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There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An exampl

There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well). For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university). For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up. At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.

Someone 4y ago
As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
- zahllos 4y ago
  Yes exactly, and your numbers are a lower bound, because the professor must do a few things: supervision of the PhDs, teaching (prep, lecturing, admin), grant applications, peer review (if not delegated to PhDs/postdocs) etc. The actual time the professor has for pure research is... not as much as you'd think. Which means that having more PhD students means you can explore more of your own ideas by assigning them to it. It also means more teaching assistants and so on for your course. So the chances you will take and graduate one at a time are very low. Also, you know some fraction won't make it, so you need to account for that too.

Someone 4y ago

As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.

zahllos 4y ago
Yes exactly, and your numbers are a lower bound, because the professor must do a few things: supervision of the PhDs, teaching (prep, lecturing, admin), grant applications, peer review (if not delegated to PhDs/postdocs) etc. The actual time the professor has for pure research is... not as much as you'd think. Which means that having more PhD students means you can explore more of your own ideas by assigning them to it. It also means more teaching assistants and so on for your course. So the chances you will take and graduate one at a time are very low. Also, you know some fraction won't make it, so you need to account for that too.