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<p>I suspect the drop would actually be relatively small, as most PhD students, at least at the respectable schools anyway, don’t take loans anyway. They’re funded one way or another, often times through teaching. The elimination of grad loans would then only reduce the minority of PhD students who are unfunded.</p>
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<p>Regarding JD’s, another way to reduce the overproduction is to simply eliminate the need for that degree from an approved law-school in order to be admitted to the Bar - a requirement enforced by most states at the behest of the ABA. Let’s face it - many law students don’t really want to go to law school, and certainly don’t want to pay for it. But they do want to work as lawyers, and they therefore attend law school because they must. Perhaps more states can allow people who simply ‘read law’ to attempt the Bar without needing to attend law school, as California, Virginia, and Washington state do now. Even New York requires that readers only attend a year of law school without needing to graduate. I think nobody would accuse those states of being lawless jungles overrun by incompetent lawyers (or, at least, no more incompetent than lawyers in any other state). If somebody without a law degree can nevertheless pass the Bar exam, why shouldn’t that person be allowed to practice law? {Clients would be free to decide whether they want to hire him or not.} </p>
<p>Regarding PhD’s, I suspect that one way relatively easy way to ease the burden is to improve the marketability of the degree. See below. </p>
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<p>Regarding underemployed PhD’s in English (and other humanities), I continue to ask the question: why exactly can’t more of them become, say, high school teachers? My high school was apparently one of better high schools in the country, yet not a single teacher there held a PhD (and only a small minority held even a master’s). Indeed, most teachers in the country not only have only bachelor’s degrees, they tend to have them from relatively lower-ranked schools. Allocating more PhD’s into our nation’s schools should greatly improve the overall knowledge base of our teaching ranks, and by extension, probably improve the overall educational experience of the students. Heck, I remember some of my high school English teachers struggling with some of the more esoteric interpretations that some students had to offer. (Granted, my high school did happen to have some bright students). </p>
<p>Many PhD-granting institutions also have a School of Education as part of the greater university. It therefore wouldn’t seem to be that hard to pair PhD training with a teaching credential. After all, if people holding bachelor’s degrees from low-ranked schools can obtain teaching credentials, surely PhD students could do the same. </p>
<p>Furthermore, teaching high school is not a bad job. You receive a steady salary, with summers off, and with the opportunity for tenure in many school districts. I have to believe that that’s surely better than the part-time adjunct college lecturing positions that many humanities PhD graduates are forced to take. </p>
<p>Now to be clear, I don’t pretend that this would solve the PhD underemployment problem entirely. I fully agree that some PhD graduates are unsuited to teach high school (but then again, teaching high school is not radically different from teaching adjunct lecturer-ship courses - if you can do the latter, you can probably do the former). I also agree that local governments are currently suffering from budgetary problems and may not be hiring extensively now. {But then again, my old high school recently hired some new teachers, and they can’t be the only ones.} And yes, certainly, many PhD graduates would become poor high school teachers. {But then again, let’s face it, plenty of current high school teachers are not exactly superstars in the classroom either.} </p>
<p>So while this proposal may not entirely solve the PhD underemployment problem, it would seemingly put a substantial dent in it. Those PhD graduates would win by having a steadier job than the adjunct lecturerships they are forced to take now. High school students would benefit from the increased knowledge base of their teaching cohort. It seems that everybody would win. The only losers would be those people who have only bachelor’s degrees who nevertheless are hired as teachers and who would lose in the competition against PhD’s. But I’m not sure that that’s bad. If I was a parent, I wouldn’t mind having my child attend a high school where many of the teachers held PhD’s. I wouldn’t mind that one bit. </p>
<p>{Granted, somebody is surely going to retort that teachers with PhD’s are mandated to receive higher pay than those with just bachelor’s, often times as a consequence of a state law and/or a collective bargaining agreement with the teacher’s unions, and such mandates may discourage the hiring of those with PhD’s in the first place. The answer would then be to reform these laws. I could perhaps understand a mandate for a salary boost for a current teacher who later receives a PhD by studying part-time. But whether a new teaching candidate with a PhD ought to receive a salary boost should not be a mandate, but perhaps should be a case-by-case determination made by the superintendent or school board.}</p>
<p>My understanding with accreditation standards is that mostly these boards want to see lots of data – how many people started a course, how many people finished, time to completion of degree, etc. What ends up happening is that they have to create whole organizations to track statistics, buy expensive software to track statistics – and the statistics are required, whereas having full-time tenure track professional faculty is optional. All the loan people want to see lots of data and statistics as well, so it’s theoretically possible to have a school with 2000 students that ends up being top-heavy with administrators all collecting this data. Education – optional. Statistics – mandatory.</p>
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<p>Then it seems to me that one way to improve the situation is to simply have the accreditation bodies mandate that schools must have a minimum percentage of Phd-holding, tenure-track (hence, not adjuncts/lecturers) faculty, relative to the size of the student body.</p>
<p>Or, how about turning the entire problem on its head? You say that schools must have entire organizations collecting data and calculating statistics. Why not have those organizations staffed by PhD-holders themselves? After all, there are plenty of PhD graduates in disciplines without the strongest academic job prospects (e.g. psychology, sociology, poli-sci) but who are clearly adept at collecting data regarding social topics and who are also statistically well-trained. Since you have to hire somebody anyway, why not hire them? Some of the best Stata/SAS/R analysts that I know are actually sociologists. That would surely create plenty of jobs for those PhD’s.</p>
<p>[sarcasm]Well, clearly we have a dire shortage of college graduates in this country and need to start producing more to keep up with China.[/sarcasm]</p>
<p>The article’s one example is a humanities grad student. Hang on while I try to cope with the shock.</p>
<p>Coping…
Coping…
Coping…</p>
<p>Okay, I’m better now.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s extremely simple economics at work:</p>
<p>1) Make something artificially cheap, and people will buy more of it.
2) Make something artificially more expensive, and people will supply more of it.</p>
<p>It really it that simple. With regards to principle 1, it has been made artifically cheap to get a degree, even a Masters or Doctoral degree, in this country. Oh, I know, “they have to pay back the loans,” only those loans are guarantee by, or completely administered by, the government, which means a moral hazard is at work. People can reasonably expect to be bailed out by the government if they can’t pay back the loans. We’ve seen that a contract in this country isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if the government decides the contract was unfair (just see Obama’s totally illegal THEFT of GM stock to hand over to the unions instead of to the actual creditors who had genuine ownership, or how mortgage contracts are illegally being thrown out by courts for purely political reasons, etc.). The idea that <em>anybody</em> taking out a student loan in America today will truly be held accountable for every dollar they’ve borrowed is a joke, and a lot of people have abused this to borrow way more than they will ever be able to reasonably pay back on a barista’s salary. So because it is so cheap (in a de facto way, not a nominal way) to get a degree, people buy more of them, especially the easy-to-get-but-economically-“worthless” degrees.</p>
<p>In regards to principle 2, because many tenured professors have artificially high wages (do you really need to get paid a six figure salary to do poetry research?), then there is an oversupply of labor in that area. Simple, basic economics.</p>
<p>Add to these two principles an entire academic-industrial complex which highly encourages people to pursue graduate degrees and makes the way as smooth as possible for all graduate-degree seekers, and it’s no surprise that you have a surplus of grad students.</p>
<p>And with a lot of people spending years out of the real world job market, developing skills that nobody in the real world job market wants to pay them, it’s not surprising that we have a lot of people out there who can’t support themselves and are essentially wards of the state.</p>
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<p>No, it’s not like that, because playing basketball is a hobby that doesn’t require spending ten years in college, away from the real-world job market. One can pursue basketball and a real career at the same time. Even most college basketball players do not go onto graduate school, do they?</p>
<p>But somebody getting a PhD in English or whatever is spending about ten years in college developing the opposite of job skills–they are developing skills which are of use only in academia. At best they may have a job on the side where they are learning actual job skills but it is unlikely to be a job leading to a genuine career.</p>
<p>To say that something is being “over-produced” in economic terms implies that something is being produced TO BE SOLD, and in the case of your analogy this would be athletic labor. But even student athletes who have hopes of becoming a professional are not necessarily providing labor to be sold, whereas a person going for a PhD in humanities has only one place and one way in which to sell their labor: academia. But an athlete, either amateur or student, has other recourse.</p>
<p>And more to the point, we ARE producing too many athletes at the collegiate level. Most college athletic programs are not self-supporting, thus the consumers (fans) of said athletic programs are not paying enough (in ticket sales, etc.) to support the team, thus there is a surplus of labor which must be paid for by the university (which in most cases means the tax-payer, or in some cases alumni donations). This holds regardless of how big a fanship these teams may have.</p>
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<p>I’m actually far more sympathetic to tetrahedron’s analogy. Sure, one can pursue basketball as a hobby, and millions of people do. But anybody who treats a basketball as merely a hobby and nothing more has practically zero chance of ever making it to the NBA. Even the most gifted player has to spend countless hours in grueling practice and gametime all the way until age 19 (when they become NBA-eligible) to even have the slightest chance of making it to the NBA. While millions of people may not be spending that sort of time honing their basketball skills, surely hundreds of thousands - especially (to be honest) in the inner cities - are doing so. The vast majority of them will never even obtain a college basketball scholarship, let alone an NBA roster spot. </p>
<p>It is also surely true that that sort of intense basketball practice - beyond the level of simple hobbydom - is, frankly, only useful on the basketball court and is a skill that is transferable to practically nowhere else. The vast majority of those high school and college players who are spending countless hours on their basketball skills would surely be better off having spent that time developing marketable skills instead. I agree with you that one could play college basketball while completing a marketable college degree and developing marketable skills at the same time…but how many actually do? Many college basketball players don’t even graduate at all, and of those that do, many will graduate from unmarketable creampuff majors. The rigors of playing in a basketball program in one of the major conferences (Big East, SEC, Big 10, Big 12, ACC, Pac-12) - which is where the bulk of the NBA players come from - are not exactly amenable to earning a degree in engineering. </p>
<p>So I believe tetrahedron’s basic point holds: we could indeed say that we are overproducing too many people who are seriously pursuing basketball but who will never make it to the NBA. </p>
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<p>And that’s the point that I’ve been emphasizing as a possibility for reform. Why exactly does a PhD in humanities have only one place to go? Why can’t there be other destinations? Specifically, I continue to ask the question: exactly why can’t more of them be directed towards teaching high school (or, at least, the ones who also have reasonable teaching skills)? I think I might have rather enjoyed having all of my high school English classes being taught by PhD-holders.</p>
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<p>That IS the point: there are a lot of un-respectable schools and directional Unis that are cranking out PhDs unnecessarily.</p>
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<p>No argument here. But a faster way to eliminate law students is to eliminate federal grad loans.</p>
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<p>Perhaps because no one wants them? Our company hires grad students with science degrees, and even math degrees – we need stat gurus. Industry can absorb some STEM majors. But we have no need of anyone to tell us about Chaucer, or Russian Lit.</p>
<p>OTOH, I’m sure some school districts do like to hire teachers with grad credentials.</p>
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<p>This is all assuming that a university, or at least the university athletic department, is supposed to be a profit-maximizing entity. Is it? Should it be? </p>
<p>If universities were nothing more than profit-maximizing entities, then that would seem to entail wholesale changes to practically the entire institution. Most pure theoretical research that doesn’t produce patents or attract grant funding should be immediately shut down. Since you seem to enjoy invoking economics concepts, then you might appreciate that such a change would entail the widespread downsizing of many university economics departments, especially those that specialize in theory. After all, economic theories are not patentable, and few economic theorists attract grant funding. </p>
<p>Which then leads to the paradox: how many fewer economic theories about economic efficiency would we have if university economics departments were themselves compelled to be economically efficient?</p>
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<p>But that’s the fundamental question - why doesn’t anybody want them? It seems to me that that’s actually a matter of marketing. The truth is, other than true necessities such as food and air, there probably is no ‘inherent demand’ for anything: the demand for most products is highly manipulable through proper marketing. Diamonds are expensive not because anybody really needs diamonds, but simply because some of the most cunning marketing in history is dedicated towards convincing us to equate diamonds with romance, such that if you don’t buy your fiancee a diamond engagement ring, then society considers you to be a cad. </p>
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<p>Is that really the point? Are there really that many unfunded PhD students at ‘un-respectable’ schools or directional universities (whatever those are)? </p>
<p>Well, if so, then I’m not entirely sure, morally speaking, what we can do to stop them, if they’re spending their own money. Heck, I’m not highly incensed even if they were spending taxpayer loan money. See below. </p>
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<p>Well, look, what can I say? I don’t know about you, but at least for me, the serial financial/monetary bailouts of 2008 - TARP, Fannie/Freddie, AIG’s Maiden Lane Transactions, the FDIC TLGP, and the unprecedented liquidity facilities opened by the Fed using powers that we didn’t even know that they had - entirely recalibrated my level of outrage. Given that the Federal government staked well over $1 trillion to, in effect, support rich bankers - who then responded by paying themselvesnear-record bonuses in 2009, 20010, and 2011 - it’s frankly, very difficult for me to summon much outrage over grad students reneging on some student loans. Instead of bailing out bankers, I’m sure we could have bailed out those students, with plenty of funds left over.</p>
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<p>Division I college basketball is not a hobby, in any way. It is a full time job, that one pursues for four years. And then you go do something else, unless you’re fortunate enough to make a professional team.</p>
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<p>Yes, and apparently there are more than enough students willing to attend these schools. Why should these universities shut down their programs? Perhaps they believe they will eventually be at the top of the heap. In any case, shutting down all but the best schools will further reduce academic employment. The fraction of graduate students that can become professors will remain the same.</p>
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<p>Maybe I didn’t make myself clear when I was speaking about STEM. Most of us in STEM will not end up doing anything even remotely related to our area of research as graduate students. We get jobs because the industry considers us “smart” or “dedicated” based on our ability to earn a PhD. As an example, Google hires lots of mechanical engineers, even though Google doesn’t do anything related to mechanical engineering work. </p>
<p>I suspect that it’s a similar situation in the humanities - you get a PhD, with a dissertation on the 8th century iconoclasm movement in the Byzantine Empire, but, you end up teaching high school level history. And that’s fine - it’s not the dream job of becoming an academic researcher, but it’s a sustainable career.</p>
<p>The people who are actually struggling, like the ones in this article, are people who refuse to attempt anything other than the academic dream of being a tenure track professor at a research university. They pile on year after year of adjunct work in an attempt to stay in the game and eventually secure such a position. I have a hard time feeling bad for these people, since ultimately it’s on them to find alternative employment, just as most PhDers have to ultimately do.</p>
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<p>Athletic departments should all be spun off as independent entities and let them sink or swim on their own.</p>
<p>There is this notion being sold to the tax-payers that we must “invest” in higher education to reap future benefits, this entire argument doesn’t support one iota the notion that entertainment should be paid for by the tax-payers on the notion that such things are public goods (I disagree, but I think one can make a halfway-decent argument that the government has a role in funding <em>pure</em> scientific research). Even if one believes whole-heartedly that the government should subsidize, administrate, or outright socialize higher education, it doesn’t follow at all that the government should be involved in subsidizing entertainment like sports. They are two separate questions and it is only an accident of American history that we confuse the two, and think that privatizing one means privatizing the other, or subsidizing one means subsidizing the other.</p>
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<p>The government certainly has no place funding economic research or any social “science” research, though one can make an argument that funding pure scientific research is a legitimate use of government funds, to the extent that pure scientific research is a public good that would not be supplied by the private sector. I do not believe this is the case, nor do I believe that the people who believe in government funding for research have made anything like a convincing case that research would fall apart without tax-payer money supporting it.</p>
<p>As for whether a research body is “economically efficient” is a phony question. The real question is “efficient at what?” And there is no <em>objectively</em> measurable way of gauging this, which is enough to put to sleep the argument that the government should fund it. Tax-payers don’t know if they are getting screwed or not, thus it is irresponsible at best to put money into an enterprise whose bang-for-buck we can’t gauge, and evil at worst to funnel money to special interests and pork projects. To say nothing of the uber-politicization of science, an inevitable result of government funding.</p>
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<p>Are all Division I programs fully self-supporting? If so, then good for them–demand meets supply and nothing is being wasted. Spin them off as private entities and let them sink or swim on their own.</p>
<p>If a Division I program is not self-supporting though, then that means that the fans, in spite of their level of fandom, are not willing to support the team financially–<em>they are not willing to cover the full cost of the basketball.</em> They like it, but not enough to pay what the full costs is, if we can really talk about such things as “full cost” when the government is involved.</p>
<p>In any case, all athletic programs ought to be spun off and allowed to sink or swim on their own merits.</p>
<p>And as for whether we are over-producing athletes, since an athlete can, ostensibly, change to a non-athlete if he finds athletics aren’t paying what he wants and do some other job, then it’s not the same situation as over-producing, say, poetry PhDs. If you make too many tractors and can’t sell them, the best you can hope for is to sell them for scrap parts, you can’t turn the tractors into something else. But poetry PhDs are like tractors. Worst-case-scenario: resources have been put into producing an “athlete” who can then do something else if need be. Let’s say he decides to go into middle management. Could resources have been used better? Yes, he could have gone into middle management without any of society’s resources going into sports stuff. But the resources expended on this guy are not totally lost, we can recover some of his human capital.</p>
<p>Now the poetry PhD. Unless he wins the academic lottery, what can he do? Work at a coffee shop. So he has spent ten years of his life and lots of academic resources to produce a person with the human capital of a coffee-shop worker. I’m speaking in broad terms, absolutes rather than tendencies, but simplifying the argument reveals the underlying point. The resources put into this guy are not so easily recoverable and his earning power is less. Get a bunch more guys like him and yes, we are definitely over-producing PhDs.</p>
<p>Real simple test to see whether you are over-producing something: does a surplus exist?</p>
<p>And yes, there are definitely surplus professors (if we count people with PhDs who can’t get a job in academia as unsold professors) galore. Since an unsold athlete can retool himself as something else, the comparison doesn’t hold as well (doesn’t change the main point that we <em>are</em> putting too many resources into sports).</p>
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<p>I agreed with you. </p>
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<p>I disagree with you on this point. There is no “industry” to absorb lit/hume PhDs. How many poetry experts does Google want/need? Zero? </p>
<p>Sure, high school teaching is a possibility, but those jobs are just not that numerous. The situation is NOT similar, IMO.</p>
<p>And don’t forget the age factor. A bball player, who majored in English Lit can be ~22. A PhD could be 30+, still with zero real world experience.</p>
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Why should these universities shut down their programs? [/qutoe]</p>
<p>To me, it’s a moral/ethical issue. If a Uni knows with near certainty that 99% of their students cannot/will not be able to work, they should not be sucking up the prime years of that student’s life. </p>
<p>Law schools are even worse because they charge $200k for the privilege of a JD when most graduates are lucky to get a job earning $60k. (Note that JD’s are mostly lit/hume undergrads who could not find a job at 22.)</p>
<p>Expecting an individual university to “take one for the team” and shut down a program so that the graduates of other programs have less competition isn’t realistic. The only thing that will accomplish that objective is a lack of reasonably qualified applicants. For the least demanding schools, “qualified” may mean “breathing” and “able to pay in cash or sign for loans.” If the situation in a particular program is so dire that it is losing money hand over fist, it might get shut down.</p>
<p>I don’t see a problem with students enrolling in any kind of PhD program they wish to, as long as they aren’t misled about their career prospects. And, I suppose, as long as they aren’t contributing to a potential credit meltdown by using government-backed loans to earn a degree that won’t result in a career that can fund paying back the loans.</p>
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<p>So it seems to me that you’re agreeing that taxpayers should not be funding social science research at all, including economics research. The upshot of that is that most economics research at public universities should be shut down, and we would then certainly have fewer theories about economic “efficiency” than we have now. </p>
<p>One of the gravest ironies in modern-day economics is the fact that many of the economics departments that espouse free-market philosophies that evangelize ‘efficiency’ and counsel against government intervention are themselves housed within public universities. Real Business Cycle Theory, which is the leading exponent of the free-markets oriented and politically conservative “New Classical School” of economics, was itself developed at the University of Minnesota. The so-called “Virginia School of Economics”, a politically conservative branch which revolves around public choice theory; law and economics; and the economic efficiency of various political institutions, it itself centered at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and especially now George Mason University - all public universities. George Mason is now arguably the main locus of academic proponents of the Austrian School of Economics - GMU’s main competitor being Auburn University, which is also a public university. in contrast, relatively few private universities have economics departments that are receptive to Austrian economics. </p>
<p>So if you truly believe that the government should not be funding social science research, then fair enough, you should agree that the research of the aforementioned economics departments should be shut down. The Virginia School of Economics should be shut down. The academic flagships of the Austrian School should be shut down. All of those professors should immediately be forced to spend all of their working hours teaching, with no time for research, or else be fired. After all, they’re on the government payroll, and the government shouldn’t pay for social science research, right?</p>
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<p>Should university economics departments - or at least their research divisions - similarly be spun off as independent entities, to sink or swim on their own?</p>
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<p>Um, actually, it seems to me that high school teaching is quite numerous. Every locality in the country has a high school which obviously has to be staffed with teachers. Why can’t some of those underemployed humanities PhD graduates teach high school? Like I said, if I was a parent, I’d like to send my child to a high school where many of the teachers held PhD’s. </p>
<p>Sure, I agree that it won’t solve the problem entirely. But it would put a substantial dent in it. Let’s face it - the vast majority of current high school teachers are not exactly highly educated. They usually have just bachelor’s degrees from lower-ranked school. </p>
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<p>I’m afraid that I still don’t see the distinction. Let’s face it, somebody who spends his entire life honing his basketball skills but doesn’t make it to the NBA is facing just as much of a marketability problem as that poetry PhD. I agree that the ‘unsold’ athlete can retool himself. But so can the poetry PhD. </p>
<p>In fact, one might argue that the case of the college athlete is actually more egregious than the poetry PhD, particularly in the case of football. Let’s be honest: a lot of college athletes, especially football players, will not only never make the professional ranks, but will leave college with permanently crippling injuries, possibly including CTE that will not manifest itself until decades later. I myself can think of several former college football players who deal with chronic pain. At least the poetry PhD is leaving school with a sound body.</p>
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<p>[Times</a> Higher Education - Google leads search for humanities PhD graduates](<a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=416190]Times”>Google leads search for humanities PhD graduates | Times Higher Education (THE))</p>
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<p>If that’s what you’re truly worried about, then frankly, we have far bigger fish to fry. After all, plenty of institutions encourage people to make economically inefficient decisions all the time. The entire gambling industry, frankly, is predicated upon encouraging people to make poor economic decisions. Yet the government not only allows gambling firms to promote their services to the public, but also the government itself promotes gambling through state lotteries. Similarly, the tobacco industry is allowed to market their products to the public despite the industry itself long ago conceding that their products are deadly and addictive. </p>
<p>A PhD in poetry may not enhance your job prospects much, but hey, at least it won’t give you cancer.</p>
<p>As a parent with lit/hume kids, it’s great to hear that the Times thinks that Google is hiring hume/lit majors, but the article has zero data to support it. The lead character was a self-proclaimed technologist. Another character was Ms. Mayer, a Symbolic Systems major from that Junior University on a Farm, who happened to take some GE credits in Psychology and Philosophy (of Math?). (Symbolic Systems includes Multivariate Calc, Stats, Comp Sci, GameTheory, etc.) Yeah, that’s a real lit/hume grad that Google hired. :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Yeah, but how many job openings for high school English teachers occur every year?</p>