[b00ty4breakfast]

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.

There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.

[EvgeniyZh]

There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty

[b00ty4breakfast]

There are too many grad students, is my point. Like, obviously, not all grad students go into academia, but that is the main career track for a graduate degree in a lot of fields.

[EvgeniyZh]

What I'm saying is that it can't be qualitatively different.

You can't guarantee every IC they will become a manager (which a professor essentially is) in any area and academia is no different. Larger number of students is what allows both the scientific progress and better filtering of potential professors.