"[S]he could not even get a job that did not pay"

Articles advising college seniors and recent grads not to go to humanities grad school lose me when, if they present alternatives at all (and they never present concrete alternatives - it's always that one might have instead found 'a job'), they offer up some fairytale existence in which unemployment exists only among PhDs, and in which the literarily-oriented 22-year-old could up and reverse a long series of decisions and inclinations and become the sort of person who had double-majored in engineering and air-conditioner repair. In other words, my beef with the genre isn't that humanities grad school in fact leads directly to tenure-track bliss, but rather that the alternatives for the people who are considering humanities grad school are, by the time they reach that point, kinda limited.

Behold, the alternatives.