I…discovered that, in the words of a professor friend of mine, “a lot of academia really sucks, most of it is over-specialized and uninteresting, and higher education is a depressing racket”.

Stopping my studies was never really an option for me.

Sure, my parents did tell me my senior year of high school that I didn’t have to go to college if I didn’t want to. But I had spent my entire life learning how to do the bare minimum to get the ‘A’. And I was good at it. I was good at it even if I disliked it.

What else was I going to do? It wasn’t like I had the physical strength to do industrial fishing or the ability to repair cars or even the musical talent to make it big (references upon request). So, like many others, I was propelled inexorably from high school to college, and then later from college to graduate school.

I was even fortunate enough to be admitted to an Ivy League school for graduate school. I had dreams of taking advantage of Penn’s amazing scholarly resources while contributing to an engaged and wide-ranging discussion of the problems that mark human existence.

I did enjoy the library, the conferences, and the world-class speakers at Penn. But I also discovered that, in the words of a professor friend of mine, “a lot of academia really sucks, most of it is over-specialized and uninteresting, and higher education is a depressing racket”.

I watched as friends scrambled madly to find extra funding to finish their niche-within-a-niche dissertations and then toiled as poorly-paid adjuncts while trying to “contribute to the field” in a rat race to get one of the declining number of tenured positions. I also observed my passion for reading, learning, and discussion slowly disappear. And I found myself increasingly marginalized within my department because of differences in ideology and research topics.

So I took a break. In theory, I was specializing in medieval Iberia, and because of the historical Arabic presence on the Iberian Peninsula, Arabic would be very useful. So in 2009 I moved to Morocco to teach English and study Arabic.

Now, two years later, I must decide if I want to go back.

On the one hand, everything seems to run through universities these days, and American universities in particular. And Ivy League universities most of all. For every occupation and every activity there seems to be a course of studies now. Even novelists seem to need a MFA before they can get published. So, to run away from the strong pull of such a system seems foolish. Several friends have told me they would kill for a Ph.D. from Penn.

On the other hand, to continue to specialize in something I have lost passion for also seems wrong. The anti-establishmentarian in me has a hankering to fight the system, with all its specialization, jargon, and butt-kissing. There are, of course, other possibilities besides continuing to study. I could find some sort of work here in Paris–a job that pays a real salary and regularizes my situation–or I could return to the US.

In short, I have to ask myself if a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university is really worth it?

Or, put another way, do I have a calling to that now unidealized world of academia? If I return to Penn, there is a seminar in Spain I would attend at the end of May.

So in the next week or two I must decide if returning to academia is really worth it.

Chris Schaefer has lived in all four continental US time zones and on three other continents. He has B.A.’s in Mathematics, Philosophy, and Spanish from the University of Oklahoma and a M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently on leave from Penn’s Ph.D. program. He blogs occasionally at The Institute where this article first appeared. Visit the blog site to share your thoughts about his decisioni with Chris. [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]