Imagine a career track where you "interned" for 5- 10 years at a salary at about 20-25% of what your first-year income would be. After this "internship," you'd be qualified (maybe) to compete with between 50 and 300 people for each job to which you apply--and if you didn't intern in the correct field, there might be four or five jobs open in your field in the entire country, if not the entire world. If you're lucky enough to snag one of these prize positions, you'll be lucky to be making $50,000 a year during your first few years. You do your job, working 50-60 hours per week, for six or seven years, after which your coworkers decide, via a process that's not at all transparent, whether or not you get to keep your job. And if you lose this job, you're very unlikely to get another one like it (if you'd even be willing to go through it all again). Such is the tenure track at colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere.