Doing an anthropology Ph.D. is not bettering yourself through education. It is extremely costly consumption, taking six to ten years of your life that you could be earning real money and developing skills that would help you in your post academic career. Maybe it would be worthwhile if there was at least a 90%+ chance of a job with tenure at the end of it. But there isn't. Most people who start an anthropology Ph.D. drop out. Over three quarters of those who graduate with Ph.D.s never get a tenure track job[1], i.e. they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means. It is not for people who will be even slightly put out financially if they don't get a job afterwards.
To be honest this rings pretty true. My wife studied anthropology and it was remarkable that _every single one_ of the people she knew working in the field were either desperate starving debt-ridden recent grads who hadn't given up yet, or people with rich partners or parents who could fund their hobby.
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
Well she's sharp enough to realize it, it was fine to be honest. One of the problems is that full-time museum jobs tend to be in the middle of expensive cities.
It wasn't me just saying "you need to quit", it was "we have things we want to do with our lives and we can't do them if we're both working just to pay for housing in the middle of an expensive city". We knew we wanted kids ands definitely did _not_ want the kind of mortgage where it dictates what you can do with your life, and when you look at the cost of childcare, or imagine yourself saying "we'll I'd like to have a stab at starting my own business but with a $5000 a month mortgage payment it's just not practical", you realize that if you're not careful it's really easy to build a life for yourself where you _have_ to make tons of money.
I do all right, but I'm not in the extremely high income brackets a lot of people on this site seem to be in. So I got a remote job, we moved to the country, and we had a couple kids. The house is paid off (no rent, no mortgage - we emigrated too, which helped). There are definitely downsides but avoiding the housing debt trap has had a lot of upsides.
> Over three quarters of those who graduate with Ph.D.s never get a tenure track job[1], i.e. they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do.
Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
> Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means.
Yeah, all these millionaires are lining up to work in anthropology between trips on their yachts.
Do you not value studying where we've come from at all?
> Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
Would you say the equivalent to someone who spends six years trying to break into acting and gives up after that with very little to show for it? An Anthro Ph.D. is necessary for teaching Anthro. There are a very small number of other jobs in "industry" for which having one would be helpful but most of the people with those jobs got them through on the job training, not spending 4-10% of their lives studying. And a Ph.D. will not help you get a teaching job any more than a B.A. will.
You may not think that doing something other than academia after a Ph.D. is failure but career academics disagree and if you're doing a Ph.D. you're going to be surrounded by career academics for four years.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is like spending six years of your life trying to break into acting, or trying to go pro as a video gamer. Almost everyone will fail to get what they wanted after expending enormous time and effort to do so.
I am currently studying myself. I don't value studying and I despise credentialism. I value learning. I don't see why people should be lied to about there being jobs when they don't exist. I don't support pyramid schemes. I don't think encouraging people to do something as damaging to their mental health as doing a Ph.D. in Anthro is moral when the cost is so high and the chance of a good outcome is negligible.
This online community is filled with perochial assholes. Studying the origins of human assholes might one day help us deal with the asshole in us, or at least the asshole in the other.
For instance, does confronting asshole behavior diminish or enflame the behavior.
> they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do
They are trained to independently do research, i.e. manage their work, learn new skills, discipline to work on an enormous multiyear project etc. . There is a reason consulting companies value a PhD highly even if it is in reindeer studies (I think it was BCG who always points to this example and a pianist).
A tenure-track job is by far not the only and not even the main job this qualifies you for.
> Doing an anthropology Ph.D. is not bettering yourself through education.
It is bettering themselves in the sense that you (on average) become a better, more developed person thanks to it. However, I agree that it's not helping your job prospects and bettering yourself is higher on Maslow's hierarchy than securing food and shelter (through job) for you and the child.
Anthropology PhD's aren't training their mind. Much less so than people who are starting their first job in sales. They're just studying man. It's very interesting, I'm sure, but as a matter of self-betterment, utterly replaceable.
In fact, anthropology PhD's don't seem any better than non-PhD's to me. They're about the same as other people their age, maybe worse. This is with a sample size of one.
On the other hand, if you've got a scratch handicap, you are better than me. I played with a +3 handicap once (better than scratch). Never have I seen something more beautiful. And scratch golfers must have a much better trained mind than some median anthropology PhD, or they wouldn't be able to hit the ball so consistently.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means. It is not for people who will be even slightly put out financially if they don't get a job afterwards.
[1]https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...