Annalee Newitz seems to be saying that "alternative careers" are nothing to be ashamed of and that there may be some good in newly minted Ph.D.s, dropouts from degree programs, those who are denied tenure, etc. becoming employed outside academia:
***** It is imperative for graduate students to understand that becoming a professor is only one of many careers they might pursue with their advanced degrees.
During my less apocalyptic moments, I've become somewhat gleeful thinking about Ph.D.s pouring into Hollywood, writing sly sitcom scripts and weirdly symbolic movies of the week. I like the idea of teachers at Heald Business School who have studied class consciousness in American poetry, lawyers who have analyzed the humor of sexual transgression in literary obscenity trials and technical writers who have explored the way information technologies change the way we use language. These are the people whose higher education is relevant to their lives, despite the fact that their experiences fall outside the purview of university curricula.
<http://www.salon.com/it/career/1998/11/06career2.html> *****
Even now, a local friend of mine Ken is learning computer languages while teaching & working on his dissertation, just as Newitz & the Modern Language Association recommend: "...within the past few years...organizations like the Modern Language Association have suggested that graduate programs in the humanities prepare students for nonacademic jobs" (at <http://www.salon.com/it/career/1998/11/06career2.html>).
However, why bother to get _a Ph.D._ in English, etc. in order to become a lawyer, a technical writer, a sitcom script writer, a teacher at a Healed Business School, etc.? Louis Menand writes: "The median elapsed time between the B.A. and the Ph.D. is now 10.5 years, of which 7.1 are spent as a registered student trying to get the bulb in the socket. The median age of those graduating this year with a Ph.D. is slightly over 34. This is not a function of the difficulty of the research. Students in the humanities are among those who take the longest -- 11.9 years between degrees, 8.3 of them as registered students" ("How to Make a Ph.D. Matter" _New York Times_ 22 September 1996). Why should one pursue a Ph.D. for eight years or more in order to become a technical writer, etc.? Why not just get a B.A. or at most an M.A.?
I _was_ an editor for a small publishing house that specialized in trade newsletters, government publications, etc. in Tokyo; I did translation also (e.g., I translated a book titled _Hackers_ by Steven Levy into Japanese for what I, in my dumb un-businesslike way, thought of as "good money" then -- I didn't even make sure to get a translator royalty, but I was only 20 & very naive at that time). There is no need to enter into -- much less complete -- a Ph.D. program to do either of the above -- just the sort of jobs now touted as "alternative careers" by Newitz, the MLA, etc.; I was already doing that when I was an _undergrad_!
Yoshie