[pmyteh]

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.