Maybe you can make some money at it if you are particularly skilled and lucky, but you will almost certainly need a real day job in order to pay the bills. There is no shortage of people entering PhD programs knowing full well how bad the job market is, yet somehow still convinced they will get a tenure-track job after they finish. I spent some time in a history PhD program almost a decade ago. We all knew how bad the academic job market was. Yet all of the students were committed to spending the next ~7 years working toward a PhD so they would get a chance to compete in what they knew to be of the world's worst job markets. At that point they had been in the academic bubble for so long that it didn't really make sense to consider life outside it, and they viewed academic work as part of their personal identity and could not imagine themselves doing anything else.