I'm guessing places like Harvard, UCB and MIT each issued close to 1000 last year. Lower ranked schools, maybe 500 each; probably cumsum to significantly higher than CalTech even with short histories.
Disclosure: Physics PhD, working in industry for 25 years.
PhD is definitely a currency, and no they're not fungible: I'm trying to figure out which ones are actually worth something. In my experience it's a fairly lousy signal. Every Caltech PhD I've met has been sharp as a tack though.
(or, more pessimistically, larger universities tend to have disadvantages that individual profs and departments might or might not overcome...)
On the other hand, most Stanford guys I've met have also been sharp, and they graduate 700 PhDs a year according to someone below.
(Many students left before graduating, maybe half, but it was only rarely because they couldn't do the work. My good friend had to leave for medical reasons, it was very sad. Another left as a sophomore. 10 years later, he asked if he could come back, and the Institute said "sure", and he graduated with straight A's. I asked him if he'd gotten smarter in the preceding decade, he laughed and said no, it just took him 10 years to get ready to work hard.)
There certainly are significant differences between individuals, but nearly everyone is smart and scientifically motivated.
The other is the hate. Especially in some industries, people are widely aware that higher education is desperately in need of reform, have had genuinely bad experiences in school, or are just plain anti-academic. In fact, the notion of "signaling" is a symptom of these problems.
Can you speak a bit more to this, and what your experience with this has been like?
It's almost like a business incubator, where they provide you with basic infrastructure, and perhaps some training, but you end up with a growing business or you don't. And in fact a lot of PhDs, at least in my field, end up becoming entrepreneurs.
You're supposed to be able to turn yourself into an independent researcher, but this is far from guaranteed. While you assume these risks, there's also the risk of getting the degree and regretting it, if the expectations (being in a leadership role, possibly directing other people) don't match with what you actually want to do, and the people skills needed for those things. And then, in some fields, you're competing with people who went straight to work after college, and have developed their careers on the job while also putting away some nice money.
Okay, enough of that. The other thing is, you can pick it up after a few months of HN, that a lot of people are really down on academia and academics. Again, this varies by field. In my field, physics, the PhD is almost the default -- there are relatively few people with masters or even bachelors degrees to be compared with, and we're also rare enough that many people have just not formed an opinion about us. ;-) Plus we do the work that most people hate, such as math intensive stuff, and we don't demand as much money. ;-)
I suggest this is an issue worth just observing for a while. There are debates among my friends about whether HN is really representative of the hive mind of the tech industry, or computer programmers, or whatever,
CalTech doesn't have a law school.
He’s a really smart dude, total waste.
Let me restate the common argument--there's this feeling that it's useful to measure people by the good they're doing for society, and that getting a PhD doing postmodern feminist readings of Christopher Marlowe is less useful to society than getting one doing Alzheimer's research or whatever.
I'll just say that it's worth considering whether an academic discipline's contributions may be difficult to notice but in fact substantial. Some academic disciplines like history or cultural anthropology must operate more qualitatively simply because the phenomena they aim to account for admit of no other approach, with the result that their intellectual products (especially when considered from the perspective of general society) will not often be as concrete as, say, a vaccine. But it'd be premature, of course, to dismiss a discipline just because its methods do not reach our desired level of formalization and its output is intangible.
If the issue you're raising is more narrowly one of your belief that within the scope of an _individual_'s wellbeing studying some subjects will leave them worse off than others, that's obviously true in at least financial dimensions, but that doesn't make a discipline a "fake subject".
It's bullshit in the sense that if you're going to be a PhD, you generally want to move to industry, enter a career path where the rigor of the PhD process pays off or tenure track academia. If the academic prospects are so poor that you get a raise managing a Starbucks rather than being a contract visiting professor for 18-36 month stints, that's bullshit in my book.