I can only provide you information regarding my school, which happens to have one of the best history departments in the world. For reference, I am a student at the University of Toronto.

Unfortunately, the information I can provide - as I see it - is not massively positive. The packages for our history programs, and indeed history programs nationwide, have had their funding slashed. A PhD candidate in the history department can expect a funding package that will cover all living expenses (in a very expensive city), but not much else. Most of the people pursuing PhDs in the history department live in pretty spartan accommodation and embody the "broke grad student" archetype.

Depending on your lifestyle preferences, I would think long and hard about your prospects as a PhD candidate in history. It is a huge change in lifestyle from that of the typical lawyer, and I know there are quite a few people in our department who have put off starting families/getting married etc. because of the financial constraints their career path poses.

As an aside, you should never take out loans to complete a PhD!

If you want to investigate career prospects and placement further, I would suggest ignoring rankings and looking at the individual school program pages - most should have a list of recent graduates and their placements.

It should also be noted that I myself am not a graduate history student, but I regularly interact with members of the graduate student body either through courses, tutorials or socially. I hope this helps.

The thing about a PhD in history (or most humanities) is that it really only makes sense if you are committed to going into academia. I know there are probably a bunch of people with PhDs doing a whole bunch of things, but the primary thrust of the PhD is to prepare you for a life in academia. You will be probably be adjuncting for some time, and you may end up in places you don't necessarily want to be in just to have a job. One guy I know finally has a tenure-track position in Lubbock, TX after stops in Rochester, NY and Fargo, ND. Not the most glamorous of locations, but it's a full-time job with a decent bit of security, something that's highly prized among academics.

In light of all this, I would echo the other comments saying not to go into debt. You will not have nearly the same earning potential as you would in law, but you could very easily get yourself into as much or more debt if you're not careful. Think of the PhD as a job, and look at any potential offers like you would evaluate a job offer. People who want you more will usually give you more money, and an acceptance without an adequate financial package is probably them chancing their arm at getting another interchangeable TA on the cheap.

But I do also want to offer some words of encouragement. One of my inspirations back in high school was a teacher who got a degree in jazz guitar from Berklee, then went to law school and was a lawyer for many years. He ended up burned out and hating law, and followed his passion for history. He was one of the best teachers I had, and many students including myself would take whatever classes he was teaching, regardless of subject, just to have him. He retired two years ago, and all in all I think he was very happy with his decision.

Speaking of which, would you be interested in teaching at all? Obviously, most schools have history teachers, and they also often have things like speech and debate or even classes on law that would make someone with your background a good candidate. I know it's not super-glamorous, but the average high school teacher makes more than what the average assistant history professor makes, with much better job security (not to mention better chances at getting hired in the first place!).

What does funding look like?

Generally, good programs will offer a 5-year package of tuition and a modest stipend. You'll often have to do something for some (if not all) of those years. For example, my package is 2 years fellowship, 3 years TA/Project Assistant/Lectureship/etc.

What additional loans are likely incurred?

Ideally? None. The program should (key word: should) offer you a livable stipend. That's not always the case, sadly.

How much money can you make in a program?

It varies. PhD programs are not some secret hack of the financial market. Most stipends are fairly modest, usually ranging between $10,000 and $30,000 at the upper end. The $30,000 figure comes from a few schools that are truly richer than God (e.g. Yale or Columbia).

How much money do you make on the side? Are you able to plan for retirement? When do you start to stop incurring debt and making money?

It depends what you do on the side. A lot of students treat it as a full time job, which is what I was advised to do. You can't really plan for retirement, as, while the money is taxed, there's some legal thing preventing it from going to your 401K. As I said above, you hopefully won't incur debt at all.

And finally, what is a good resource for judging schools by prestige/placement/recognition in the industry?

Largely? Faculty and resources. Some schools are forward about their placement (e.g. Hopkins, Wisconsin, Princeton), whereas others are far less forthcoming about that information.

What about teaching legal history at a law school? This may be a viable career path that does not require you to do more graduate school, though I must of course admit that I'm a little fuzzy on the particulars. Back when I was an undergrad, I had a professor who had both a PhD and JD, and he recommended to any students interested in legal history that they skip the PhD and go to law school.

Sorry to divert any attention from your question, OP, but does anyone have a good idea of some great jobs that a history masters/PhD might get? I'm thinking of going into the historical video game field, but I am equally interested in archaeology. Besides that, what else is there? Professor...that seems to be it.

Depending on your interests, another option could be an economics PhD. The academic job market in econ is much stronger than in history, econ faculties love hiring joint JD/PhDs, and there's a fair number of economists that do research in "economic history", which mostly involves using really old data to answer questions more related to history than modern markets. You can check out some of this research here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=1492207

You've already got good comments from others. To throw in my two cents:

• Funding. Most schools now only admit students with full funding. Those that don't are disreputable in my opinion. "Funding" generally means a five year package, a mixture of TA-ships and fellowship years while you take coursework, study for general exams, and then dissertation writing. Depending on the type of history you're interested in, external fellowships for overseas research, language study, archive visits in the US, and dissertation writing provide further support. You'll get tuition remission, insurance, and modest stipend that range from as low as $16k to about $30k at the super-rich schools.

• Loans. You should not go to a PhD program without full funding. When people run out of funding or get shitty funding, then they are forced to take out loans. You may have to dip into savings to cover onetime expenses and some summers. But generally you shouldn't have loans.

• Unless you have a high-earning spouse or family help, it will be hard to set aside money for retirement. This will be an opportunity cost for you.

• Selection of program depends totally on what country/region/ time period and/or theme you want to specialize in. I could say "Harvard," but if you wanted to study say Early Modern Spain and Harvard doesn't have anyone doing that (I don't know for sure, this is just an example), then Harvard would be a terrible place to go for you (you would likely be denied admission too). Identify the top people in your field and apply to work with them. That's how things usually work. Without specifying what exactly you want to study, it is impossible to give you guidance on institutions.

If this is something you want to do, what is most important is that you get paid a stipend that you can live on and incur no debt, if only because a position that does not value the labor you perform in it enough to pay you enough to live on is not a position that can be expected to give you an academic career.

Any letter that you get from an institution offering you a chance at an doctoral degree but not enough funding for both tuition and a plausibly livable stipend is not an acceptance letter, at least not like we culturally understand them, it is just a very targeted job offer. One of the big transitions from undergraduate life to graduate school is one that no one really warns you about, and that law students have been famously poor at negotiating (at least in aggregate), where as an undergrad your success is the end goal of most everyone around you with power over you, while as a doctoral student you are almost always simply a means to some other end. Indeed, as an academic graduate student, for the department you will be a means of cheaply supporting professors who bring in cash or a means of cheaply instructing students who bring in cash or a means of cheaply attracting cash in the form of research funding. While for professors you could be a means of establishing pecking order in the department by supervising your teaching, a means of cheaply producing research with tools that are committed to sticking around for a while, a means of expanding their research community, or generally all of the above; what you aren't is the customer like you were in undergrad, you are the product being sold by you. As a professional graduate student in law school paying real money that was actually yours, the healthy dynamic involved exchanging that money for an economically viable NON-ACADEMIC skill set that the school could demonstrate will lead to a profitable professional career, but academia is inherently different.

An advanced academic degree that you pay for will, in addition to driving you into debt that the degree will not help you pay off, make you an exploited stooge, and just like everywhere else, no one respects an exploited stooge in academia. An adviser who is desperate enough to take their failure to thrive and failure to fund their work out of the paychecks of their doctoral students is an adviser who cannot be relied on to provide you with an economically sustainable skill-set; period. Similarly, a department that is craven enough to do the same also cannot be expected you to be reasonably expected to further your interests, being incapable of furthering its own. In exactly the same way, any academic field without sufficient funding to do something as basic as paying its doctoral students a livable wage for their labor, through either their teaching or directly for their research, is not a field worth joining for anyone but the independently wealthy and hobby minded - which does not sound like you. Not only is an advanced academic degree without funding is a miserable existence, but it will also inevitably not result in the career that academia as an institution is designed to provide, it will instead give you an academically-flavored hobby. Not all academic degrees are created equal and an adviser/department/field that cannot pay you for your labor will be an adviser/department/field that cannot be taken seriously by the people you would want to pay you later on in a career. That is an adviser/department/field that cannot be reasonably expected to train you in an economically viable skill set, much less help you prepare for a career more successful than their own. This is why prospective students should NEVER EVER do an unpaid post-graduate academic (non-professional) degree, much less pay for one with your own money. The most meaningful signifier of prestige in academia is money, most other signifiers boil down to it, and if they don't have it for you at this level then something is very very wrong.

Things are not generally so bad in the hard sciences because even mediocre departments need to compete for a limited supply of the actually decent much less really good doctoral students, and there are multiple products that good STEM students can produce that people are willing to pay for. However, even in STEM there are still indeed plenty of specific professors within otherwise nice departments, specific departments within otherwise nice fields, and indeed entire fields that are impossible for a doctoral student to negotiate anything that is not deeply terrible either because what students produce in that context is so de-valued and/or replaceable that they have no leverage or the employer is so deeply unhealthy as to be incapable of acting in their own best interest by shaping up in such a way as to attract valuable students. In History this becomes even more important as departments contract, research funding dries up, and powers-that-be get tempted to eat their young rather than attract more funding or own their failures to do so. From the outside looking in the desperation, and lack of hope for the future you are dreaming of, that those dynamics represent should be terrifying. If things really are so bad for an adviser/department/field that you really can't be paid for your labor as a doctoral student, they are bad enough that you are not sufficiently likely to ever be paid for it in an academic capacity.

Also, before some doe-eyed undergrad stops by to extol the virtues of sacrificing for what you believe in, joining an academic field under exploitative conditions will only ever hurt it in profound and generationally deep ways. Inevitably, the most important thing you as a voluntarily exploited doctoral student would accomplish for the study of whatever would be to push it further towards being dominated exclusively by those with more money than sense rather than those with genuine merit. Regardless of whether one has more money or less sense, the sacrifices that should be made for academic fields are ones that must be made by those with the ability to make meaningful and beneficial ones, like universities, taxpayers, funding agencies and the independently wealthy - not vulnerable students. u/AbsurdLeft, as a prospective student you only really have the power inherent in what you are willing to consent to, and that power is considerable. It helps no one for you to use it to enable the exploitation of the vulnerable, only consider a paid position.