One thing that struck me about your earlier data post on faculty hiring was that there were roughly twice as many physics faculty, total, at Ph.D. granting institutions than at Bachelor's institutions. Because the system where a tenured professor creates 10 new Ph.D.s is OK if 9 of them go on to get jobs like, well, yours. (Or mine, for that matter.) Although really not so much the prestigious SLACs, but the large Directional States, because isn't that the most common type of institution for undergrads, as in don't-forget-most-people-don't-go-to-SLACs.
It's also interesting to see your suggestion that the job:new PhD ratio is such that we need to train fewer Ph.Ds alongside the recent articles in Science, and elsewhere, about how important the diversification of physics is. If successful, isn't there a risk of these efforts turning into a large bait-and-switch?
Yeah, there are two slightly different things going on with the Ph.D. pipeline, and they affect different disciplines to different degrees. One problem is that the culture of academia in many ways discourages and disparages leaving academia for a Ph.D. level job elsewhere, the other is that the number of academic jobs is vastly smaller than the number of new Ph.D.'s being produced.
Depending on the relative size of the markets, that second one may be less significant. The stats I've seen suggest that very few Physics Ph.D.'s end up living in vans down by the river; lots of them end up out of academia, but there are enough industry and finance positions that they mostly end up doing okay for themselves. There are even fields like CS, where my colleagues struggle to find a handful of candidates worth bringing to campus for interviews, because the industry side of the market is so attractive.
In other fields, though, my sense is that the non-academic market is a whole lot less appealing. That's how you end up with freeway-flyer adjuncts trying to cobble together enough courses at multiple institutions to pay the rent. Taken across the whole of academia, my impression is that the net result is an excess of Ph.D.'s, and that some serious consideration should be given to scaling back the rate at which we create new not-that-kind-of-doctors. Even in disciplines where people mostly end up with jobs, like physics, we could stand to scale back-- some of the jobs these folks end up in are not exactly a top societal priority (*cough*Wall Street*cough*), and many don't REALLY need the degree, they're just able to use it as a screen because of past overproduction.
(Maybe important bit of context here is my long-standing position is that the only good justification for going to grad school to get a Ph.D. is because you love to do research, and specifically want the chance to be in charge of a research program.)
obv the university in some form will continue. but the post ww2 system is probably not sustainable as it depended on certain demographics, and its roots are from an earlier period when less than 5% of the population got a college degree
eg we need more technical universities since marketability/skills is really a big deal, and the community college system needs to be emphasized probably more than the R2 system imo. the bottom
One thing that struck me about your earlier data post on faculty hiring was that there were roughly twice as many physics faculty, total, at Ph.D. granting institutions than at Bachelor's institutions. Because the system where a tenured professor creates 10 new Ph.D.s is OK if 9 of them go on to get jobs like, well, yours. (Or mine, for that matter.) Although really not so much the prestigious SLACs, but the large Directional States, because isn't that the most common type of institution for undergrads, as in don't-forget-most-people-don't-go-to-SLACs.
It's also interesting to see your suggestion that the job:new PhD ratio is such that we need to train fewer Ph.Ds alongside the recent articles in Science, and elsewhere, about how important the diversification of physics is. If successful, isn't there a risk of these efforts turning into a large bait-and-switch?
Yeah, there are two slightly different things going on with the Ph.D. pipeline, and they affect different disciplines to different degrees. One problem is that the culture of academia in many ways discourages and disparages leaving academia for a Ph.D. level job elsewhere, the other is that the number of academic jobs is vastly smaller than the number of new Ph.D.'s being produced.
Depending on the relative size of the markets, that second one may be less significant. The stats I've seen suggest that very few Physics Ph.D.'s end up living in vans down by the river; lots of them end up out of academia, but there are enough industry and finance positions that they mostly end up doing okay for themselves. There are even fields like CS, where my colleagues struggle to find a handful of candidates worth bringing to campus for interviews, because the industry side of the market is so attractive.
In other fields, though, my sense is that the non-academic market is a whole lot less appealing. That's how you end up with freeway-flyer adjuncts trying to cobble together enough courses at multiple institutions to pay the rent. Taken across the whole of academia, my impression is that the net result is an excess of Ph.D.'s, and that some serious consideration should be given to scaling back the rate at which we create new not-that-kind-of-doctors. Even in disciplines where people mostly end up with jobs, like physics, we could stand to scale back-- some of the jobs these folks end up in are not exactly a top societal priority (*cough*Wall Street*cough*), and many don't REALLY need the degree, they're just able to use it as a screen because of past overproduction.
(Maybe important bit of context here is my long-standing position is that the only good justification for going to grad school to get a Ph.D. is because you love to do research, and specifically want the chance to be in charge of a research program.)
obv the university in some form will continue. but the post ww2 system is probably not sustainable as it depended on certain demographics, and its roots are from an earlier period when less than 5% of the population got a college degree
eg we need more technical universities since marketability/skills is really a big deal, and the community college system needs to be emphasized probably more than the R2 system imo. the bottom