Matching the Zeitgeist.

It seems that I'm at the forefront of the zeitgeist when it comes to speaking out on doctoral education in the Humanities.

Pretty much all the students who I know who've thought through my analysis agree that there's effectively "2 tracks" of Ph.D. students, and people have better options in grad school and beyond if they have more money.

They also are all troubled, but see no good solution, other than to have students without independent money self-select out from the profession and never enter it at all.

From what I can tell, only a handful of professors feel similarly, so it'll be interesting to see what happens once these conversations reach prospective students and decisions not to go for a Ph.D. start mounting.

Though, on the other hand, I think it's only 25-35% of students who enter without independent money (though that # may be higher for some program), so it's not like a program would be devastated if half of those students wised up and decided not to attend (and I'd be surprised if half wised up; so many entering students are over-optimistic or naive about their prospects, even when you lay it out for them).

Perhaps the biggest task right now, then, is consciousness-raising: to convince students, profs, and the admin at large that the academy will suffer if the lower socio-economic classes never enter it.

Then, they *create* a problem, whereas the problem would just slide buy unnoticed otherwise, since you'll still have a full regimen of doctoral students.