The PhD trap
Despite grim academic and job markets, many students embark on their PhD journey for the sheer love of research
We are currently in the age of academic inflation, where academic degrees and achievements are devalued, according to recent reports.
“I knew what I was getting into when I decided to do a PhD. A declining field. Few, if any, permanent jobs,” says Thomas MacMillan, a PhD candidate in Concordia University’s history department.
Over the years, the number of people obtaining a PhD has grown, but the same has not been true for academic jobs.
TRaCE McGill, in 2021, traced the post-graduation journey of McGill University's 4,500 PhD alumni who had graduated between 2008 and 2018.
The report found that only 54 per cent held jobs in academia, spread across universities, colleges, CEGEPs and university research centres and institutes. However, only 23 per cent secured tenure-track jobs.
Despite the precarious status of the current academic climate, for students like MacMillan, PhD research provides “an opportunity to really dive deep into a topic meaningful to myself and hopefully others.”
However, he expressed that the opportunity comes at a deep personal and financial cost.
Concordia’s Doctoral Graduate Fellowship offers a base package of $14,000 per year to PhD students, totalling $56,000 over four years.
“I was able to negotiate for the maximum funding after a previous professor advised me to,” said Tim Chandler, a PhD candidate in Concordia’s art history department.
“Some of my peers entered the program with no departmental funding at all,” Chandler added.
In an email to The Link, Julie Fortier, Concordia’s deputy spokesperson, pointed out that in 2019, the university increased the Doctoral Graduate Fellowship from $10,800 for three years to $14,000 for four years.
Fortier further outlined that the total financial support from Concordia donors to PhD students—a different pot of money than that of the Doctoral Graduate Fellowship—was double in 2024-2025 compared to what it was 10 years before.
But even if one were to get the maximum package offered by Concordia, data shows it would barely cover the cost of living and tuition.
As per the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques, the cost of living for a single person in Montreal in 2025 was $40,084, an increase of 4.2 per cent from 2024.
Professor Kevin A. Gould of the geography, planning and environment department emphasized that funding from the Doctoral Graduate Fellowship has remained the same since 2019.
“The package is not great, and it has stayed the same in geography for a long time as inflation has hollowed out the value,” Gould said.
However, geography professor Damon Matthews suggested that graduate student funding can be seen as a joint effort from the university’s internal scholarships, the department’s teaching assistantships, research bursaries, and other external scholarships that the student finds themselves.
A PhD program is a full-time, 40-hour-per-week commitment that takes most students three to six years or longer to complete.
For external funding, students can rely on provincial sources such as the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) or federal funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
The results from the 2024 competition cycle reveal that, of the 2,201 eligible applications, SSHRC awarded only 935. Most students end up applying for several cycles in the hopes of being awarded funds that may ease their academic journey.
"I only applied for FRQ once because my capacity to take rejection is very low,” said Sneha Kumar, PhD student at the department of film and moving image studies. “But I know people who applied for SSHRC and FRQ two or three times before succeeding."
For people like MacMillan, it became necessary to fill funding gaps through various other means.
“I had four years of university funding, $14,000 per year. I was a TA seven times. I taught a course in my department. I received small scholarships and borrowed a bunch of money through the U.S. Department of Education,” MacMillan said.
MacMillan added that he also worked as a research assistant, substitute teacher, union officer and for political campaigns in the U.S.
Yet, according to Chandler, there is another problem at hand for PhD students.
“Virtually no humanities students can finish their PhD in four years, setting us up for failure at the end of our degrees, when we have a higher workload teaching than ever and more thesis work than ever,” Chandler said.
For some international students, the high cost of tuition creates an additional barrier to achieving their dream of earning a PhD.
“Financial stress of this magnitude is not just an economic hardship. It directly affects well-being and academic performance,” said Ahmed Musa, an international PhD candidate who was granted a pseudonym for fear of academic repercussions.
“An international PhD student spends five or more years of the most productive period of their life working essentially at minimum wage or below, while carrying research expectations equivalent to full-time professional positions,” Musa added.
While the responsibility is shared, some feel that Concordia’s financial situation has placed an additional burden on PhD students, which is often overlooked.
As Concordia faces what president Graham Carr recently called “the most serious [financial] challenge in Concordia's recent history,” there have been cuts across the board, leading to more competition for the limited resources available.
In 2023, Concordia made significant cuts to the Conference and Exposition Allowance that allowed emerging scholars to share their research. More recently, Concordia also made the decision to not to renew limited-term appointment (LTA) teaching contracts, leading to anger across the board.
Chandler said these cuts have led to PhD students carrying a considerably larger academic load.
“It just feels like Concordia's administration keeps pushing work down the chain of instructors,” Chandler said. “First, our department had to freeze hiring professors, then LTAs. And a lot of that work falls to PhD students who are teaching courses.”
Fortier called it “inaccurate” to say the university is increasingly relying on PhD students to deliver core teaching.
She said the allocation of teaching assignments, including to graduate students, is governed by collective agreements, and said the number and type of courses taught by graduate students have not changed.
The Concordia Research and Education Workers union (CREW) went on strike for better pay in March this year. The union said in its collective agreement that its student members deserve a living wage, a fairer workload and better job security through indexed contract hours for teaching and research assistants.
“I think there’s definitely an over-reliance on student labour at Concordia, even beyond the fact that all of the university’s biggest courses can’t function without the work of teaching assistants,” Chandler said.
Many PhD students also come to the program while balancing their caregiving responsibilities for families, partners and children.
According to Musa, this includes the issue of health insurance coverage for family members. While international PhD students are covered under the university’s compulsory health insurance plan, their dependents are not.
“This is not for lack of willingness," Musa said. "International students are willing to pay [for dependent health coverage]."
Fortier said the university has “considered” insurance for dependents and consults with the Concordia Student Union and the Graduate Students' Association (GSA) on the matter regularly. She claimed it was last discussed in the summer of 2025, where the “student association did not endorse any of the proposed options for dependent coverage.”
In the 2025 GSA general election, a referendum question asked the graduate population whether they wanted to negotiate for extended coverage for dependents to be added to the international students’ health insurance plan.
The question received 283 votes in favour, with 112 against, and 32 abstaining.
For international PhD students like Musa, there remains a stark contrast between what PhD programs are advertised as versus what they actually entail.
“Instead of a stable, supportive environment fostering innovation,” Musa said, “many find themselves navigating financial instability, insufficient support systems and institutional policies that have not adapted to the realities facing global scholars today.”
This article originally appeared in Volume 46, Issue 8, published January 27, 2026.
