[analog31]

A PhD degree doesn't "prove" anything. It's a chance for you to build your own education using the resources at your disposal, under a mentor. There is vastly too much variability in the experiences of PhDs, even within any single field, to generalize. This makes it difficult to market the PhD as a credential or meal ticket. It's a license to compete, that's all. And as you can read in this forum, it's held against you by a lot of people.

Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.

Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.

For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.