[gwd]

Do the math: The number of professorial positions is not growing (or not very quickly). Under steady-state, each professor only needs to train one single tenure-track PhD in their entire career. (Or maybe 10 professors need to train 11-12 students, to account for various forms of attrition.)

If you want more PhD's than that, you have to figure out a place for them to work; industry is a good "pressure relief valve".

[fc417fc802]

This is true but it doesn't necessarily mean that academia ought to shift its focus to professional training. Also keep in mind that this has ~always been the case. Sometimes you train with a specific task in mind. Other times you do something open ended and unrelated "for the experience" with the idea that it will benefit you in various ways in the future. Neither of those approaches is always wrong or always right. Sometimes you need to focus but there are other times narrowing your view would materially diminish the benefits of the experience.

I do think it would be good for all levels of academia to be more explicit about the goals of any given program. I think these things are often blurred together to the detriment of both student and staff.

[psyklic]

The goal of PhD programs has never been to have every student become a professor. Also, strong STEM PhD students generally don't need much help finding jobs after they graduate. Claiming that PhD students "aren't prepared" for industry careers is simply saying that students lack industry experience (obviously, being students!).

The problem here -- and why universities even do research at all -- is that industry's support of basic science is not very stable. At least when I was in school, industry research generally was more applied and engineering-focused.

[rayiner]

With the aging population, we also hit peak college attendance 15 years ago.

[parpfish]

i think major federal funding agencies should track department-level stats on "how many phd students did you admit?" versus "how many tenure track positions did you hire?" and use that to implement mechanisms that encourage a healthier balance (e.g., changing funding lines on grants, adjusting their overhead cuts, boosting trainee grants at certain places).

this would hopefully stop departments from over-admitting and encourage less adjunctification.