I'm not sure what PhD students you're hanging around, but all the ones I know are painfully aware of the fact that we're making terrible career choices. No one expects to get a job as a professor right out of the program, except maybe a few people who hope to get a job at a teaching college. Even those who are going to do a post doc are doing it with full belief that it is unlikely to lead to a tenure-track position. And all of that is at a top 10 CS PhD program.

PhD students generally just love research. We sign up for this because it's what we enjoy doing. Companies try hard to recruit us away, but we stay in spite of that, because why would we want to do anything other than work on the one problem we've always wanted to solve?

Maybe it's different in the humanities, but every STEM PhD student I've ever met has low expectations, with the exception of one-- and she has a first authorship on a Nature paper and is working on a Science submission, so I still think she's pretty well-grounded.

Exactly. Most of the ones I've known are profoundly aware of the job market - hell, most of us looked at the jobs we could have gotten with MS degrees and chosen to continue.

Honestly, at this point, finding out that the job market is grim takes only a shred of research, and absolutely the kind of research you should do before applying.

I think you should stop assuming you know what the vast majority of PhD think about doing a PhD. I'm a student myself and I've loved every minute of it so far. I use the tools I want. I work on interesting problems. And I pretty much make my own schedule. AND I get to help other students while I'm at it. What's not to like? Frankly, it's bliss.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do when I'm done.

Granted, not everyone thinks like me. But certainly not everyone thinks as you do.

This is completely wrong. Nobody expects an academic career anymore, and all the PhD students I know are doing it because they really like their subject. It's like aspiring to be an artist.

> The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career.

Anecdotal rebuttal: The first conversation I had with my research advisor concerned the difficulty of getting a tenure track position at a research university straight out of Ph. D. school. In her words, "that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anymore in this field (Computer Science)."

There are no delusions of academic grandeur, at least in my neck of the woods. I agree that the Ph.D. may be pursued as a career maneuver, but if your end game is a teaching position at a research university your approach to the program has to be very different (and extremely more ambitious) than someone pursuing industry or other goals. And if you're pursuing a prestigious academic position, you are quickly educated on the slim possibility of attaining it, even if you're willing to post doc.

The only reason we grad-students give a crap about academia is that it's our only opportunity to spend primary work hours on research. Unfortunately, academia proceeds to load us down in courses (during the early years) and then TA'ing and RA'ing as well (the whole time). You sign up to grad school to do research, and then find that often you're doing anything but research.

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