You are an intellectual. Read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It is 10th grade reading, so it should be a breeze to finish it over a couple days, max. It should tell you everything you need to know about how you, as an intellectual, would do as a soldier.

Judging only by what you said in your letter, I think you would be 100% miserable at war. And you don't strike me as someone motivated by naive sentiments of patriotism or a desire to make some sacrifice for the benefit of the rest of us-- you are looking for the payout. Do you really envision yourself a mercenary? Do you want to kill or be killed for money?

All that being said, as someone who began my adult life with $140K in student loan debt, I can tell you honestly the more student loans you have to repay in your adult life, the more you will spend your working life feeling like an indentured servant. Yet, even as an indentured servant, you still have significantly more freedoms than you would as an enlisted officer in the military.

Be more creative. Are you applying for PhD programs at state schools rather than pricy Ivy League or private universities? Are you applying for TA positions or RA positions or other jobs that will possibly grant you tuition credits as compensation? Can you work your way through a PhD program on a part time basis to minimize your loans?

For the field you plan to study-- what is the compensation for adjuncts, associate professors and full tenured professors? If you are pursuing engineering or dermatology, you could easily pay off your loans once you secure a position as an associate professor. If you are pursuing Art History, you may never be able to afford to work as a professor and still make the minimum payments on your loans.

Student loans are not compromised of free money. The interest rate is lower, but the trade off is your loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy if you go broke.

So look for work-study, grants, part time, state tuition over private. Wait tables if you must.

Don't go to war. And don't believe the recruiter who is promising you that because of your degree you won't go to war, because you will most likely go to war no matter what the recruiter says.

Wonkazoo wrote from experience:

"The good news is that if you survive your tour the horror you experience will give you an invaluable and life changing perspective, and the mantle of having served your country honorably and as a choice will give your words, your person, and your being, an authenticity that no one will ever be able to take away from you."

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I think all this is true and I respect Wonkazoo's service to our nation and his authenticity.

But I would hope the LW might also consider that it is equally true that he might "survive" the horror and yet return to civilian life with undiagnosed brain trauma or post traumatic stress disorder, his or her present-day personality and psyche completely broken and his spirit irrevocably changed. It has been known to happen from time to time to some of our best and brightest soldiers and the safety net just isn't there for them now.

Rogues gallery? LOL. True you need an M.D. to be a professor of dermatology. Many medical researchers have M.D. and Ph.D. credentials, but the PhD isn't always required. The reason I mentioned dermatology in particular was because I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday which made mention of a professor of dermatology at Columbia earning over $4 million per year. So it was fresh in my mind as an example of what disciplines are financially valued in academia.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/02/23/highest-paid-college-employees-mostly-mds/

Otherwise, nothing in my first post with respect to student loans or graduate school funding was untrue. I went to graduate school at Stanford and my cousins completed graduate programs in the humanities at Columbia, Cornell, Duke and Yale. We are not an old money family, we are among the third generation of an immigrant family that gradually worked its way up from the unskilled labor class one generation at a time. Our "connections" are local, not national or international.

And our educations were financed by student loans. Contrary to popularly mythology, these schools do not guarantee you a massive financial payoff and lucrative career at the end of your studies. The truth is much more complicated than that, and you have so much arrogance in your voice than I can only surmise that you are currently IN a graduate program at a prestigous (and pricy) private university, given your disdain for public schools. But I could be wrong.

Good luck to you. Oh, and for the record-- earning a PhD from a reasonably priced state school is no barrier to success in academia. What matters is what you do with your degree, what you publish, and what you do with the opportunities that present themselves along the way.