I liked a suggestion from the RAND institute. This article took the interesting approach of concluding that the lack fo interest (among Americans) in Science &

I liked a suggestion from the RAND institute. This article took the interesting approach of concluding that the lack fo interest (among Americans) in Science & Engineering PhD programs is a rational response to long, uncertain training times and poor pay and career prospects relative to the "professions" (law, dentistry, mba, medicine, etc..) One suggestion was moving these PhDs to something more resembling the "professional" model... http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html "Adopt the “professional school model” for S&E PhD programs. This strategy aims to reduce the early costs and uncertainties of training for an S&E career rather than increasing later career rewards. The adoption of this strategy by academe, even any resolve toward attempting it, seems remote. Still, more young people might select these S&E doctoral programs over professional schools if the years to S&E PhD completion were rolled back to, say, 1970 levels, if this term were predictable and uniform, and if the subjective and arbitrary aspects of the PhD path were curtailed." Truth is, almost all (98%+) of of the people who get into Stanford's law school or MBA program finish their degrees on time. You can't say this about the PhD programs - not a knock on Stanford here, it's one of the friendlier campuses from what I've heard. This is typical of any university. Make the PhD programs shorter and more predictable, and they'll be more appropriate for the kind of non-academic careers this article discusses. As for academics? Well, law professors don't typically have PhDs. No reason people can't continue to learn to do research as a junior professor. I do agree that the odds of this happening are very low, largely because the university system is addicted to cheap graduate student labor, and because they'll be able to fill the gap left by Americans who overwhelmingly prefer the professions with international students whose visa terms make it difficult to walk away from the grad program without also losing US residency.