Why I Didn't Go To Grad School For Philosophy

And Probably Never Will

I’d like to think this philosophy blog is a top hobbyist blog on substack. Perhaps it’s top 5, 10, or 100, I’ll let you be the judge. I think this not because I hold my own philosophical capacities in high regard but because I emphasize that I am a hobbyist.

Most people I interact with on substack are either philosophy students or trained philosophers. They are people more trained in philosophy than I am, or on course to be more trained than I am one day. Their interests in philosophy are more professional.

And so on the measure of being a hobbyist, I score quite high by default!

Anyway, with this dynamic, on many days I think to myself “Man, it would be great if I could go back to school to study philosophy again, if only to earn an MA.” But this is likely a fantasy. It’s not on the level of a fantasy of a random white collar worker thinking he can get in shape and become a professional athlete, but it is a similar type of fantasy. Here’s why.

I Already Went To Grad School

I have a Master’s Degree. I forget about it all the time.

Immediately after I earned my bachelor’s degree, I went to graduate school for marketing and mass communications. I did this because I didn’t apply for internships or part time jobs during undergrad, had no experience, and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I thought a Master’s degree would help (and I was probably wrong).

I won’t go into detail about my grad school experience, other than saying it was relatively easy. My GPA was a solid .5 points higher in graduate school than undergraduate. As an undergrad, I often would drink two monster rehab drinks to write a major essay the night before it was due (psycho behavior in retrospect). I often stayed up until 3 to get it done (how I graduated above a 3.25 GPA is a mystery to me). When I was in grad school, for my first essay I took the same monster-fueled approach…and was done by 9PM.

Graduate school was fine. Most of my classes were in the evening and I could have worked full time, but I imagine it would have been harder and less fun (it was basically a fifth year of college for me).

Today, I 100% don’t want to leave my job, take a likely pay cut, and go back to that environment. I like making money, and being able to check out of thinking about work when work hours are done. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to write this substack had it not been for good work-life balance.

The Financial Logic of Grad School Is Awful

If you’re an undergraduate reading this, I don’t recommend going to graduate school unless you are completely certain you want to study the subject you are studying. That means being prepared to go into academia or being at peace with the possibility of accumulating a lot of debt to not be a part of academia.

If you’re worried about your employability, you’re better off cold calling businesses and asking if you can do a non-paid internship with them, build experience, and apply for jobs while doing that cold calling/working said non-paid internship. Seriously.

It would obviously feel sucky to do that while living with your parents, but guess what? Your early-to-mid twenties are full of underemployment, and you’re probably going to be in a precarious living situation for a couple years anyway. For your medium-term financial well-being, internships and menial jobs are better than grad school.

What’s more, the income bump you get from having a graduate degree isn’t nothing, but you’re not going to see it in your job searching until years later.

I was recruited for my current job (which feels crazy in retrospect) after about two years working another job. I think my Master’s probably helped, but it probably didn’t help getting that original, first job (which was the whole point of getting it!).

I think later on in my career, when I’m searching for different jobs, my Master’s degree will be a mark in my favor, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal at the moment.¹

Many social media influencers say bachelor degrees are scams, and they’re lying to you or coping with the fact that they don’t have one. But weirdly enough, I think many of the wrong criticisms about bachelor degrees are correct about master’s degrees!

This post is a little more informal, so I’m not going to go deep into sourcing, so “trust me bro” on these facts and statistics.²

• Something like 50% of all graduate degrees are for education and business, which are degrees subsidized by employers (MBAs) or necessary for career advancement (education). Keep in mind, these degrees are pursued after one has a job or career.

• I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that master’s degrees are cash cows for institutions in that they make significantly more revenue from master’s degrees than bachelor’s degrees, because there’s less financial aid for master’s degrees.

• Combine that with the fact that you may be taking out $10,000-20,000ish a year for graduate school, and you’re in a hole.³

• If you have undergraduate debt, you may have mid-five-figures student debt (or more), with minimal differentiation of other job candidates, at least in the short to medium term.

• This is the key point: the financial benefits of student loan debt will not be apparent until you’re supposed to have that debt close to paid off (at least 5-7 years, maybe closer to 10).

Long story short, if you’re going to graduate school, you better love it, have a job lined up associated with it, or have someone else pay for it! Otherwise, you’re setting yourself back for monthly payments worth hundreds of dollars more per month, with no financial benefits during that time.

If someone explained this to me when I was a directionless college junior, I would have made different plans. One of the awful things about America’s student loan system is that most students don’t know what it’s like to have a recurring payment worth $200 a month, let alone $400 or more. If you have more than the $30,000 in loans, you’re assured to pay at least $250 per month in loan payments for a 10 year repayment plan. If you go to graduate school, it will be much higher. It’s arguably predatory.

Thankfully, I’m on a trajectory to get my student loans forgiven in the next few years from public service loan forgiveness. Given that I’ve already done graduate school and incurred some of the aforementioned costs (not just the financial costs of the education, but quitting my job, surrendering my free time, etc), I do not have much interest in repeating that process I’m probably not any sort of genius in philosophy, so attempting to return to school would certainly incur more debt.

It’s kind of like going on a long trip, being 70% of the way there, and someone asking if you want to go back in the opposite direction to start over. No thank you!

Grad School Is Oriented For Academia Or Certification

The other thing about graduate school is that people don’t typically do it for fun or for hobbies. Sure, some (rich and imprudent) people do, but I don’t consider myself among their ranks.

Generally, people go to graduate school to get some sort of certification to differentiate themselves on the job market or to advance knowledge in academia.

In philosophy, there’s not that many programs that are *just* for Master’s degrees. You go to graduate school in philosophy to get a PhD in philosophy, become a philosopher of some sort, and find a teaching gig somewhere.

To make matters more complicated, philosophy graduate programs are less ubiquitous than MBAs or education master’s in the United States. There may be multiple universities in any given state, but very few of them have a philosophy PhD program, and maybe not the kind of PhD I would be interested in.

It’s possible if not likely that, to pursue a PhD I’d have to uproot my life to attend an institution far away. That makes perfect sense for a young student committed to learning or someone who is confident that the academic world is for them, but it’s not a system conducive to people like me. I’m married and hoping to have a family soon.

I Don’t Want To Be An Academic

Back when I was an undergraduate, the main reason I didn’t pursue academia outside of a master’s degree was because I didn’t want to be an academic.

My dad warned me against going into academia. He went to graduate school for History in the late 80s, thinking he wanted to be a PhD. He got his Master’s, but his advisor basically told him that he was screwed because of how bad the job market was. This was the late 1980s, and now it seems the market is worse!

The philosophy job market is bullshit

But even then, I think my dad’s experience underplays how rough the academic life is in America. The value proposition is much worse than I considered 10 years ago. If you’re an academic without tenure, you’re constantly applying for jobs, often uplifting your life to move across the country for the jobs you are fortunate enough to get offered.

When I was a recent college graduate, I had strong roots with my family and friends, and so that wouldn’t have appealed to me at all. Since then, I’ve become less rooted, and I’ve learned I like having the freedom to move. About 5 years ago I moved to a bigger city to pursue better economic and relationship opportunities.⁴ I would have had a much harder time justifying those risks as an academic.

Now that I have gone this non-academic route, have a steady job with decent income, academia seems less and less enticing. You have to give up so many other freedoms, take many risks, and delay a lot of gratification to be a successful academic. Though tenure seems like a sweet deal, I have no idea how realistic it is for someone to expect to get tenure.

With all the other costs, academia is just not a good deal for someone like me.

On a more positive sidenote, these dynamics are why I respect PhDs and academics, even if I disagree with them. And when someone mistakenly thinks I’m some kind of philosopher (something that has happened a couple times on this platform!) I stop them right there.

I have not done the work. As much as I like philosophy as a hobby, I yield to people who have done the work. They’ve sacrificed a lot to get where they are, and I’m not going to steal any valor (that still doesn’t mean they are automatically correct though).

Being a Hobbyist Is The Best of Both Worlds

Whenever someone is contemplating radical lifestyle changes, like moving cities, going to school, getting a new job, etc., we often have this tendency of thinking about all the fun things we’d be doing with the specific lifestyle change. We don’t think of all the things that would be the same or worse.

For academia, the main appeal to me would be to research and teach. I’m sure I’d love that! The problem is that, when earning a degree, I’d probably have to take a few silly classes I don’t have interest in taking and research things I wouldn’t care about (I hate general education requirements). What’s more, the classes I’d teach wouldn’t necessarily be classes I’d want to teach.

There are specific subjects in philosophy I find interesting and that interest fuels my curiosity and writing. Some would call that interest “passion,” and I wouldn’t contradict them. But as a general life lesson, I have learned that it’s not smart to make big life or financial decisions based just on passion. Because in chasing that passion, I may not see the tedious experiences that may otherwise be the graduate school experience.

Another way of framing this is why pay thousands of dollars to learn philosophy when you can just read philosophers’ books yourselves? Obviously, it’s not a substitute for earning a degree, but it can be more fun.

Some day, I’d love to teach philosophy in some capacity, but I think it’s better to explore alternative options to academia. It’s possible these alternative options don’t exist, and I’ll never find them, and that’s fine. For now, I have a hobbyist mindset, and so I’ll just continue writing this blog.

Also…Family!

This is compounded by the fact that I’m in my first year of marriage and my wife and I want to have kids. It doesn’t make sense to pursue something as serious as another graduate degree, incurring all of these various costs when I’m needed in the most important part of my life.

But Never Say Never!

Having said all of that, I wouldn’t say I’ll never go back to grad school in philosophy.

Specific circumstances could arise that make it a plausible path. For instance, if this substack grew to have tens of thousands of subscribers, netting low 6-figures in revenue, it would make sense. But man, that just feels like an implausible scenario; a wishcast, if you will. In fact, whenever I think of plausible scenarios, they feel implausible; I can’t help but think they’re all wishful thinking.

If the only cost or difficulty that came from getting a PhD/Master’s in philosophy was the time and effort it took to get it, I don’t think there’s any question that I would try. But everything else surrounding academia makes it too costly and not worth the effort for me. But hey, that may not last forever!

In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy writing here as a hobby. I hope you’ll join me and subscribe!

1. Not to overshare, but I’m aiming for a slight career/job title pivot from Digital Campaigns to Business Intelligence/Analysis, I don’t think my Master’s of Mass Communications will mean much in that industry other than signaling a degree of conscientiousness.

2. Ingest with a healthy serving of salt

3. I took out about $25,000 for about a year and a half of my degree as I didn’t have good enough income and needed it for rent - not advisable in retrospect!

4. Long story short: It worked!