[cafard]

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.

[bonoboTP]

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".

[thfuran]

>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.

[cafard]

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.

[mathattack]

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.