the disposable academic

this week's economist has a fabulous article, subtitled 'why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.'

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223&CFID=151512952&CFTOKEN=68634053

it is scary how frighteningly true some of the points are. it is not an article against education or PhDs per se, but one highlighting the huge flaws in the system. life as a PhD student is hard: "one thing PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. some describe their work as slave labour. seven day weeks. ten hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread." All true. due to a technicality in Britain's nationality laws, i was declared ineligible for funding, although i have and have always had a British passport, the commission determined i had "failed to maintain a relevant connection with the United kingdom." as a result i had to work full time during my PhD to support myself living in London. I also discovered my East European MAs were useless, and as a result spent several years in service sector jobs. I worked 40 hours a week, and then came home and wrote my PhD at night and weekends, literally 16 hours a day 7 days a week, for 5 years. it was hell. Because my economic situation was dire, i got out of the institution labour abuse most PhDs suffer, as the article notes, most serve as slave labour to their own universities- getting a PhD student to teach full time for a year at Yale costs $20,000, whilst a "real" professor would get $100,000 for teaching the same courses, as part of what the article calls the long standing "implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for good academic jobs later." It is a promise that sustained many of my classmates through our studies, but it too proved to be a mirage. the statistics are abysmal. Only 49% of those who start PhDs in the humanities ever graduate, something i have witnessed first hand. Many of my own peers spent years slaving away at their studies, only to never quite write things up, or worse, fail their Viva. Even if you pass, the job market in academia is lethal, especially in North America (the US graduated 100,000 PhDs between 2005-2009, whilst 16,000 full time academic jobs came on the market. Again, I saw this first hand- practically none of my classmates got full time jobs upon graduating, most are hopping around, teaching 4 months here and there, waiting for something to come up. but most damning is the articles point that even when PhDs manage to get jobs in the private sector (no small feat given some of the prejudice out there against us egg heads) they often underperform compared to those with only an MA. Again, this is a lesson I have learned the hard way, desperately trying to catch up with colleagues who sometimes dont even have BAs, but have learned practical skills on the job.
I am a big fan of education and i think it should be open to all who are qualified, but the expectations around degree granting need to be carefully managed, especially in depressed economy. An education of whatever level does not guarantee you a job, and getting a job should not be your only motivating factor in choosing to continue higher education.
on the one hand it would be nice to say that i wish someone had forced me to read this article 6 years ago, but i doubt it would have made any difference. what would have made one would have been a tangible presentation of alternatives, and how i could achieve them. I was a good student, therefore I was always encouraged to keep studying, straight until i got into a doctoral programme. I continued to live in student squalour whilst many of my less successful peers went on to start earning serious money. Worse, pursuing academia caused me to rack up debt in the form of student loans which it has taken years of working two jobs to shake off. At the same time, in my company i see 23 year old telesales guys raking in 100k per year with the most minimal educational credentials. Although I intellectually enjoyed doing my PhD on many levels, I now realise i will most likely never work in academia, or use my PhD in any professional setting. there are loads of alternatives to education out there, and maybe if bright students were presented with a wider variety of choices, there wouldnt be such gap between the number of PhDs granted and the number of positions available, and there wouldnt be so many people like me, wondering where five years of our lives went.