tldr: I'm not ignoring the humanities; it does function like you describe. But ALL of the humanities combined were only 2.6K PhDs out of 52K total; Education is

tldr: I'm not ignoring the humanities; it does function like you describe. But ALL of the humanities combined were only 2.6K PhDs out of 52K total; Education is larger than all of the humanities combined, health sciences is about the same size as all of humanities combined, clinically-heavy life sciences are about the same size, CS is about the same size, etc. etc. The humanities are an outlier, and also small. Why is it "hand-waving away education" but "look at the humanities" when there are nearly 600 more Ed PhDs than there are all of the humanities COMBINED in SED 21? In Ed, 48% are primarily self-funded and 12.7% are primarily supported by an employer meaning a majority aren't "traditional" phd students on the path to a potential faculty position. A ton of the Ed students on fellowships are employer-supported by other means and even those with research assistantships or teaching assistantships are on same path (working full time in a central office or K12 school). The vast majority of Ed PhDs have no interest in higher ed eployment; they're getting their EdD/PhD because of the role it plays in public school compensation bands and promotion pathways. There are breadcrumbs that paint this picture throughout the various SED tables, but also, you can just... talk with people in the field. Many of the applied/clinical life and health sciences function the same way albiet with slightly different funding mechanisms and candidate incentives. The point is, no interest in TT faculty jobs. Combined with humanities this is 2x-3x larger than humanities. WRT non-classical phd setups and immigration, humanities are the outlier rather than the norm. And in any case small compared to STEM -- many individual STEM fields are nearly as large as all of the humanities combined, for example.