It is certainly smart to spend some time outside of school after your undergraduate education before attending graduate school. However, I would still encourag

It is certainly smart to spend some time outside of school after your undergraduate education before attending graduate school. However, I would still encourage potential applicants to be very cautious when deciding to attend graduate school, especially in the humanities (and philosophy specifically), due to hardships of the post-graduate job market. The hard science and social science (my field) markets are far less dire than the humanities. As outlined in the original linked article, the process of getting your PhD is pretty brutal and you lose a lot of potential income on the years you are receiving a low graduate stipend. However, I would disagree with the author in the linked article--many graduate programs (especially in the US) do a very good job of providing graduate students with skills to complete a thesis. Schools are investing a lot of time and money into each graduate student and want them to succeed. Once you make it through to the other side, the job market for recent PhDs is another thing all together. The recent recession has hit universities hard, especially public research institutions, and especially in the humanities. Therefore, only a very few graduates are able to secure tenure-track jobs (networking while you are a grad student helps—and hope for a lot of luck). This is often because so many applicants who have less appealing jobs (such as community college or non-tenure track jobs) are applying to the same tenure-track jobs as a recent graduate and have far more teaching and research experience. If you get one of the less appealing jobs, you are generally given a very high teaching load and low pay, which harms your potential of producing more research to secure a better job. I would recommend reading through this page: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2011/04/55-there-are-too-many-phds.html http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2011/04/55-there-are-too-many-ph... (and all of the reasons posted there). All of that said, I was fortunate enough to receive a wonderful tenure-track job as a professor at a public research institution straight out of grad school. The job hunt was rough--I sent out an incredible number of applications over 6 months before I got a single interview. Persistence paid off, fortunately. The PhD and academia are great if you can make it through the system. The system is rough. You really must be dedicated to your research and teaching to make it through. Also, FYI, the hours I work and stress levels as an academic dwarf those compared to when I was a higher-ed IT professional. Fortunately, I find this work far more rewarding. Try your best to get a seat at a relatively prestigious school in your field and be as productive as possible during those years. That will go a long way towards getting you out in a successful place at the other end.