Reply to Possible to get into a great grad school/become a prof at a highly-ranked college

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a tenured professor at an elite university. As others have said, a poor undergraduate record is highly likely to hurt your chances of getting into a top PhD program. If you do manage to get into one, your undergraduate grades will probably no longer matter. You will, however, have to excel in the PhD program to have any chance of getting a tenure-line job. Even then, the chances aren't great, especially if you are in a field where there are no other job paths for PhDs or where there's not much undergraduate demand. It make a difference whether you're talking about a PhD in comparative literature or in computer science. There's a lot of luck involved with landing a good academic job and you have to be prepared to move anywhere in the country.

You should also keep in mind that higher ed is in a crisis and it's only going to get worse over the next decade or two. Tenure-line jobs are becoming harder and harder to find. When tenured faculty retire, they are now often replaced by non-tenure-line faculty or adjuncts, even at elite universities. External funding, which is absolutely essential in the sciences, is extremely hard to get. Publishers are struggling. Academic life is not what people outside of academia often imagine it to be. If you pursue it, do so with your eyes wide open.  [/quote]

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