It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lo

It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lot of money and time or you plan on going into teaching. The issue of course is there are not nearly enough teaching positions to employ all the people with PHDs. Further, while a school might have a well respected program it may not have the cache value that a department wants so the positions seem to go to graduates of schools with impressive names. It's kind of funny when a law school wouldn't hire one of their own to avoid inbreeding but the entire department is filled with people from only 3-4 schools who were taught but people from those same 3-4 schools. It's a slightly wider gene pool but inbreeding none the less