The PhD Glut, Tenure, and Meritocracy 

 The Economist has  an article  that has made the rounds on  the   Monkey   Cage  and with  Drew Conway . The article bemoans the glut of PhD degrees granted in the U.S. and cries oversupply. It points to the rise of post-docs and adjuncts as cheap labor in the education and research markets. While the article does paint a perhaps overly bleak portrait of the current academic environment and the potential for those who leave it, I think the reaction has been a little strange. Since it&#8217;s slightly off-topic, I&#8217;ll banish most of my argument below the fold.  



 From Josh Tucker at the Monkey Cage: 

 
   Like it or not, academia is a meritocracy. It may be a highly flawed meritocracy susceptible to overvaluing labels or fads of the day, but ultimately tenure is bestowed on those who earn the respect of their peers, and the more of your peers that respect you, the more job offers you are going to get and the more money you are going to make.  
 

 And yet, tenure and meritocracy are goals at odds. The  average age  of professors when they received tenure is 39 in the United States, meaning that many will spend roughly half of their academic life with tenure. I don&#8217;t think it is a stretch to say that academic merit ceases to be a relevant criteria for employment after tenure. Of course, it matters for further professional success, but that is not what&#8217;s on the table. The most recent generation of scholars are likely to live quite long and productive lives, meaning tenure looms large for budgets.  

 To bring to back to sports, baseball teams do not hire players for life. The certainty of tenured faculty positions shifts most of the uncertainty in the academic labor market to graduate students and junior faculty. Does this mean we should reduce the number of PhD candidates we admit? Not necessarily, but we should not ignore the fundamental cracks in the academic system that we have seen in the last economic downturn. The academy (and especially the way we teach) will change drastically in the next 10-20 years. We would be wise to be ahead of those change instead of trying to catch up. 

 We could, though, try to reduce the information asymmetries that exist for potential PhD students. But it is hard to deny this sentence from the Economist article: 

 
   The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. 
 

 Though, even when they are aligned you see problems due to selection effects: professors who are dispensing advice are the ones who made it. Very few potential graduate students understand the market before they decide to earn a PhD. This might actually be getting better due to (of all things!) the often insipid and almost always anonymous job-rumour mongering forums that have cropped up for various disciplines. Even when people are attempting to give honest advice, they fail to anticipate impending problems. When I applied to graduate school 5 years ago, people made the job market sound like the land of milk and honey. You just go pick your job off the tree! No one anticipated the crash in the number of available jobs, or at least they did not reveal this information to me. This problem exists even more strongly for law schools as they are unaware of the life at top law firms and the likelihood of receiving such jobs. Yet law students have more paths available to them after they graduate compared to PhDs. The paths to success in academia are fairly limited to the traditional model.  

 And lastly, this story from Drew: 

 
   On my first day of graduate school one of my professors said, &#8220;Congratulations on being accepted to the program. While most people will not understand it, you have one of the greatest jobs one the planet. People are going to pay you to think, and I think that is pretty cool.&#8221;  
 

 I heard this numerous times as well and may have even said it myself. And yet, I think there is an inherent tension between this idea and Josh&#8217;s assertion that we succeed by convincing others of our ideas. The most surprising thing I have learned in graduate school, embarrassingly enough, is that we are not in the business of creating ideas, we are in the business of selling ideas and, in some sense, selling yourself. I think potential PhD students should know this.