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<p>Of course the undergraduate institution is not responsible for the Ph.D. job market. But it is responsible for appropriate advising, and IMO kids who get steered into second- and third-tier Ph.D. programs—only to find after they’ve been there for a while that the newly minted Ph.D.s coming out of those programs are not competitive for the academic jobs they hoped to land when they went in—are in many cases poorly served by the undergrad faculty mentors and career services staff who led them down that primrose path. I certainly have no objection to someone pursuing a Ph.D. if they go into it with their eyes open, if they value learning for the sake of learning and have realistic expectations about their post-Ph.D. job prospects. Many people who earn Ph.D.s hoping to land good tenure-track academic jobs will (sooner or later) retool and have successful careers in the private sector, or end up in law school or business school after completing their Ph.D. Others will end up as relatively low-paid and typically part-time adjunct lecturers or community college instructors. Some have no regrets. Others are quite bitter about the experience. But I’m certainly not going to say that school A is in any relevant sense “better” than school B just because more of school A’s graduates go on to earn Ph.D.s. I’d want to know where they’re getting Ph.D.s, and whether those advanced degrees are leading to academic, government, or private sector jobs commensurate with that level of training. It could be that more of school A’s poorly advised graduates end up driving cabs or delivering pizza after earning dead-end Ph.D.s, while school B’s better-advised students go directly into the private sector or on to law or business school, skipping the Ph.D. step.</p>