> Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60's and 70's. If you're a graduate student, not only are your classmates your competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs.

I must say, I quite disagree with what seems to be a generally negative tone on HN towards academia. Basic research is fundamentally important, more than that there are extremely talented people who should be doing it - rather than allow themselves to have their time wasted by some corporation that does absolutely nothing beneficial for civilization.

Obviously it's a problem if these people are disenfranchised, not sufficiently funded or otherwise aren't able to do what they wanted to do and for those reasons are turned away from Academia (btw tenure track is not the sole option for doing fundamental research).

But on here it seems the entire critical conversation is centered, on job options, salary, competition, and all the other things are really evidence of someone too deeply emersed in the corporate culture. If you are doing good research - competition doesn't matter, if you care significantly about the research salary doesn't matter all that much. There are surely negative aspects but statements like these:

> That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you can even start a career and begin living like an adult.

Sound almost like corporate salesmanship for getting talented people out of Academia, into useless soul-destroying jobs.