So, with these higher ed plans (in fields like Composition, it's exceedingly difficult to get scholarships, and paid fellowships are incredibly rare), it seems unlikely that he'll ever have much saved. He's not a big spender and leads a frugal life, but I've done the reading on the phd route for really narrow subjects such as Composition (he specializes in electronic computer music). He said the phd to professorship was a back-up plan as he hopes to pursue a freelance career.
I hear a train wreck happening.
The PhD market (by which I mean, job market for professors) in the humanities is horrific. Don't take my word for it; go to the forums at the Chronicle for Higher Education (
http://chronicle.com/forums) and post something like what you just said ("My boyfriend is planning to get an MA and PhD in music composition, a field for which fellowships are incredibly rare, so that he can have being a professor as a backup plan while he pursues a freelance career"). Then see what advice you get. There are hundreds of very active people at that forum and basically 90% of them are working in academia (tenure-track profs, deans, adjuncts, visiting profs) and the rest are still in their PhD programs (or much more rarely, MFA programs) or on the job market. There is no better source on the internet for advice on PhD programs and academic jobs.
So I strongly advise you to go there and see what advice you get (or suggest your BF do that on his own behalf). But I can all but guarantee you that the advice is going to boil down to, "DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT pay for a PhD in any humanities field! The job market is horrific [myriad examples, possibly including statistics]. Paying for an MA and PhD will put you $100k+ in debt for a job that barely exists anymore and that, in any event, you have at best a 1/500 chance of getting. Not to mention,
how are you supposed to build a freelance career while also being in a graduate program? The only way to do that is to half-ass both the freelance career and the PhD, which means you'll fail at both. You don't need a PhD or $100k in debt to build a successful freelance career, and trying to do both at the same time will stunt your freelance career anyway. If you want to be a freelancer, dedicate yourself 100% to that--you have a much better chance at that than you do at becoming a music professor."
Oh, and they'll also point out that if you can't get into a good school with a free ride, it means you're one of the people who isn't going to be able to get a tenure-track professor job, either. Going to a lesser-known school is just shooting yourself in the foot, and *paying* for it--even at a well known school--well, is your goal in going to grad school merely to take out $100k in loans in order to subsidize the grad students who are getting free rides and will be getting the academic jobs you want? If not, don't do it.
There will also be some posts inviting you to do the math and really realize what it means to be $100k in debt (or more, if your BF took out loans for undergrad). Like, what does that mean in terms of how much money you will have to spend every month until you're 45 years old?
The math is really, really sobering. So much so that even the lucky few who do get tenure-track university positions sometimes question whether it was worth it... and the vast majority who don't get such positions are stuck with basically a mortgage to pay off and no chance of getting the job that they got the degree for in the first place. How would your boyfriend like working in the Barnes & Noble music section while paying $1000+ a month towards loans for a degree that got him nowhere? Or even, best-case scenario, how would he like trying to kick start a freelance career ten years later than he could have started it if he had just gone for that (i.e., for what he really wants) rather than wasting a decade and $100k on one of the world's worst (in terms of least likely to succeed) backup plans?
So that's my advice to you, or rather to your boyfriend, but I invite you to get it directly from the source by asking the professors, PhD students and other academics at the Chronicle forums.
Yes, his biggest fear is that he'll have to work long hours and have no intellectual/emotional energy to compose, which is more important to him than money.
That's exactly what will happen if he goes to grad school.
Outside of money, my concerns are that his career choice may end up leading him to living in many places, whereas mine are rooted to the local community.
If he gets a PhD and is among the lucky few who get an academic job, wave goodbye to your local community, to your state, and probably to your entire region of the country. It is the nature of academic jobs that you cannot go from a PhD program to your first job unless you are completely mobile, willing to live anywhere in the country that will hire you. This is because there are so few academic jobs to go around. And that's especially the case with humanities jobs, because the *only* market for most humanities degrees is a college or university position--people with advanced degrees in engineering, law, business etc. can work in academia or in industry, so there aren't as many people applying for each academic job and thus they can be pickier. Music composition? NOT the case.