Your "goal" of getting a Ph.D. to teach is basically just another way of putting off beginning your life. If you are excited by doing the videos then do them. Don't make up excuses about how you need the money or how you will be applying said money to education. If you are going to do something risky or illicit just own it. The rest is fraud. By the way, strip clubs and the porn industries are littered with girls who are "just earning some money for college" and nary a degree amongst the lot of them. Will you be the exception to the rule? I doubt it.

Wise up. This is how it works. Let's say you keep selling your underwear to skeevy dudes. One day one of these skeeves puts $200 on the table for a hand job. You'll have some direct need for that money. You'll rationalize it a one time deal. The conversion from stripper/fetish girl/panty seller to prostitute is incremental and happens over the course of time, you won't even notice the transition. You would like to think it is going to be a grand decision i.e. "I'll do this or that but I'll never prostitute." Those thoughts were expressed by every prostitute working today. You are 25. You can spend the next years involving yourself in a self centered world of vice and corruption, participating in things that may excite you, but also corrupt a person's self worth. It is hard to undo. I say live a fuller life. Reset your sites for better things. Unlike most responders here that think that sex work is harmless, and that the Ph.D. is a lofty goal...I will deviate and suggest that you can do better on both counts.

Community and university professors are now being background checked in a number of states. Porn industry involvement would trigger "morals" clauses and/or other issues for employment, especially if your area services education students. You will not get hired in certain states for any type of teaching job with that kind of background. Universities are actually quite conservative when it comes to hiring.

A good PhD program should have assistanceships, stipends, etc. Grad students on stipend also fill fee waiver positions in almost every office at a flagship school.

You can teach at the community college level with a masters, or go into administration. A Masters to teach will get one certified and allow the person to get a middle school or high school teaching certificate. That's an 18 month to 2 year degree in most places. In the cities, one can usually get an emergency certificate to teach. Also check out Catholic schools. They don't usually require certification to teach.

While many flagships use a lot of adjuncts, most of us at the second tier public and smaller schools do not. We teach more, and either are teaching/research hybrids (my school) or teaching schools only.

Very few people find porn or fetish economically empowering. It is designed to use people up for the lowest anount of money. A few have converted it into good money, but most don't.

When I was in college these guys trolled around, looking for vulnerable, broke college women. Those poor women wound up regretful. I hope you choose against this.

(Disclaimer: I am exhausted and have been working on my dissertation all day. I am also quite cynical at this point in my pre-career.)

I am writing not so much to the LW but to the other posters because I think that the original letter is a fake written by someone who has a letter-writing fetish.

The Ph.D. isn't worth it. Well, maybe in the sciences, but certainly not in the humanities. Sometimes it will feel like prostitution, but without any monetary gain. If you cannot get significant assistance from a quality institution, you will have a very hard time finding a job.

Adjuncts get horrible pay, have no job security, and rarely treated well by deans and tenured faculty. As an adjunct, expect to spend time developing a syllabus, only to be told the day before classes start that a tenured faculty member's load did not make, and therefore, you are no longer needed for the semester. You will spend hours trying to decipher incoherent writing from your students (without additional pay). Expect to have a dean or department head grant permission for one of your students to take an incomplete, which means that you will be working without pay to help the student fulfill that incomplete (usually a week before the cut-off date). You probably won't get your own office, so you will need to hold office hours in the library, student union, or nearest custodial closet. You will drive long distances to teach at several colleges with no reimbursement for fuel. And if you are young and female, you will be ogled by students, regardless of whether you work in the adult entertainment industry.

I could continue, but others have said (and will continue to say) plenty about academia and what a wasteland it is. Oh, and if this letter is legitimate, I wish the LW the best of luck. A Ph.D. does not guarantee a teaching career, and anyone who thinks so is in for a rude awakening. Get some real guidance counseling, not from Cary but from someone who is actually familiar with academia. You will never get tenure if someone discovers even your bare foot out there on the internet. And someone will--probably one of your students. Also, given the other details of the alleged situation (mortgage, supporting a family member, clothing shortages), you will have a hard time staying focused on your studies. And one final note: landing a tenure-track position is no picnic these days. Seven years of nothing but teaching heavy loads, publishing up a storm, traveling to conferences for very little reimbursement, and sitting in endless committee meetings...with the knowledge that at any time, you could be fired for any reason, with virtually no recourse, only to be replaced by eager part-time adjuncts who will obligingly get paid next to nothing to replace you. I almost think that the fetish videos are a better career option. Almost.