I wonder what this number would be like if you cut the number of academic jobs in half. Because that's what I see happening in the future.

I mean, I don't want to say the people on HN are smarter than the rest of the world but we do tend to spot trends earlier only because of the collaborative nature of the site and that people here actually evaluate the world around them. Which means societal trends can become apparent here before the rest of the world realizes they're going on.

So I think it's instructional that we see a "Higher Education is broken" item about every couple of days. In the years to come I suspect we'll see a lot more competition from lower priced options that provide education using online tools and who don't need armies of research fellows and "postdocs". Combine that with Governments making serious budget cuts and I think you'll see the demand for PhD's plummet.