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> Wait, why is this the universities problem? If too many people want to get phds than our society can support than less people should get phds. That or they’ll get stuck in the current academic grind. Any PhD student should be well aware of the career difficulty that follows, particularly if they want to be a professor. There’s no lack of articles like this one pointing out that fact.

But I think there very much is a systemic effect that everyone is missing because it happens so slowly.

Fundamentally, if the number of academic positions remains constant, then each professor only needs to train one PhD student looking to enter academia in their entire career.

OK, maybe 1.1 to deal with deaths or other sorts of natural attrition. But think about that for a minute, and then think about how many PhD students a typical professor actually trains in their career. That level of "production" is OK when the number of academic positions are expanding at a similar rate. But they're not expanding at any where near the same rate these days; instead, there are longer and longer "holding patterns".

And this introduces a pattern where the "holding patterns" get longer and longer, but people don't really notice. Professors who got their PhDs in the 70's didn't do any post-docs, or maybe only a year or two. Professors who got their PhDs in the 80's or 90's did a few years, but not many. PhDs getting jobs now in some fields can expect to have post-docs for a decade; but people getting PhDs now will have even longer waits.

So PhD students "should be well aware", but 1) the people advising them almost certainly had a much easier time than the people currently in the pipeline, and 2) it will almost certainly be much worse by the time they actually want to get a job. Add to that that it would be nearly impossible to perform modern academic research without the army of PhD students and postdocs being paid slave wages, so there's very little incentive to give students a realistic picture of what their chances actually are.

So yes, it should be up to universities and research institutions to set up a sustainable system.

> Any PhD student should be well aware of the career difficulty that follows

There's an important disconnect about the job market. Most PhD students know general facts about the job market: one in ten PhD holders becomes a professor. Very few people have a good idea about that applies, specifically, to their own career prospects.

As for postdocs, treating it as "a holding pattern" is, IMHO, the root of the problem. There's been a massive push, especially from the NIH, to speed up the "pathway to independence", but that's only really a goal because postdocs' job conditions aren't great (low salary, massive job insecurity). Research is hard and it's absolutely bizarre that we want to transition people away from doing it as soon as they are trained, and towards supervising it, a role for which they get virtually no training or mentoring. If I were King of Science, I'd move towards a model with a more gradual career path and less trainee mania.

Two counterpoints:

1) There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor. So the number is a lot higher than 1.1.

2) I can only see it as naive on the part of students to think they can become one unless they’re able to be in the top ~5% of grad students and then work incredibly hard for 10 years. We should be telling everyone this. And encouraging professor aspiration only for PhDs with the heart for this. If we did that then the universities would work things out. But expecting the universities to fix the problem is backwards because they have zero incentive to.

> There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor.

Sure; that's why I said, "PhD student looking to enter academia". CS PhDs for the most part go into industry (as I did). But if you're a CS prof, you should basically default to telling all of your students except maybe three in your entire career to plan to go to industry. The same thing should hold for physics/chemistry/biology/history/whatever profs: if you have more than one PhD student per decade going on to get a post-doc, you're failing your mentorship duties.

> But if you're a CS prof, you should basically default to telling all of your students except maybe three in your entire career to plan to go to industry.

Except it's not like 3 PhD students from $topschool become $topschool professors while 3 students from $randomschool become $randomschool professors.

What happens is the top students from top schools become top schools professors. The middling students from top schools become professors at random schools. The students from random schools are unlikely to become professors anywhere.

So if you're an MIT professor you can encourage more students into academia. If you're a random school professor, you should encourage them all into industry.

At least for CS, it was pretty clear to me that PhD and post-doc is not about becoming a professor. Instead, you are getting much more interesting projects, but also a much lower salary.

This is obviously not for everyone, but there are plenty of people who would like to do this for a few years (or much more -- then they end up as research scientists and non-tenure-track professors)

There's a subtle insidious effect of professors being childless. Like it or not, for practical intents and purposes, academia serves as arbiter of truth for our society. If most of the professors are childless, they will be subconsciously incentivized to arbitrate truth in ways that are biased accordingly.

yes, because the vast majority of our society is run by professors...

Almost all of the ruling class in the USA went through the same few schools.

Academia has prestige and its viewpoints diffuse across the rest of society.

You would think being cognizant and forward thinking enough to evaluate the prospect of a 6 year endeavor is a requisite for prospective PhD students.

And yet...