grad school

(n): an institution where you get to enjoy the fantasy of a great career for a few years, only to be released into soul-crushing labor to pay off your student debt for the rest of your life.

Michael Moore got into this in Sicko, showing how student debt was like the need for insurance in that it ties you to the capitalist work system until you die.

Apparently there was a Marxist academic who wrote about this and spoke about it at Duke last year. He argued that grad school gets most people nowhere now, esp. in the humanities and social sciences, but increasingly in the hard sciences. It just serves as a pool of cheap labor for research institutions, and most people's research lives end with graduation.