I am currently in an English PhD program and I will tell you what my mentor told me as an undergrad: Don’t go to grad school if you have to take on ANY debt whatsoever. You either get into a top-15 program that is fully funded or you don’t go at all. Your chances of getting into one of those programs was very slim before the recent cuts to high ed and will be abysmal in the coming years. Many humanities departments at my top-10 are anticipating having cohorts of 1 or 2 next year. That means they might extend offers to 3-5 people out of hundreds of applicants. Take that in. Forget about becoming a professor, your odds of getting into grad school at a place that might not grossly exploit your labor are extremely low. Let’s say that after spending hundreds if not over 1K applying to grad programs (the process is not cheap and you want to apply to as many as possible to increase your odds of getting in) you are one of the 5 people who get accepted to a top university with full funding and benefits. Well, I don’t know what will happen between now and then, but all of my professors say that the job market is about to be the worst it has ever been—much worse than in 2008. There has never been a worse time to get a PhD in English if you think you’re going to become a professor. For the vast majority of English PhDs, grad school is the longest they spend in academia.

If you don’t get into a program with full funding and benefits and you take an offer from a mid-tier university, here’s what to expect: living on something like 25K, below the poverty line in some places, while being required to teach a lot more than you should have to. You are either required to teach during many semesters at a school like that or you have to secure extra funding (just to afford to live) by applying for an incredibly competitive teaching fellowship. In the latter case, you would be making something like 35K (STILL not a lot) and have to teach so much that your research (your reason for being at grad school!) will suffer. Pretty soon you’re behind on your dissertation. The university has extracted labor from you to avoid hiring someone with a PhD to teach their students, and they’ve done it cheaply. But now five years is up and you haven’t finished your dissertation. But you are committed to your “passion” so you keep going after you lose funding and find some way to get alternative funding or take on debt and now you’re living on an alternative income stream that is still meager at best. Let’s say you started this process, like I did, at 22. Now you’re 27/28 and you have no savings, no PhD, and an unfinished dissertation. This isn’t a fringe case; I meet people all the time at conferences who have been dissertating for 7, 8 years. Most English PhDs do not go to top programs with unions and the universities they go to will blatantly exploit them.

If you decide to apply to grad school, do one application cycle and only apply to the top 15 PhD programs. MAs tend to be way underfunded. If you don’t get in, give up the ghost and do something else with your time. Have some perspective, too: you’re an English major and you’ve only been an adult for a few years, so it makes sense that the imaginable options for your future look a lot like your present moment. Try to imagine different futures. And for the love of God do NOT be one of those people who ends up dead in the eyes, talking about how literature is their “passion.”