| This is not true because it is a multi-agent problem. There is not just one professor, but there is a competitive pool of professors working in different areas. In some highly productive (or otherwise "hot") areas, some profs place every student in faculty positions. In some areas, this number is almost zero. So it is a competitive field. The problem of pyramid-scheme, etc. occurs when people don't realize this and enter academia with an expectation of entering the tenure track. I find biomedical academia to be the principal culprit in this academic Ponzi scheme. They require high skilled labor, which they procure in the form of underpaid grad students and permanent post docs. Only a small minority of biomedical faculty care about their students entering the tenure track. The other set of fields that are bad for post-PhD careers is liberal arts. Mainly because colleges started lots of liberal arts departments to boost enrollment and inflate grades. So the demand is artificial. On the other extreme is b-school and econ PhDs who almost all enter academia. Other hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) fall in the middle: it is a struggle, but people end up landing well after PhD. Physics folks get finance, developer, etc. jobs. Chemistry folks are usually absorbed into pharma/chem companies. Math and engineering academia works pretty well too: almost all engineering PhDs get good R&D/developer jobs that are reasonably high status and pay well. I don't know any super-star PhD in engineering who didn't get a reasonable academic position. The defense industry is another big employer of math, engineering, and sciences PhDs. |
This does not contradict the GP. In field that are stable, the average number of new professors per old professor is 1.