Too Much Education? Analyzing Wooldridge's "Doctor Dole Queue"
This paper analyzes Adrian Wooldridge's article "Doctor Dole Queue," in which Wooldridge argues that a generation of PhD students is accumulating massive debt while facing poor employment prospects. The analysis examines Wooldridge's rhetorical strategy—his use of facts, statistics, and reductio ad absurdum reasoning—to challenge the assumption that more education always leads to better outcomes. The paper also identifies a key weakness in Wooldridge's argument: while he makes a compelling statistical case against humanities PhDs, he fails to provide evidence that professional degrees such as MBAs are equally useless, and he largely ignores the strong labor-market returns of STEM doctoral programs.
- Overview of Wooldridge's Argument: Wooldridge's central claim and rhetorical approach summarized
- The Case Against the Humanities PhD: Evidence Wooldridge marshals against doctoral study
- Weaknesses in Wooldridge's Analysis: Gaps in Wooldridge's treatment of MBAs and STEM degrees
- Conclusion: Qualified assessment of Wooldridge's overall argument
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves methodically through Wooldridge's article paragraph by paragraph, keeping the analysis tightly tethered to the source text rather than drifting into generalization.
- It identifies both the rhetorical strengths of Wooldridge's argument (use of statistics, reductio ad absurdum) and a genuine logical gap—his failure to distinguish humanities PhDs from professional or STEM doctoral degrees.
- The critical counterpoint is specific and evidence-based, noting that Wooldridge provides no data to support his claim that MBAs are equally poor investments.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates rhetorical analysis: rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with Wooldridge, the student unpacks how he builds his argument (examples, statistics, logical extension to absurdity) and then evaluates where that argument holds and where it breaks down. This approach—describe the technique, assess its effectiveness, identify its limits—is a core skill in argumentative writing at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a framing paragraph that summarizes Wooldridge's central claim and rhetorical method. Two body paragraphs follow, each corresponding to a paragraph in the source article and offering progressively deeper analysis. The final body paragraph pivots to critique, identifying the argument's internal inconsistency regarding MBAs and STEM PhDs. The structure is compact but logically complete, ending on a qualified judgment rather than a simple endorsement or rejection.
Overview of Wooldridge's Argument
It might seem that having too much education—like being too rich or too thin—is impossible to achieve. However, according to Adrian Wooldridge's article "Doctor Dole Queue," that is precisely what is happening to a generation of PhD students. After a certain point, there is a diminishing level of returns for the student in pursuing degree after degree. Certain degrees, such as a PhD in English literature, can actually make the job-seeker less employable, given the lack of utility of the degree in fields outside academia and the opportunity cost of time and money required to earn a doctorate. Wooldridge primarily uses facts and statistics to illustrate his point, underscoring the discrepancy between the claim that "more education is good" and the reality that most students encounter in the working world.
In the first paragraph of his essay, Wooldridge argues that a generation of people with PhDs is being created burdened by massive student loans and poor employment prospects. He counters the assumption that "more education is better" by taking it to its logical, absurd conclusion: he suggests that PhDs will eventually be touted as mandatory for all students in post-industrial economies, just as secondary education is considered the minimum standard for entering the workplace. The absurdity of this vision underlines a serious point—namely, the uselessness of a PhD for the majority of the degree's current recipients.
The Case Against the Humanities PhD
In the second paragraph of his article, Wooldridge presents a substantial body of sobering evidence in support of his thesis. He highlights the crushing levels of debt carried by PhD students in fields such as English literature and notes that many PhD holders are employed in low-paying positions that do not even require a college education. The education these students receive is so narrow and specialized that it cannot be transferred into other types of useful professional work.
There is always the counterargument that a PhD prepares someone for an academic career, but tenured positions are notoriously difficult to obtain. Wooldridge points out that many PhDs who do teach do so only as contracted, temporary employees with no benefits and very poor pay. The hard facts simply do not support the emphasis on graduate study as a particularly sound investment—at least for highly specialized doctoral programs in the humanities.
Conclusion
Wooldridge makes a persuasive argument that, for students pursuing highly specialized humanities doctorates, the financial and professional returns are unlikely to justify the investment of time and money. His use of statistics and his reductio ad absurdum opening effectively challenge the conventional wisdom that more education is always better. However, his analysis would be stronger if it distinguished more carefully between degree types—acknowledging, for instance, that STEM doctoral graduates and MBA holders typically face a very different labor-market landscape than English PhD recipients. As it stands, "Doctor Dole Queue" is a valuable provocation, but one that requires a more nuanced reading than Wooldridge himself provides.
References
Wooldridge, A. (2011). Doctor Dole Queue. More Intelligent Life. Retrieved from
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