What does it really take to get a job in academia?

Do you want to go to graduate school? Then you're in good company: nearly 80,000 students will begin pursuing a PhD this year alone. But while almost all new PhD students say they want to work in academia, most are destined for something else. The hard truth is that half will quit or fail to get their degree, and most graduates will never find a full-time academic job.

In Good Work If You Can Get It, Jason Brennan combines personal experience with the latest higher education research to help you understand what graduate school and the academy are really like. This candid, pull-no-punches book answers questions big and small, including

• Should I go to graduate school—and what will I do once I get there?
• How much does a PhD cost—and should I pay for one?
• What does it take to succeed in graduate school?
• What kinds of jobs are there after grad school—and who gets them?
• What happens to the people who never get full-time professorships?
• What does it take to be productive, to publish continually at a high level?
• What does it take to teach many classes at once?
• How does "publish or perish" work?
• How much do professors get paid?
• What do search committees look for, and what turns them off?
• How do I know which journals and book publishers matter?
• How do I balance work and life?

This realistic, data-driven look at university teaching and research will help make your graduate and postgraduate experience a success. Good Work If You Can Get It is the guidebook that anyone considering graduate school, already in grad school, starting as a new professor, or advising graduate students needs. Read it, and you will come away ready to hit the ground running.

Few advice books come closer to presenting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Don't just read this book. Become it.
—Econlib
Economist and strategist Jason Brennan delivers a data-driven, punchily practical guide to succeeding in academia, aimed at PhD students.
—Nature
Don't let anyone you know apply to grad school without first encouraging them to read Good Work If You Can Get It.
—James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
America has needed a book like this for a long time and bravo to Johns Hopkins University Press for publishing it.
—National Review
Good Work If You Can Get It is a frank, realistic, and data-driven discussion of what it takes to succeed in academia. It's the kind of book every aspiring scholar should read.
—Forbes

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is the coauthor of Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education and the author of When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice and Against Democracy.