Now let’s look at what Jordan and I signed on to when we entered journalism. First of all, I am not so sure that one’s shot at making a living wage in this business is actually better than one’s shot at making a living wage in academia. Second, though, while Jordan and I have lucked out so far, and The Atlantic pays better than a graduate stipend (and has worked its ass off to reach the state of financial stability it’s currently in), let me state the obvious: I am hard-pressed to think of any job in the industry that even approaches the five-year security of a Ph.D. program, let alone that of the golden tenured faculty position those students are aiming for. In fact, I am hard-pressed to think of any job in the industry that has even one-year security.

Anyone saying humanities Ph.D.s are a terrible bet is already buying into the cultural paradigm that affects the students’ decision to enter the program in the first place: that a tenured job is so desirable that not getting one equals failure.

Let’s examine that premise. If at the end of five to seven years of being a graduate student, the student can’t land a tenure-track job, or at the end of the next seven years of the tenure clock, doesn’t get tenure, that individual has still been drawing a stipend or salary for five to twelve years. Not bad. Whether that individual is now less employable than he or she would have been had he or she not taken the Ph.D.—which is where a lot of the complaints come from—is a crucial question, but it’s not a particularly easy one to answer.

To start with, more than just the decision to enter the Ph.D. program plays into one’s employability five years down the line. Thousands of other decisions are involved: what the individual does while in the program, whether he or she has developed other skills, etc. But the biggest question when evaluating whether entering the Ph.D. program made this individual less employable than he or she would have been without the program is what the student would have been doing if not in the program.

And here things get tricky. First, the job market outside academia right now is indeed “scary,” as some of Jordan’s respondents said when justifying their decisions. But also, humanities Ph.D. students are self-selecting. I’m not sure that if they didn’t wind up in a Ph.D. program they’d be applying themselves with equal fervor to landing a high-security, reasonably high-paying job, say, in nursing, plumbing, or accounting. What makes anyone think they wouldn’t instead be doing something just as financially insecure and non-transferable from a resume perspective, like temp work, museum curation, music, or hitch-hiking towards self-discovery?

As one Atlantic editor with a doctorate put it, “When I was in my 20s, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I liked the idea of working in a video store and not worrying about a career. But I was also a little worried about not worrying about a career, and I was interested in the history of civilization. So I decided to do something I semi-joked about at the time as a plan to waste the rest of my 20s and get congratulated for it at the end.”