It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.
These are hard truths that are seldom aired publicly. Though the article focuses on the humanities, most of what he says also applies to Anthropology.
In archaeology, things are a bit different. I would counsel anyone wanting to pursue a career in CRM to get an M.A. It is definitely useful. A Ph.D., however, while it may prove useful at times, will never pay for itself. For the past four years ACRA has put out a report on salaries in archaeology. If you look through the results you will find that for a similar position and responsibilities an archaeologist with an M.A. makes about $10k more per year than an archaeologist with a Ph.D. Add to that the years in graduate school in which you will earn no salary and gain no real useful experience in the industry, and a Ph.D. in archaeology looks like a pretty bad investment.
Unless you want to be a tenure-track professor somewhere. Good luck with that. As the author of the Chronicle piece puts is, "the minority of candidates who get tenure-track positions might as well be considered the winners of a lottery."
