My post on graduate school attrition brought lots of responses from the attrited. I'll post a number of them over the next day or so; you can also read online responses at Caveat Lector, Michael Williams, Tightly Wound, Industrial Blog, and Mt. Hollywood.

Here's a letter from someone who is glad to have left a top Ph.D. program in history:

Personally, I think better of the students who drop out of Humanities Ph.D. departments than the ones who stay in. When I started my Ph.D. program, I thought it would be difficult to find a job, but my ability would see me through. After a couple of years of watching professors across my small field retire from various universities, and seeing theirÝpositions remain unfilled despite excellent recent graduates, I realized that my ability to get a job had very little to do with the quality of my research and everything to do with the relative popularity of my field. As the jobs flowed to faddish areas chock full of po-mo blathering, I decided to grab the condolence M.A. and get out. It worked out nicely - foreign language fluency, a strong statistics background, and communications skills honed by writing and teaching made me very employable.

Many of the comments over at the Invisible Adjunct assume that getting the Ph.D. is somehow difficult, and the weeded-out students lacked ability. This is mostly nonsense; as long as you're willing to work like a packhorse and follow the appropriate trends, you can get your Ph.D. Academic departments are full of people who barely qualify as bright, but know how to put in the long hours and grind out papers on the right topics; the closer you get to and the more you interact with actual Ph.D.s, the more the degree loses its shine. No, most of the students I know who quit could get their Ph.D.s without much difficulty, given sufficient motivation, but left because they had nothing to motivate them - they realized academia was a dead-end, filled with long hours, low pay, absurd politics, and only a miniscule chance of success. My advice to students considering grad school: don't, but if you insist, you should choose a program that offers M.A. degrees on the way, and quit after your M.A. if you're at all dissatisfied or pessimistic about their future. There's no shame in leaving a sucker's game.

More soon. Meanwhile, check out Invisible Adjunct's new thread on graduate school reform, real and imagined, effective and not.

UPDATE: Don't miss John Bruce's analysis of how the graduate education system may be understood as a Ponzi scheme. His outline of how a class action lawsuit for systemic institutional fraud would work is fascinating.