The Grad School Scam

 At Yale, in an English department that was perennially ranked in the top ten, we were overjoyed if half our graduating [graduate school] students found positions. That's right - half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University, that's the kind of unemployment rate you'd expect to find among inner-city high school drop-outs. And this was before the financial collapse. Since then, the market's been a bloodbath - often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and, as always, hundreds of people competing for each.

- From "The Defunding of the American Mind" in The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz