Week after week, graduate students, adjunct instructors, and recently hired tenure-track professors recount harrowing stories of applicants who go in search of tenure-track jobs only to find themselves locked into a series of low-wage temporary positions. The tenacity of the job crisis means that it is time to rethink the nature of graduate training in America. According to this author, one fundamental problem is that higher education departments continue to run doctoral programs on an outdated guild model in which professors and matriculants tacitly agree that the only worthy outcome for the apprentice is to land a journeyman position in academia, eventually becoming a tenured master. The author suggests replacing the guild model with graduate programs that help shape students in to balanced, well-adjusted colleagues, thereby eliminating the assumptions embedded within the guild system that make the tenure-track academic job the central trajectory of doctoral training. (Contains 2 endnotes.)