PhD Oversupply in Academia

The problem is that too many people want a life in academia, heavily insulated from the outside worldJust like school teachers in America, PhD students are taken advantage of for the exact same reasonsPeople want the jobs, and America doesn't believe in regulating supply and demand

I'd say the problem is there is simply too many people wanting to get a position compared to how many open positions there are. In my college PhD's are practically handed out in return for working on some projects which generate revenue for the Uni + doing the teaching assistant work. After that everyone goes back to the industry because it's practically impossible to get a professor title. And no one ever loses their job so there are more professors barely doing anything than tho

This article shows a gross ignorance of the reality. Academic sciences especially are woefully under funded and anyone coming out now with a PhD has no position to go into especially if you are half decent. Accepting to only teach in a crap university and struggle to have a research career is not a choice for competent people. Instead they leave once they fully understand the insermountable task of obtaining a decent life in the academic world is. Worse is the younger 40-45 yol academics think p

I can only tell about my field, which is Physics, and a hard science field.No, it is still increasingly hard to find a job (in US) from what I saw. Even getting to tenure track is achievement in itself. For example, any major top school (like Caltech, MIT, etc) train as many as one and half to two times the PhD students each year compared to department strength. MIT Physics, for example, intakes roughly ~25 PhD students/year for faculty strength of ~80. That's almost 125 PhD graduating every

Dekhn is calling you out on your qualitative statements: where you live, in your field, in your own mind and to the people you know ("I know a lot of people who have done PhDs") these facts may indeed be true. But I would argue that it's not true elsewhere, such as in the US across scientific disciplines.The research of Paula Stephan covers the economic decisions made by US science research institutions[1]. Her hypothesis is that academia maximizes PhD student num

The people who seek professorships aren't motivated by money, they're motivated by prestige and tenure. If they wanted money, they'd have gone directly into the private sector.But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year.This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet.But

The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in currently a PhD student. They should be delighted so many people want a job with indefinite length, uncertain prospects, and very little pay.I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the former to enjoy the latter, but I

Perhaps there is not an abundance of PhDs, rather a shortage of jobs for PhDs. Something close to 1 of 75 PhDs will become a professor (from the PhD Grind), so almost every PhD should be preparing to work not as a Professor.

It's bad everywhere. A professor with tenure will hold that job for 20-30 years. In that time, (s)he will graduate at least 5 (in some fields way more) PhD candidates. If the field of specialization of the professor is booming, (s)he may get replaced by 3 new professors. It is way more likely, though, that there will be 20+ PhDs for every single tenure job. Even in 'hot' fields, universities have little incentive to rapidly increase the number of well-paid professors, if phD stude

Not surprising at all. The PhD pipeline has been broken for years: low stipends, ridiculous workloads, a shrinking number of stable academic jobs. Who wants to spend 5-7 years in a grueling program only to end up in postdoc purgatory or fighting for adjunct gigs? And the irony is that academia needs PhDs...