Why?

*dup*

*dup*

Getting yourself into serious debt to do a PhD, when as this forum shows regularly, people are not getting the types of jobs they hoped for at the end, is not a very good idea. The last stats I saw suggest that only 8% of UK PhDs get permanent academic jobs, so the odds are not good, and if you aren't in a discipline where a PhD is useful for non-academic jobs, those odds need to be weighed against the financial sacrifices you make as HazyJane says.
It's also difficult if you want to try for academic jobs, as if at the end if you are already at the limits of whatever you can borrow, you are not going to be able to sustain the very uncertain years after the PhD where you are likely to have to move frequently (certainly nationally and maybe internationally), chase after very short-term contracts and/or live on hourly paid teaching which realistically works out about minimum wage. If you are self-financing and trying to juggle another job and study, it's also very hard to find the extra time to publish / present / teach i.e. to get the things onto your cv that give you a chance of getting an academic job or applying for postdoc scholarships. Obviously if you are independently wealthy or have well-off partners / parents then doing an unfunded PhD is unlikely to have a majorly negative effect of your financial position, but for the less fortunate, it really is something that has to be considered high risk.

Hi bewildered.

Thanks for giving the other perspective. That 8 per cent figure is pretty frightening. And certainly it seems that the full time permanent lectureship is a tricky thing to achieve.

I do worry how much chance I would have to punish and present things alongside my teaching workload, but guess I'm going to have to play it by ear.

Sadly I'm not independently wealthy, and will have to teach four days a week and mark exam scripts to cover my costs, so that is a concern, having time to do it properly.