In the 70s, academia in general was still growing so there were opportunities for many of the people who wanted a career in that field. Now that the field is shrinking due to demographic changes the competition has become much more vicious.
The baby boomers were going to college, ergo colleges and universities were expanding.The Ph.D. from a Tier-N school who didn't catch on there could find a tenure-track position in a Tier-N+M school.
Back in those years, at I suppose a Tier-3 school, I went to some academic ceremony where the professors wore their robes. I was impressed at how spiffy the crimson Harvard robes looked. Somebody more sociologically aware would have thought, Hmmm, there sure are a lot of Harvard Ph.D.s on the faculty here, and considered why.
How was it before then? Surely you can't expect that N PhDs minted by one doctoral advisor will each be able to take an equivalent spot at the same institution as the doctoral advisor. Or did people expect that? Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math, but the emotions and egos seem to make this discussion "complex".
>Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math
Yes, and the US population went from about 130 million in 1940 to 330 million in 2020, while the percent of adults with a college degree went from about 5% to about 40%. There were a few decades of particularly rapid growth.
I think that the American college and university system had previously been expanding slowly. The GI Bill and the then the baby boom greatly increased the rate of expansion. Expansion still goes on, but maybe at quite a low rate.
Growth in the percentage of population going to college. And from a research reputation point of view it’s very important to create a lot of mini-mes.
Colleges and Universities have, out of necessity, started thinking more like a company. Part of that is often new accounting models. One such way of modeling costs anscribes indirect costs to programs (utilities, building maintenance etc). Low enrollment graduate and doctoral programs look really bad on a balance sheet when you factor in these indirect costs and they will never look good. In fact they will always lose millions per year under this model. It is frankly an inappropriate budgeting model for colleges to adopt because academic programs are not product lines, but here we are.
It seems like it's just poor management. I understand they are not product lines, but a university has bills to pay. They have to pay people salaries, benefits, maintain those builds, labs, libraries, etc. The money to do that has to come from somewhere and in the hard times, the fields with the least likely chance of generating revenue to keep the university afloat will see hits. It seems like the university though has put itself in the hard times by taking on a large amount of debt: https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u.... It seems like its less malicious and just risk taking gone wrong.
It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing, recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't responsible for the issues that the company is facing.
When I first heard Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze blasted out as I walked in darkness down the hillside to the womens' dorms, I realized it was a new age and a good time to be alive!8-))