I think this is generally excellent advice - and for one reason beyond the obvious 'don't get crushed by massive debt'.
In many academic fields, there are many more new PhDs than there are available careers. Just think - in order to maintain a steady academic state each tenured professor needs to turn out only a couple of trained successors over their whole career. But it's common to have several at any given time, and generating dozens of potential academic replacements over the course of a career is not unusual.
Competition at the postdoc level is grim, and it gets even more brutal if you try to get on the tenure track. To succeed you normally have to be both excellent and lucky.
The competition for PhD funding is a first signal as to a prospective student's place in the career race. It's also a very cheap signal: you get it up front rather than investing several years of your life and then finding out you can't find a post, or falling into a cycle of underpaid and overstressed adjunct appointments resulting in burnout and resignation.
So if you can't get PhD funding, you should also be asking yourself 'am I well placed for five years time?' The answer isn't always 'no', but it should prompt some serious thought.
I had all tuition covered and a guaranteed stipend for 4 years. I was also assured that there would be other ways to replace the stipend after those 4 years, with a last resort being to sustain myself by TAing classes. In the end, I took 7 years, largely because there was no money outside of TA work and that took up so much time I had serious difficulty maintaining a good rhythm to make progress in my research. Not to mention that the money was so little I had a lot of extra stress in life just making ends meet. And as someone in STEM, I was easily on the more comfortable end of the spectrum as regards funding opportunities and teaching responsibilities.
I am therefore very excited by the unionising efforts of graduate students across the US in recent years. I find it particularly admirable, given how much extra time and effort such organising takes and which the students are bringing forth in full force despite all of their day-to-day burdens. It's far from an easy task, as the administrations of these institutions are definitely prepared to play dirty.
In many academic fields, there are many more new PhDs than there are available careers. Just think - in order to maintain a steady academic state each tenured professor needs to turn out only a couple of trained successors over their whole career. But it's common to have several at any given time, and generating dozens of potential academic replacements over the course of a career is not unusual.
Competition at the postdoc level is grim, and it gets even more brutal if you try to get on the tenure track. To succeed you normally have to be both excellent and lucky.
The competition for PhD funding is a first signal as to a prospective student's place in the career race. It's also a very cheap signal: you get it up front rather than investing several years of your life and then finding out you can't find a post, or falling into a cycle of underpaid and overstressed adjunct appointments resulting in burnout and resignation.
So if you can't get PhD funding, you should also be asking yourself 'am I well placed for five years time?' The answer isn't always 'no', but it should prompt some serious thought.