Heavens forbid people should try to better themselves through education later in life.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means. It is not for people who will be even slightly put out financially if they don't get a job afterwards.
[1]https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...
Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
> Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means.
Yeah, all these millionaires are lining up to work in anthropology between trips on their yachts.
Do you not value studying where we've come from at all?
Does society need 100,000 philosophers? 1 million? 10 million?
How much "studying of where we came from" is required?
For instance, does confronting asshole behavior diminish or enflame the behavior.
And start recording now...
Would you say the equivalent to someone who spends six years trying to break into acting and gives up after that with very little to show for it? An Anthro Ph.D. is necessary for teaching Anthro. There are a very small number of other jobs in "industry" for which having one would be helpful but most of the people with those jobs got them through on the job training, not spending 4-10% of their lives studying. And a Ph.D. will not help you get a teaching job any more than a B.A. will.
You may not think that doing something other than academia after a Ph.D. is failure but career academics disagree and if you're doing a Ph.D. you're going to be surrounded by career academics for four years.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is like spending six years of your life trying to break into acting, or trying to go pro as a video gamer. Almost everyone will fail to get what they wanted after expending enormous time and effort to do so.
I am currently studying myself. I don't value studying and I despise credentialism. I value learning. I don't see why people should be lied to about there being jobs when they don't exist. I don't support pyramid schemes. I don't think encouraging people to do something as damaging to their mental health as doing a Ph.D. in Anthro is moral when the cost is so high and the chance of a good outcome is negligible.
It is bettering themselves in the sense that you (on average) become a better, more developed person thanks to it. However, I agree that it's not helping your job prospects and bettering yourself is higher on Maslow's hierarchy than securing food and shelter (through job) for you and the child.
In fact, anthropology PhD's don't seem any better than non-PhD's to me. They're about the same as other people their age, maybe worse. This is with a sample size of one.
On the other hand, if you've got a scratch handicap, you are better than me. I played with a +3 handicap once (better than scratch). Never have I seen something more beautiful. And scratch golfers must have a much better trained mind than some median anthropology PhD, or they wouldn't be able to hit the ball so consistently.
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
She doesn't work in the field anymore.
It wasn't me just saying "you need to quit", it was "we have things we want to do with our lives and we can't do them if we're both working just to pay for housing in the middle of an expensive city". We knew we wanted kids ands definitely did _not_ want the kind of mortgage where it dictates what you can do with your life, and when you look at the cost of childcare, or imagine yourself saying "we'll I'd like to have a stab at starting my own business but with a $5000 a month mortgage payment it's just not practical", you realize that if you're not careful it's really easy to build a life for yourself where you _have_ to make tons of money.
I do all right, but I'm not in the extremely high income brackets a lot of people on this site seem to be in. So I got a remote job, we moved to the country, and we had a couple kids. The house is paid off (no rent, no mortgage - we emigrated too, which helped). There are definitely downsides but avoiding the housing debt trap has had a lot of upsides.
They are trained to independently do research, i.e. manage their work, learn new skills, discipline to work on an enormous multiyear project etc. . There is a reason consulting companies value a PhD highly even if it is in reindeer studies (I think it was BCG who always points to this example and a pianist).
A tenure-track job is by far not the only and not even the main job this qualifies you for.