I think academia is improving, but slowly. In 1960, the student population was exploding and academia could take a certain self-segregating attitude because the

I think academia is improving, but slowly. In 1960, the student population was exploding and academia could take a certain self-segregating attitude because there'd be several times as many academic spots available in 15 years. That's not true anymore. The number of academic slots has plateaued, if it's not declining. If the average advisor has 5 graduating students in his career, that means 4 of them will need to get non-academic jobs. The problem is that many advisors have no interest in the outside and wouldn't even know how to get non-academic jobs for their students. I like a lot of academics individually, but the culture of academia is very narcissistic and insular, which means that it doesn't take in much information from the outside world. Most academics haven't a clue whether their work is useful, nor how to get their graduate students jobs outside of academia. Academics also live in a world where anything non-academic is somewhat disparaged, and people who leave have "sold out". It's similar to what you see in investment banking: changing careers means being an utter failure, as far as many are concerned. It also is too individualistic for its own good; as much as the phrase "team player" annoys me, academia could stand to have more respect for that concept. However, that's an aspect of academia that's actually doomed to get worse as the competition increases. The scarce job market leads to cutthroat competition and insane careerism, which makes the culture even more defective and insular. Academics need to get better at playing nice with the outside world, because most of the PhD graduates are going to have to work outside of the ivory tower. The advisor system that you mentioned doesn't help. Advisors tend to insist that their best students should get academic jobs and... as for the rest, who cares? They're out on their own. "If you really want to work in 'industry', go ahead, but don't expect my help." Also, having one advisor is like having one boss with all the power-- a single-point-of-failure situation. So there are definitely problems with the advisor system. On the other hand, it has some benefits: if you get a great advisor, it's awesome. Academia has an additional issue in this: it doesn't "counsel out" those who don't belong. The culture is broken, the people are cutthroat, and well-paid jobs are scarce... but you can stay a graduate student for 8-10 years, and shitty jobs (sub-40k adjunct positions, teaching unmotivated students) aren't that rare or hard to get. Most careers flush people out if they reach extreme failure; academia lets them stick around in an undead status for a long time. This creates an academic underclass of socially undeveloped people who have fallen out of proper academia and have nowhere to go: they can't even get jobs at Starbucks. By middle age, they tend to become very bitter and pretty much unemployable. Academia is a great place to learn some things, but the culture is broken and should not be emulated.