ABSTRACT
Louis Menand made this observation in the fall of 1996 in a much-discussed essay in the New York Times Magazine, situating it in the context of a declining job market for young scholar-teachers, a “market” in which “the supply curve has completely lost sight of the demand curve in American academic life” (“How to Make a Ph.D. Matter” 78). The term job “market,” in part because it connotes increasingly scarce opportunities to “sell” or exchange services, may not be the right term here, but his larger point is nevertheless well taken. And Menand’s emphasis on the lives of doctoral students before they receive their degrees is equally salutary. Yet there is also reason to believe that the precarious economics of graduate study, especially insofar as debt is concerned, are far worse than he implies. Moreover, if recent trends in student borrowing continue, the indebtedness of graduate and professional students will rise to more dangerous levels just in the months between the time we wrote this book and the time you read it (undergraduates are also borrowing more than ever before, but their predicaments will not constitute the focus of this essay). In many cases, this debt will seriously undermine these students’ financial stability; and in about 10 percent of the cases-about the percentage of graduate and professional students who default on their loans-it will effectively ruin their credit ratings for a decade or more, thus impairing their ability to buy homes, start families, and so on.
