So You Want to Be a Grad Student?

From the Village Voice, an interesting article.

“Here’s an exciting career opportunity you won’t see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read.”

Is there an overproduction of PhDs? Here are two differing perspectives on that question in the atmospheric sciences.