So You’re Getting a Ph.D.: Welcome to the Worst Job Market in America | Hacker News Reader

So You’re Getting a Ph.D.: Welcome to the Worst Job Market in America

weeklystandard.com

16 pointsjseliger8 comments

It'll take 20 years, but slowly over time, informed, intelligent people will choose another profession. And then there will be no one qualified to teach. And then the universities charging $90,000 a year tuition will panic.

The problem is that everything is a business, and with the managerial class reaping the benefits of lowering the payroll, intelligent people are getting steered away. Because there are a lot of Ph.D's currently out there, there are some willing to do the work, but I guarantee that more and more will choose other paths.

The internet and articles like this will deter them.

One thing that might help would be for surveys that rate colleges (like US News & World Report's annual ranking) to start tracking what portion of classes are actually taught by research faculty. That is, after all, the distinctive factor of a university, the instruction not by teachers or practitioners but by research scholars.

And those adjuncts aren't scholars, since they don't do research. At best, they're highly credentialed teachers.

This is exactly how market works: when there is an oversupply of X the price of X drops and X suppliers move on to something more profitable.

If people were fully rational, sure. But they're not. Record companies have been treating musicians like crap for at least a lifetime now, and there are still people dreaming of record contracts.

Will the academic job market be different? Let's hope so. An early sign of it would be dropping application rates to grad school programs, particularly the less prestigious ones.

"Fully rational" in this case means "want to sell high and buy low". It's a very low bar to clear, especially in the job market for PhDs.

>Record companies have been treating musicians like crap for at least a lifetime now, and there are still people dreaming of record contracts.

If I understood you correctly, you are implying that musicians have better options than signing with labels and are acting irrationally by doing so? I disagree.

But education shouldn't be an industry, especially in public institutions.

"And then there will be no one qualified to teach."

Less snide than sour: when did that bother colleges? I don't know that I ever encountered many stupid professors. I do know that I met plenty worn down by alcohol or alienation, or unwilling to take much interest in anything outside a narrow sliver of their department's field.

This reminds me strongly of an article in the economist published in 2010 - the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Made me glad (in a way) that I didn't finish my own doctorate, although I did find the research very personally fulfilling. article: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

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