When I started my PhD last year, my department head gave us a speech where he told us that college football players have better career prospects in the NFL than we will in academia. While that was probably a bit of hyperbole, it certainly made us realize how unrealistic most of our goals were.
This is fine ... but what he ought to do as well is to tell you that going through the program is still beneficial to you even if you don't thread the needle and land that academic job ... and that the Dept or University has resources that will help you find a non-academic job where you can make the most of your skills
That's rather presumptuous to assume that he didn't. In fact, he did and as part of our grad student resources, we have access to a whole host of school specific recruiters. While students from our programme regularly go into the postdoc mill, many go to work at startups, at industrial labs, in finance, at consulting firms, etc. Even more important, though, none of these options are denigrated.
That's not a hyperbole, I totally agree with it. If you sum upp the yearly income of all university football coaches in the US, the amount should be more than triple of the cumulative income of all professors.
