I'm not sure this dirty secret is really very secret

I love this line: "GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning."  So mean and evocative.  I'm imagining all these Ph.D. students wandering sullenly in a post-industrial wasteland, ivy covered buildings dilapidated and crumbling, undergraduates scurrying fearfully from one class to another.  Some of them are wondering with deserved anxiety, when their major professor will ever let them finish up their research instead of pushing them to write more and more articles with only a 3rd, 4th or (horror) et al level credit on the byline.  However, I've met lots of very happy Ph.D. students who have stayed well over a decade on subsistence pay by choice.  The life of a student isn't all bad afterall.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.