Reply to Pursuing PhD @ 50+

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm the PP who said everyone who does a PhD is miserable. I didn't mean to imply that it's pure misery throughout, or that there are no good outcomes - neither was the case for me personally. But it can be a long, uncertain, isolating process, through which you are paid at poverty levels even as you work incredibly hard. And for a lot of people with academic aspirations, it ends with disappointment because tenure-track faculty positions have shrunk drastically in the past few decades. I'm grateful for my PhD but most people I know who have one wish they'd appreciated the tradeoffs and considered other options instead.

Add to that for someone 50+, they will be even more isolated from their peer grad students, faculty will be unwilling to invest in them because it's highly unlikely that they'll become a meaningful player in the field, and there's almost no prospect of a better or even good job at the end of the process.

As someone who is in her 50s, I'd tell a contemporary who wanted to do this to find a different path to scratch that academic itch. Take classes, read books, go to lectures if you have the time and money to do that. But pursuing a PhD at this stage of life is really pointless.[/quote]

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