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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Tenure's not the problem, the problem is that in their academic career, a PHD will produce X new PHDs. Where X is substantially greater than 1. Until this is fixed, it doesn't matter if academic jobs are for life, or are contracts that get renewed (or not) every 8 hours.

This pyramid scheme was fine while demand for PHDs was increasing (By industry, and growth of academia), but now its really not (Industry doesn't want to pay, academia can't grow anymore). Universities must start greatly restricting their grad school programs. Of course, this will absolutely kill the practice of using underpaid grad students to do research... And would have to be offset by public increases to research spending.

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I will say that those who can do research probably dont become adjuncts, but continue as a researcher on soft money or go in industry. The more liberal arts, philosophy, turn to adjunct positions.

>I will say that those who can do research probably dont become adjuncts, but continue as a researcher on soft money or go in industry. The more liberal arts, philosophy, turn to adjunct positions.

I know a bunch in engineering and medical fields who are adjuncts. It's not rare. They do get paid a lot better than liberal arts ones, though and often get benefits as well. But they're situation is as precarious - they could get cut any semester.

Seems surprising that such can't find a position outside of academia. I am cog-neuro so a little more bound.

I'm sure they can, but they usually either like what they're doing and are OK with the pay, or have other constraints (do not want to leave the city, etc).

Interesting to note grad students. My university found they could increase income by taking in more international students, but when those same students wanted paid GTA jobs, they had to find a way to pay for it. So they did what all universities do: They made the undergraduates pay for it, by requiring those students take paid "labs" for classes that never before had labs, for no course credit.

Another way is to have the grad students teach, and grade all the courses, so that you don't have to hire any faculty. (Which means no academic jobs for them once they finish grad school.)

As a PhD who never went into academia, I can easily take the pledge not to have any (academic) children.

Alas, while that saves us having X^2 PHDs for each PHD position, it doesn't stop us from having X PHDs for each position.

You aren't training new PHDs - your teachers were, and still are.

All PHds don't need to go into academia. Nothing wrong with having lots of people with advanced degrees.

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