The linked article by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman is thought provoking. I declined an offer from North Texas to come to the University of Calgary in 2011. I was taken aback by how much work they wanted me to do right off the bat, not to mention that the compensation for the heavy workload was EXTREMELY low!
Many graduate philosophy programs rely upon what could be characterized as a game of bait and switch. These programs exist not because there is a job market for their graduates. They exist for a variety of reasons, including the intrinsic value of philosophy and institutional mandates to produce Ph.D.’s. But they also exist in part to help universities reduce the cost of tuition while providing faculty members with the opportunity to conduct research…
In the majority of graduate programs, students are overworked and underpaid during their time in school, and they have few prospects for work once they graduate. And the beneficiaries of this system—again, setting aside the pleasure of studying philosophy for a period of one’s life—are the universities, which save costs on instruction, and the professors, who practice their specialties in graduate courses and use their reduced workload to produce philosophical research.
Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman (both…
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A Philosopher's Take 
rung2diotimasladder
August 31, 2014
I briefly considered going for the Ph.D in Philosophy—just for the love of it, with no job expectations. I think a lot of us are like that…we just want to stay in school forever, it’s heaven for us. However, after a lot of research and peripatetic movements, I changed my mind. The clincher was when I listened to a weekend-long symposium on Plato, my main man, at the university I most wanted to get into. The lectures made no sense, or if they did, the theses were too uninteresting to be of value to healthy-minded people. I couldn’t believe they were talking about the same Platonic dialogues I had come to love in such a bland way. It all felt…dead. For me, just not worth the debt. Plus I don’t have an intense drive to teach and can’t imagine jumping through those hoops to land possibly nowhere.
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Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
September 1, 2014
I read the entire CHE article just now, and they make some good points —the exploitation of graduate students is a big problem, especially in North America. On the other hand, I feel somebody needs to make a point that is made when the value of philosophical research is questioned due to its lack of readership outside of the academy, viz., how many non-academics read the latest theoretical physics papers, mathematics papers, biochemistry papers, etc? There is more of a trickle down affect with research than there ever was money.
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