> Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs?
Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.
Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.
I'll add as well: the standards expected for present day PhD students is insane compared to PhD students a generation ago. When I speak to some of the tenured professors I know, they readily admit that they would not meet the standards for TT positions today. Add to that the insane number of applicants, and the tendency for hiring committees to default to applicants from top-tier programs for hiring (regardless of the quality of their research), and you end up with an increasingly bubbled and desperate profession that is extremely unwilling to break from party line and disrupt whatever sliver of a living they ended up in.
The majority of my fellow students are international, mostly from China. I know hardly any other Americans in my program. At this point I see the system as more or less a way for international students to gain citizenship. I'm all for immigration, but I think it has gotten to the point where American students don't even want to go to graduate school at their own Universities, and the system imports foreign students who they know they can abuse for cheap labor. If grad student salaries were higher I'm sure we would see more Americans joining.
I decided to leave due to abuse by my initial advisor. So many of my fellow students have experienced abuse or neglect by their advisors. By neglect I mean that advisors won't even talk to them because the advisor has tenure and doesn't care. Many CS doctorate holders I've talked to have expressed that their degree was not worth it.