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musicale

> Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking

The academic pyramid was never sustainable.

However, for some fields (science and engineering being good examples) there are decent jobs outside of academia.

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> The academic pyramid was never sustainable

Theoretically it wasn't, or every human on Earth would be a PhD candidate within the century.

However there was a period after WW2 where a lot of empty professor chairs needed to be filled and so I believe that people came to expect the growth. So for example you would have the post-war generation push their kids into it, saying "but of course you can be a professor like me, they will be beating down your door to get you hired!" But of course that seems to have stopped around the end of the century.

My dad got a chemistry PhD in the mid 1950s. He said that by that point, it was already widely known that most PhDs would have no chance of landing an academic position. He went into industry and had a good career.

I got my PhD in physics, in the mid 90s. Same story.

The period after WW2 wasn’t empty seats to be filled, it was the government funding science, engineering, and some social science. That changed the shape of universities forever.

It was both. The universities needed help recovering from WW2, and they got that plus more thanks to Vannevar Bush.

First there was the expansion to recover from WW2. Then there was expansion in science to prepare for the Cold War. There was also expansion from the Great Society's education efforts. And the influx of women and minorities into college. And expansion from other countries sending students to the US to kickstart their own universities.

It kept the academic sector growing for decades, gradually, and people just forgot the mindset you have to have for the day the growth stops. And that day came.

Most academics teach in departments that don’t grant phds. They’re at liberal arts Colleges or regional state universities. True that statistically only a small percentage of grad students will go on to have their own PhD students, but that doesn’t mean there are no jobs for the rest.

That may have been true in the past, but at this point even the smaller colleges are flooded with applicants for faculty jobs.

A billion applicants for 2 full-time faculty jobs, but they’ve always got a billion adjunct openings that pay shit, offer no benefits, and have no job security.

There can even be competition for those lousy adjunct positions.

Indeed, and those positions have had semi-legitimate purposes in the past but have now become a treadmill. For instance, they often served as "academic spouse" jobs. I have a friend who had an English degree, and his wife was a high level science professor. Teaching classes wasn't hopelessly taxing, and they kept re-upping his contract year after year. The flexible schedule allowed him to manage their kids.

I used an adjunct job as a stopgap when I was an "academic spouse" too. It was in the EE department at a Big Ten university. I spent my time networking, and one of the other teachers helped me get a permanent job in local industry.

I worked for a household-name-prestigious school (not as an academic) and they essentially used adjuncts for their cash-cow open enrollment classes knowing that people that were passionate and/or wanted to get the big name on their resume would essentially work for free compared to what even full-time non-tenured faculty got. They made a lot of noise about the university “community” and wellness but I guess that didn’t include adjuncts. It wasn’t UPenn, but the conditions are similar:

https://www.openculture.com/2013/09/death-of-an-adjunct-a-so...

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