Advice to graduate students: join the Army

Inside Higher Ed give advice to potential PhDs: There are no jobs.

In the previous spirit of making lists, let me then offer the following advice to tomorrow’s potential Ph.D.s:
1. Don’t go to graduate school. Because so many young people are seeking sanctuary from the rampant unemployment of the broader job market, the number of graduate students has increased, while the number of jobs for them has withered. You have a better chance of publishing a successful novel than you do of landing a tenure‐track position. Better get to writing!
2. If you do decide to pursue graduate studies, remember that you are playing a numbers game. Like British soldiers sent to Gallipoli in 1915, only a few of you will make it out alive. If you are keen on heroism, perhaps you will have the stamina to stick things out. But never forget — bullets, like the job market, are indifferent to your courage. You had better don some serious armor.
3. Realize that you occupy the lowest rung of the ladder. The real reason research institutions have graduate programs is because tenured faculty don’t want to teach lower‐division courses. Your "career as a burgeoning intellectual" is in fact a barely concealed sham in which tenured fat cats chuckle at your bustling naïveté.
4. Know your enemies. They are everyone. You and your "graduate student colleagues" are a smelly pack of famished mongrels tearing at each other’s throats for paltry scraps; your professors are the bourgeois slave drivers and elites that they themselves warned you about in that class on "Critical
Theory." Begin to suspect that the leftist virtue of the university conceals a system of privilege and good‐ole‐boyism every bit as sordid as the Corporate America you went to graduate school to avoid.
5. Join the Army. You can be an officer, and you’re guaranteed to receive a monthly salary, good benefits, and great deals on car rentals for the rest of your life. The only risk is that you might get killed.
And above all — keep writing. Consider the endless volumes of soporific rubbish that academics produce every year, and focus your energies on writing something that people will actually enjoy reading. You might even get lucky and write a bestseller. Then you can send a copy to those wicked committee members who tried to goad you into suicide.
The humanities is a sinking ship, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
My advice is to strap your life preserver on tight; the ocean is vast, cold, and full of terrible creatures, but better to be devoured by beasts than to drown with crazies.

This advice is brutal, but good.