I know this thread is pretty old by now, but I’m having a similar problem and was wondering - what did you decide to do? Law school, phd, or break? And how pleased are you with that decision?
He went to law school. Judging by this post from another thread, he regretted it:
Are you in the US? The job market for lawyers will be fractionally better when you graduate than it was for me, but I wouldn’t go to law school under any circumstances unless you have: (1) a guaranteed job, or (2) a full scholarship to a top 25 school.
I had (1), so I was able to go to a cheap school, but the vast majority of my classmates are struggling. We took the July 2014 bar exam, so we were all admitted by September of last year, and some have already given up looking for license-required jobs.
The academic job market is capricious. Luck plays a huge factor. Most doctoral dissertations are incredibly specialized. Will a job open that generally fits your dissertation topic the year you graduate? You can hedge this by having some teaching experience or secondary research experience that differs a little from your main topic and allows for a wider spread of jobs. Unfortunately, many PhDs graduate with extraordinarily specialized skills and research.
Many of my friends with PhDs have landed jobs in community colleges, which pay as well as many university positions, but make little use of the specific research that their dissertations involved.
I don’t see much evidence that the “rung” or tier of a university has such an overbearing influence. Smaller or less funded universities tend to have very specialized programs. For instance, I imagine at an Ivy League school, a doctoral student can specialize in American, Asian, Latin American, African, European, World, and other histories. Plus, there are more interdisciplinary opportunities that create more versatile graduates. As a small public branch university, if there is a PhD program, it may only be one of those fields, or perhaps a subset (i.e. Colonial American or African American). A graduate of such a program may excel in that field - but be in that field alone, and has to hope that there are demands for jobs in the field.
I reread the OP several times and still don’t have a feel for what you *want *to do with your life.There are a couple of things you think you’re pretty good at, but the rest of the post is basically you trying to compare two things you find pretty much equally distasteful.
My advice is to forget the negatives. Either choice you make is going to cost you a lot of money, require more time in school doing progressively harder work, set your life in a direction that will be difficult to change if you decide you made a mistake, and graduate you into an iffy job market.
For heaven’s sake, at least choose something you LIKE.
It’s a four year old thread, FYI.