The biggest ponzi scheme of all: graduate school!

Thomas Benton (William Pannapacker in real life) once again has a fantastic column on why graduate schooling in humanities is a Big Lie.  I would enlarge the scope to include graduate schooling in most disciplines.  This is, of course, not the first time I am blogging on this topic.  It won't be the last time either because, even as recently as a fortnight ago, I think I shocked the life out of a student who came to talk to me about grad school--shocked that student with data on debt and potential joblessness, and added that I would certainly help out if the decision--after being well informed--was to pursue grad school.  Haven't heard from that student, yet.

Anyway, Benton concludes:

Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.