The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a prof

The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-). CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job." Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard." Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world. Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-). In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons: 1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city. 2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move). 3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit" 4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI. 5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time. 6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all." 7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then. [1] My calculation: 1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr 2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work 3) assume $100k/yr salary 4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting 5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream 6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates