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I think this article really misunderstands the structure of academia. The paper looks to have done a bunch of data collection, which is great; but the results c

I think this article really misunderstands the structure of academia. The paper looks to have done a bunch of data collection, which is great; but the results could be predicted without collecting any data at all. Structurally, if the average professor graduates 10 students over the course of their career, half of which go to industry, then an institution with a given prestige level will send 5x as many graduates to academia as it has slots to hire professors. So just from pure statistics, if everyone is trying to hire for new faculty jobs PhDs from the most prestigious institutions, one should expect the average PhD graduate who goes into academic to get a job at an institution about 5x less prestigious (one a percentage basis) as the one where they got their PhD. (Hiring is of course more complicated than that, but I think you don't need to make a lot of assumptions about the professor hiring process explain the data in the article). It's not exactly a pyramid scheme design; there was significant growth in the total number of professor jobs, due to population growth and increasing college attendance rates. And in many fields, there exists high demand for PhDs for work in both industry and government research labs. But these statistics mean that only top schools have the option for a large portion of PhD graduates to get professorships... And I don't think there's any realistic reform that academia could make to change this reality.

tabbott 4y ago
I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field. But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach. But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.

tabbott 4y ago

I do think universities should work hard to communicate with their PhD applicants and students about their job prospects. Among my friends who did their PhD at MIT, which was often one of the top-3 schools for their field, most of them who were having a good experience doing research were able to stay in academia and eventually get professorships, usually at a top-10 school for their field. But universities that are not in that top school range need to be communicating that the likely outcome for a PhD in their field is work in industry. There are a lot of industry jobs that involve reading research papers and doing research (with variation in whether you publish it), which are the key meta skills that a PhD is intended to teach. But it's doing students a disservice for a school that's not in the top 10 schools in their field to market to students that they'll have a job exactly similar to their advisors'. It's certainly a possible outcome if you're unusually talented and have a good advisor who has a reputation in the field and work hard for decades and get lucky with how your research is received by the field! But it's an unlikely one, and one shouldn't plan one's life in a way where you're going to be really sad if you spend a few years getting a PhD at that school can't find an academic job.