The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you

This may be the case in the sciences and engineering, but is much less so in the humanities and the social sciences. They are very different situations.

The comparison to banking/consulting is bad for a few of reasons:

1. Analysts and consultants make very decent livings. Spending your mid 20s as a banking analyst/associate is a very nice life for someone in their 20s. PhD programs barely pay a living wage, and in large cities simply don't pay a living wage.

2. When deciding whether a lottery is worth playing, you are looking at both probabilities and outcomes. You covered the probability aspect well -- that's the similarity between banking and professoring. The massive difference between the two is in the outcome. Banking higher ups have won a lottery that is worth winning. Professors, on the other hand, max out just above FAANG entry-level wages. Even then, it's only after decade+ of top-decile performance.

3. You might counter #2 with things like "work-life balance", "lifestyle job", "job security", and so on. None of these are true anymore.

3a. Universities are run by middle managers who are mostly less competent and more petty than their private sector counter-parts.

3b. Moreover, tenure doesn't mean anything. At this point, it's nothing more than a gentleman's agreement with an MBA. I have literally zero doubt that over the next 20 years every single university in the US will go through a round of layoffs that target tenured faculty, and will do so without declaring financial exigency. This already happened at a lot of places during COVID, despite massive bailouts and even at places that increased enrollment without increasing spending ex-headcount. If you got into academic for the stability 30 years ago, your bet was pretty good. These days you'd have to be an idiot or have your head buried under a hundred feet of sand to make the same bet.

"Tenure" now is nothing more than "continued expectation of future employment"; i.e., it's the only "normal" job in an industrial sector (edu) where the majority of employment contracts are not only at-will but even come with with your dismissal date attached (post-docs and even phd students). Can you imagine working at a software company but they tell you up-front they will have to fire you in 3 years? And also only pay $55K? LOL. When push comes to shove, in most modern faculty constracts, there isn't that much of a substantive difference between "tenure" and "at-will".

4. The glide-path out of a STEM PhD is usually at least as lucrative than out of an unsuccessful analyst position, but the scars of poverty make it feel like an insanely lucky success. I've seen 32 year olds with Mathematics PhDs cry because they get a job doing nothing related to their PhD but that pays the same amount that their students are making at their first job out of undergraduate.

So, I think a PhD in a technical subject can still make sense, but there's no rational reason to be an R1 faculty member outside of a teaching track. Well, except one: "massive ego that can't play well enough with others to hack it in the private sector". And that's certainly who you'll find yourself surrounded by if you choose that route.

> PhD students are mostly cheap labor to carry out research for faculty.

This is true.

> Most of them are immigrants

This is false.

> Most of them are immigrants who view it as a way to get into the USA, and so its a worthy trade off.

Simply not true; I know of innumerable cases where European universities keep same-country academics on indefinite post-doc or other roles, refusing to ever grant tenure.

Most end up working in different EU unis and switching every 2-3 years, moving house regularly, all while having a horrible work-life balance.

Actually, post-docs are the cheap labor. PhD students are given a stipend and many/most have their tuition waived. The overhead of running a research department in the US is fairly high and leaves little room for high salaries[1]. Anything can be improved, and its easy to criticize from the outside.

[1] In the main-stream case, not withstanding the egregious greed that sometimes occurs at the management level. But no industry is immune from human nature.

Being in the same department as your faculty advisor can also be politically challenging.

That's an interesting excuse but isn't most PhD level academia at least in the United States a pretty big echo-chamber?

Another factor is that if your department's area is hiring for a new position that you might be a good fit for, your P.I. or advisor is likely on the hiring committee. Thus the committee then has to be wary of nepotism and conflicts of interest. When everyone is so incredibly specialized, it turns out that the sub-field you are working in is small.

Almost all of my CS professors had PhDs from Universities other than the one I received my degree at, but most of them had undergraduate degrees.

School 1 (BS) -> School 2 (PhD) -> School 1 (Teaching).

I have a PhD, and yes this is exactly the reason Universities don't want to hire their own. It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.

This is a white lie at best. I’ve never sat on a hiring committee that cared about diversity of thought.

It's mostly an excuse. They're looking for reputation or monetary gain. If you have grants waiting to write a check to an institution or some high individual reputation that the university can claim as their own this excuse of cross-pollination disappears.

MY dad who had a PHD and was a college dean said the same thing years ago. While that may be true but a lot of the universities only seem to recruit professors from a limited number of universities so the feed back loop is still there -Head of the IU econ department gets PHD from Harvard, hires new professor with PHD from Harvard, how is this different?

> universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas

Maybe in her case, but that’s just not true. The whole point of the Internet was to exchange scientific ideas, and that has actually come true - all academics I know share data/ideas online in real-time.

Universities are just too cheap to hire as many PhDs as they generate.

That sounds like the same rationalisation companies use when people quit.

"It is good because we don't get inbred ideas".

More often than not the person departing has expert competence in the university or company specific systems or social structures, that are of no use somewhere else, and no one recruited from the outside have it.

I’ve always wondered, because whenever I see people talk about PhDs they talk as if the only thing to do with them is to sit in academia for the rest of your life, but I see industry research jobs all the time that want a PhD. Why is that not an option?

I agree on the publication record. But the school you go to has a huge effect on your ability to publish. This is well documented.

Go to top PhD program -> publish top journal easier -> attain tenure track job.

It all comes down to prestige in the end. This is aside from very hard sciences where true ground breaking results cannot be ignored.

I'm not saying that universities aren't using PhD students as cheap labor and then cutting them loose (they absolutely are), but a more charitable side to it is not that universities want to "hire up", it's that they want diversity of thought/background. Hiring your own graduates, who have been "raised" in the same culture, can lead to isolation and groupthink plus it reinforces the existing specialties within your department. The degree to which so-called academic incest is a factor varies from school to school and department to department, but I don't think it's wholly unreasonable as part of faculty hiring considerations.

> Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything

If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.

> They will just look up your actual thesis and critique it

Actually reading your thesis is probably a bit too much work. But they will certainly look up your publication list and count the number of papers at the top conferences/journals they care about.

> This tells me the author has no knowledge of the academic hiring processes. Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything.

While this may be true, the fact remains that most academic hires are from the top universities, even for jobs at state universities. If professors are the least susceptible to prestige, then why do we have the situation we do?

> professors are the group of people least likely to be impressed by prestige.

Not true, academia is dominated by posturing, prestige, and networking just as much as any other profession.

> your publication record is everything

This is literally a form of prestige. The content of research rarely matters - the value proffered by the publication and your research group have much larger bearing.

It's always been the unspoken truth about graduate school especially in liberal arts. There's really no reason to get a PHD in Russian Lit unless you have a lot of money and time or you plan on going into teaching. The issue of course is there are not nearly enough teaching positions to employ all the people with PHDs. Further, while a school might have a well respected program it may not have the cache value that a department wants so the positions seem to go to graduates of schools with impressive names. It's kind of funny when a law school wouldn't hire one of their own to avoid inbreeding but the entire department is filled with people from only 3-4 schools who were taught but people from those same 3-4 schools. It's a slightly wider gene pool but inbreeding none the less

I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field.

But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach.

But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.

Between the sunk-cost fallacy, and how many years both grad students and would-be grad students have spent on the ivory tower's propaganda treadmill, with little other (adult) life experience to be able to objectively judge things...

However small the number, some people believe that the correct direction isn't copying others' path to success.

Young people are ambitious and believe the odds don't apply. Academia is no different than other highly variable status-seeking paths, such as entrepreneurship or sports. Different personal values, same basic combination of youthful idealism and hubris.

The west would atrophy and die if everyone took the path of least resistance to a comfortable lifestyle. Market economies with perfectly rational actors would cannibalize themselves in a single generation.

“The best” here is measured by reputational vibes—not research value added.

Public schools generally charge much more for non-residents (between 2x and 4x more in my experience) in part because of the reason you describe, not having contributed to the tax base which funded the school.

Students whose parents maintain domicile in another state (or another country) are generally considered by the school to be residents of that place for tuition purposes and thus not able to access the, much cheaper, in-state tuition.

Do you have any statistics on public schools which enroll a majority of international students? With a cursory search, the highest I found was UC Davis with 16% [0].

UC Davis charges, for undergrad, 14k~ for resident and 44k~ for non-resident.

Domestic Non-Californians are eligible for loans and potentially a small number of grants via FAFSA from federal tax pools, as with anywhere else.

Generally, only Californian residents are eligible for state and university need-based funding.

Most non-citizens, such as those who are undocumented, are not eligible for FAFSA.[1]

It seems more likely to me that these students, given how much more they pay, contribute to a reduced tax burden for tax payers on the whole. Not to mention the economic benefits from them buying housing, food, beer, etc. In the area where they live while in school.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...

[1] https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/eligibility/requiremen...

FYI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02351-1

For what its worth, I've always received a favorable response when I email the author to received a private copy of their paper.

Best way to get a promotion in many organizations!