Hacker News Reader

The increase in tuition (and fees) make up for budget shortfalls everywhere (fancy facilities are actually not all that big of a deal if you crunch the numbers).

At the same time, getting rid of tenured positions is a decent means of cutting costs to try to address the same shortfall.

View on HN

Sounds like a death spiral. My father got a PhD in history so he could be a professor. If he couldn't expect that, he would have gone to business school, reducing the demand for history professors and so on until there's none left. You get it.

At the moment, there is a surplus supply of PhDs. If, at some point, that gets corrected, things may change.

Though I should note that PhD students in history aren't major drivers of demand for professors of history - undergraduates are.

In the sciences, there's a bit more of an incentive to have lots of graduate students.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com