Why a PhD Program Is a Hostile Environment for a Family
I remember the feeling of being a newly accepted PhD student in philosophy. I had worked my tail off just to get a shot at being accepted into a program: it was my second round of applications, and I had taken grad courses at two different universities while working full-time to support a growing family. The dream had finally become a reality. But that reality quickly shifted into something both thrilling and grotesque, in ways I couldn’t anticipate.
So what makes PhD life so hostile to families?
1. The Big One: Lack of Income
This is the most obvious challenge, and it can permeate every facet of graduate life (when I say “graduate” here I’ll mean the doctoral kind), even for someone who is single. Before you step foot on campus, you will probably have to move far from where you are to your new institution, which can be very expensive, especially with a family. Covering moving costs can be a major challenge before you see your first stipend check for a month or so after you start the program. Speaking of that stipend…
If you can cover the initial moving expenses, you will have almost no income to speak of on the other side. Any philosophy graduate program worth considering will be funded, which means tuition is all or mostly covered, and you get an annual stipend over the life of your program ranging anywhere from $12k-$25k, in exchange for being a teaching assistant, a research assistant, or teaching your own courses. This will put you below the poverty line even if you are single. It is extremely challenging to cover basic living expenses if that stipend is your sole source of income, even if you’re single, and it’s impossible to do so if you have a spouse and kids. The math doesn’t add up. That means you will need to supplement the stipend amount in some way: 1) through summer teaching or some other kind of summer work, 2) your spouse finds a job that pays enough to cover expenses, 3) you have financial support through others’ kind generosity (family, fundraising, benefactors), 4) loans, or all of the above. Aside from loans that put you in debt, those necessary supplements can be difficult to find, especially over the course of 5-7 years in the program. If you have kids and your spouse works, the situation presents its own challenges to graduate life: if you want to be successful in the program, it will be very difficult to do the kind of intense work that success in the program demands, while regularly take care of your kids for long stretches of time. To achieve the many accomplishments required for a successful CV, a graduate student is on the clock almost all day, just about every day, for many years, which means…
2. The Psychological Toll
…the psychological challenges of grad life are real and constant. You’re doing all this work in social isolation while in the back of your mind you know that there is a good chance you will have little or no employment payoff at the end of it.
I’ll give you an example. While I was looking at job listings in my field over this past year, a realization hit me like a ton of bricks: in the mainstream academic world, the skills I have trained for and honed for years are simply not valued, financially speaking. I was perusing philosophy jobs and noticed that Mississippi State University had an opening to teach in their department. It was one of the temporary positions I mentioned above: only 9 months (an academic year), and it paid $36k. Now, MSU is an R1 institution with a lot of financial resources, and a quick google search reveals that they recently set a fundraising record. Another quick google search reveals that the average public school teacher salary in Mississippi is…$48k. So if I was “lucky” enough to land this position at MSU after years of successfully grinding through a PhD, I would be making as much as the average public school teacher, but without the stability of long-term employment. I would have to start applying for that next job on day 1 of teaching at MSU. Realizing the lack of value of your hard-earned skills can strike quite a psychological blow, especially when those skills came at such a cost to you and your family.
Many grad students enter a PhD program as naïve as I was, working harder than they have ever worked under daily intense pressure, while sacrificing and having little or no job prospects at the end of it all. Speaking for myself, the hard work and pressure was just something I came to accept as part of the graduate deal, and wasn’t the aspect that took the greatest toll. What wore me down was knowing that my family was making many sacrifices as well so that I could do this graduate school thing, and at the same time knowing that their sacrifices, like being far from family and friends, were fused to my efforts that at many points seemed utterly futile. The psychological toll cannot be reduced to just the constant isolation, or the intense pressure to publish, or the distance from family and friends, or the poverty, or the bleak future at the end. The toll comes from getting pummeled with all of that simultaneously for 5-7 years straight, and, at least for me, especially from the guilt of putting your family through it.
3. Isolated Work
The nature of graduate work is also unique. A graduate program in a field like philosophy demands 1) a ton of research (a lot of intense reading and a lot of intense writing), and 2) (ideally) a good amount of teaching. The level of research you need to achieve to be successful1 requires a long-term physical space that is isolated and distraction-free, and such a space can be especially difficult to find with a family. If you’re lucky enough to have an office on campus your office may be quiet at times, but it can also be pretty socially distracting throughout the day, especially if your office mate is there. Most grad students work out their research ideas (and frustrations) by talking through them with their peers. But let’s say you are successful and find some space free of distractions. The nature of research requires you to do about 95% of the work alone. You read stuff alone, then you write stuff alone. That’s research. The typical grad student has to intentionally shut out the rest of the world, including his or her family, for a good chunk of the day, even on weekends, for years. That kind of daily, long-term isolation is the accepted norm, and is unfortunately necessary for most graduate students to pump out the level of writing that is required to be successful. But the constant isolation is bound to have both short-term and long-term effects on your family and social life, in a way I haven’t yet figured out or processed. It costs you more than just financially.
Obviously there are many jobs that require a similar, isolated environment, so graduate life is not entirely unique in that way. Part of what’s unique about graduate work is that it isn’t a job in the ordinary sense, and the fact that it isn’t an ordinary job allows billion-dollar-endowment institutions to legally justify the ethically unjustifiable pay I mentioned above. The other unique part is the ever-present, relentless time-limit of your work in the program. You feel the constant pressure of completing the dissertation, of course, but sometimes even more important is the unavoidable, intense pressure to get your papers accepted at conferences, and to publish in a good journal before going on the academic job market. Generally speaking, if you don’t publish during grad school you simply won’t get a job. You probably won’t get a full-time, permanent academic job anyway, but an absence of publications more or less kills all your chances of getting hired in mainstream academia. So while you’re likely having real trouble providing financially for your family, you have very little chance at landing a job in your discipline at the end of all of the years of sacrifice. A school has to 1) have a job opening in the philosophy department, and 2) the position must be specific to the particular sub-field you worked on in grad school. Even with those conditions, there are often hundreds of people applying for that one position. In fact, I learned in the early days of the program that there is actually very little chance that you’ll get a long-term job in the end. The typical route to a job, if you’re very lucky (I’m not exaggerating), is to get a temporary 1-year appointment at a school that’s almost certainly at a distant location from where you and your family have lived while in the program. If your “luck” streak continues, you repeat that process a couple times at least over the next few years, moving your family every year from place to place: new schools, new friends, new colleagues. That process ends when either you get unlucky and don’t land a job that year, or miraculously you somehow land a more permanent teaching position. That job cycle can be indescribably tough on a family in many ways: financially, socially, psychologically, etc. In many cases those costs can be too high to be worth whatever the gains are.
I don’t want this post to read as a list of complaints; if it reads that way I’ve done something wrong. Being in a graduate program is a privilege, and getting accepted happens because of some mysterious proportion of merit and luck. I’m thankfully on the other side of all this, so I no longer have to navigate some of the intense challenges. My primary reasons for writing this post have been to warn those who may be thinking about applying to grad school (particularly in philosophy), and simply to provide a window into the tragically unique trials and challenges that have more to do with daily living than with the academic demands like presenting at conferences, getting published, pleasing an advisory committee, etc., which obviously provide their own unique trials and challenges. I could say quite a bit about the ways a PhD program is unimaginably difficult, academically speaking. I’ll probably say more about that broad topic at some point, but I wanted to focus here on why PhD programs are unavoidably hostile environments for grad students who enter the program with a family, or who start a family at some point during the program. (I have in mind PhD programs in philosophy at R1 or R2 institutions, so there will be a range of similarities to programs in theology at seminaries or to grad programs in other fields.) I was embarrassingly uninformed when I applied to grad programs. I didn’t have a solid grasp of the many pitfalls inherent in a PhD program at a major university, particularly for someone doing so with a family.
A more balanced post would include positive points to a PhD, like the joys of teaching (which in my case is certainly true), the lifelong skills cultivated through hardcore mental training, etc. But this is an intentionally imbalanced post, meant to put the fear into anyone looking to venture into the PhD world with a family. I have experienced too many soul-crushing events, and watched too many of my fellow grad students either drop out or suffer psychologically, not to emphasize these real aspects of grad life. (You can find similar stories scattered across the web.) If you’re considering grad school, strongly consider something else. Anything else. If you’re not considering grad school, but know someone currently going through it (with or without a family), any encouragement you give them will be appreciated more than you think.
Note: I started writing this article before a similar article on the financial struggles of a (English) PhD came out, but that article is well worth reading.
For much more on graduate life for philosophy students, I could not more highly recommend The Philosopher’s Cocoon. They have every resource you could ask for on this topic.
[Post was read and approved by my wife, who knows all too well the few ups and many downs of grad life.]
By “successful” I don’t mean just finishing the PhD program. I mean achieving enough publications, conferences, teaching, and service to set yourself up to have even the smallest chance of getting even a response on the tragically competitive and often unjust job market.