The problem is multifacted, but it's not the case that PhD students are trained to become professors. They are trained to become researchers. The problem is als

The problem is multifacted, but it's not the case that PhD students are trained to become professors. They are trained to become researchers. The problem is also not generally that PhD grads believe they will become professors and are completely lost when that does not happen - in many fields, a PhD gives you perfectly good job opportunities outside academia, in some it is almost mandatory. The problems are: * People who do become professors have spent years training to become good researchers, and very little (if any) time training to become good teachers. They're kind of expected to be pick it up along the way, which may or may not work well. * Some people in academia still insist on the traditional idea that university should teach academic research and nothing else, and resist including anything that aims to better prepare students (and especially PhD students) for working in industry jobs, even though the vast majority of them will. * There are some fields where there really are few job prospects outside academia, and logically those fields should have very few PhD students, or at least make it very clear to students that they need to have a Plan B that is really more Plan A. But Professors need PhD and postdoc students as cheap, qualified labor. Some unscrupulous professors try to attract students by giving them an unrealistic view of their prospects in academia. They probably don't even think they're lying: see the previous point. This kind of thing is probably most common in fields like literature which combine bad job prospects with being very popular.