In my personal experience (at a top humanities PhD program in the US), everyone started out with the explicit goal of becoming a professor. One or two did, and

In my personal experience (at a top humanities PhD program in the US), everyone started out with the explicit goal of becoming a professor. One or two did, and everybody else recalibrated their goals along the way. We all knew the statistics, but every single one of us assumed those numbers were about other people.