Perhaps part of the reason quit lit is so common is that colleagues who remain recoil in horror when they talk with someone who quit. The quitter is left with no one to talk to but the cold vacuum of internet. For months I would get emails asking if I was "okay". When I would giddily explain that I've never made a better decision than leaving my faculty appointment-- that would be enough to never hear from him/her again.
Academia in its modern, McKinseyfied, perverse form doesn't do much good for anyone/anything besides endowments. It's really hard to admit that after you've sunk a decade into it (and are supposedly lucky enough to be faculty).
For my own sake, I wish there had been a faster way to look behind the curtain... C'est la vie!
So you're blaming the semblance of market reforms for the overproduction of PhDs?
The reason we have too many PhDs, and too many students is the same: our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children.
Without the state artificially funding this no one in their right mind would do it. Our parents demanded it, and we got it. Turns out its a scam.
> our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children.
100% wrong. The vast majority of STEM PhDs are foreign born. The reason we have a ton of PhDs in certain fields is because of how our immigration system works.
TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math).
> The reason we have too many PhDs
We really don't, at least in certain fields. We might have too many PhDs who want to be faculty at top 10 universities. But, at least in CS, we have a pretty significant shortage of PhDs. My first post-PhD job offers were in the 300K - 500K range. I had zero days of work experience outside phd school. That indicates a significant labor shortage; I'm not that special, I promise, but I was the only person in my particular niche on the market they year, and there were 5 companies with deep pockets who wanted my expertise.
Hedge funds and tech monopolies over-paying for talent is, I guess, not the worst thing in the world. But good luck hiring a PhD to be a professor at your small cash-strapped branch campus when you can pay $60K/yr, your governor is constantly shit-talking lazy academics who in fact work 80 hour weeks, and the competing offers in industry are well into the mid six figures with better work/life balance and better job security.
Err... I think you're taking an extremely narrow job market view of a PhD... ie., one which is actually useful for a job market.
Sure, in some research-driven and high-complexity industrial areas there's a very severe shortage of talent in general. You don't get programmers being paid 200k without a real-terms shortage, let alone programmers with PhDs in, eg., algorithmic research.
My point was about the university system, as a closed system. That is what the OP comment is talking about.
The only use of a cultural criticsm PhD is a job teaching that subject. There aren't any.
Last time I checked there were TWO job openings in the entirety of the united kingdom for a postdoc job requiring a philosophy PhD.
The university is, at this point, just a scam. For almost all students. The 1-5% who get some use out of it, and who always got some use out of it, should continue to go.
>> TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math).
But, tbh, this isn't even about fields, it's about spending 5 years developing hard-to-find research skills vs. spending 5 years indulging one's curiosity/taste.
CS has its own version of "useless phd in Great Books/crit theory", and I've worked with philosophy PhDs who wrote more code for their dissertation than the average CS phd student.
People are getting into $100k+ debt, and loosing out $100ks+ on the opportunity cost of this employment.
We can take the "rational preference" of the postgrad student as perfectly well informed of this, or we can admit it's a scam.
It's a scam. There is no job for them. They'd be happier elsewhere, being independent.
They're being played around with for years of their life, being missold a future, and having their passion exploited.
The "rot" isnt in the marketization of the university where (heaven forfend) students demand things of their professors.
The rot is in their professors themselves (who know the game and lie about it), the government which supplies their marks (ie. satisifies their voters) and the aspirational middle class parents who demand their special little ones get $100k+ loans against their future for nonesense and bullshit.
PhDs come with a living wage stipend and 100% tuition.
I've never heard of anyone going in to debt to get a phd. If you're paying for your phd with borrowed money, you made a really huge wrong turn.
As for the rest... sorry you had a bad experience. To all future readers: don't do a phd for the money, and during your phd, make sure you develop marketable skills. By your mid 20s, you should have realized that you are responsible for your own career.
> The rot is in their professors themselves
yeah, those evil professors, working 2x the hours I work for 1/5th of the money /s
No one owes you anything. University -- especially phd school -- is a place where you can draw on experts and resources to develop marketable skills. Or you can not. You're paying for access, not for guaranteed outcomes.
It's not just about phds. Undergraduate education is significantly compromised because universities literally focus on customer service metrics, and are directed by the business school.
At prestigious institutions this is literally a revolving door with mckinsey which can be followed through key appointments but I was using the word to make a more abstract illusion.
Are you sure its customer service metrics and not the oversupply of students? Are you sure it isnt that students who couldnt complete an entrance exam 30yrs ago are being given $50k - $100k loans to get a degree they derive no value from?
The average IQ of an undergrad 30 years ago was over 120, now it is 105.
University doesn't "educate" you. At best it trains you in a discipline that you have to, on arrival, have an aptitude for. The (pseudo-)educational experience isnt transformative, it doesn't take a person who cannot learn complex topics independently and turn them into a person who can. It facilitates.
That means c. 10% of the current population of students are actually suitable for university. Everything else is a bubble created by "aspirational" parents demanding $100k loans for their children.
you speak as if it has to be either or.. from the inside looking out, I can say its both. To deny that the modern (US) university is driven by customer satisfaction and B-school world views is hard to defend if you know how universities function. To say that the financial aid market and sheer number of mediocre Unis teaching mediocre students doesn't perpetuate the institution is also going to be hard to defend. But they are not independent and certainly not contradictory.
If there was no demand, there would be no market.. and what the demand is for is not education but a diploma. And the larger markets insist of college degrees for the most mediocre of jobs, and have off-loaded training to be subsidized, ultimately by the students getting a degree (and then complain because they are not being 'taught' skills necessary for the workplace).
If this is the case, (and I'm not disagreeing outright) I think the fault lies with primary Ed, and the oft true perception that education is unnecessary because the stamp of intelligence can be bought. Cough, kushner, cough.
The state funds it less now than they did in my parent's day. Debt is not state funding.
This is an absurd take for other reasons too, though. "Past generations = dumb" is silly wishful thinking, as is "bad results indicate malice or a scam". The world changes faster than people update their priors, so this sort of wrongful optimization is a common failing that we should really introspect about more deeply. Education level alone was more important in the past, and then everyone realized this and "competed" themselves into a new, overall-worse, equilibrium.
That happens EVERYWHERE so if you're upset about it you need to both push for flexible, adaptable systems, and continuous rapid feedback loops.
For Chinese and Indians, it takes decades to get green card in EB-3, EB-2 categories. They can just do Ph.D, and get green card in O-1 and EB-1 categories. If one is 21, they can just come here for Ph.D in biology somewhere by the age of 25. Spend another three years PostDoc, while getting green card.
You may ask, isn't it a waste of time going through this rigamole? Of course, it is a waste of time for the super brilliant people; however, majority of them are like average you and me.
We graduate an order of magnitude more PhDs than anyone has a real use for.
Even ignoring arts and humanities PhDs which are obvious cases, in fields like biology a newly minted average PhD has roughly zero people competing for them. They’ll be lucky to find a job even close to their field. You have biology PhDs working as Clinical Research Associates, for heaven’s sake.
As someone with a PhD who works in industry, that’s certainly not what I meant.
There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. We can argue about the magnitude of the oversupply, but the reasonable range of discussion is between “huge” and “gigantic”.
There is almost no competition to hire them, as far as I can see.
Maybe top-flight CS PhDs from Stanford, I’d believe that. But your average biology or chemistry PhD? Every single one of them that I know struggled mightily in the job market.
So, I left a tenured position. The linked piece resonates with me.
I'm actually not so sure it's that common relative to the number of people who actually leave. After I left my position I started learning about other tenured faculty who left their positions also, some of whom I respected quite a bit and who I never imagined would have any reason to leave their position. One place interviewed me for a faculty position later, the primary problem being that they had multiple tenured faculty leave and had holes to fill. None of these individuals who left their positions wrote about it.
I do think you're right in the sense that it's this thing that no one knows what to do with. You've built up these relationships, your colleagues are all in academics, and many of them are happy. So they don't understand. You're kind of a glitch in the matrix, and no one knows how to approach it because it's not supposed to happen. I've been told everything from that I'm a total badass to crazy and insane. I myself haven't figured out which is more accurate yet. Maybe both.
The fact that these experiences compel some kind of cathartic explanation speaks volumes about the problems in academics though. It's like there's the commonly agreed-upon story in academics, the face being presented, and then there's reality, and they don't line up, so people just kind of pretend the glitches don't exist.
Not too long ago on HN there was a blog piece going through one person's (an economist?) exploration of whether or not biomedical research was in crisis. (I've tried to find it but can't.) It was frustrating to me because so much of what they detailed was true, but in the end they just decided something like "oh well, it's obvious this field is in crisis, but research is getting done in the end so it doesn't matter." It's like this ship in flames, where people are burning and there's emergency sirens going off, and as long as the individuals in power are happy, and there's a good narrative being presented to the public, with results in the media to talk about, no one cares.
I just can't tell where this is headed: if the ship is going to finally sink so far that it becomes something you can't hide, or if it's just going to keep on like this indefinitely, or if it's going to get fixed, or what. Universities have survived much worse than current circumstances, so it seems implausible to me anything will fundamentally change.
There's a substantial correlation between the behavior of academia and that of a cult. In my field of fundamental physics, we are so specialized that when people leave, they essentially never return. If conditions were to change in such a way as to make it possible for people to flow back and forth between serious research and the real world, the culture would normalize.
The reason that doesn't happen, though, is that academia is a lot like professional athletics. Whether most of the participants know it or not, they're doing it for some combination of love-of-the-field and a lottery ticket. We're all willing to tolerate sub-standard working conditions precisely because we absolutely love our field and are willing to do almost anything to stay in.
I've left lots of money on the table in order to remain in physics as long as I have because the work is, when it is good, so very fulfilling. Unfortunately, I'm about to leave because some of the structure, built for good-hearted reasons but presently suffering colliding dependencies, now substantially impedes my colleagues and me from getting good science done. I know that when I leave, I essentially cannot come back. There will be another younger, smarter ISL waiting to fill my position the moment I'm gone.
Imo it will boil down to economics and the undergrads. Universities have survived a very long time, but they used to sell education not prestige. Prestige is an asset that can rapidly lose value: ask MIT-bioscience donor Jeffery Epstein ;P. It's humourous to watch them scramble to get classes going because if a year of young people just move on without universities, the jig is up. The admissions scandal should have already done it :/....
In college it seems like unless you have a really good GPA and have parents or yourself to be independently wealthy the best advice for academia or even getting a degree is getting out as fast as you can for Computer Science. For me it took me six years when I traded money for time at Community College.
Also, bumping up your own earnings by a significant multiplier is probably easier if you bypass getting a Masters Degree and just start doing interview prep. Whats even better is hitting multiple multipliers. I was in a Computer lab where someone got an offer letter from Facebook which was extremely high and they IPOed. Now I think he is doing some kind of javascript style hosting stuff but I think he is independently wealthy.
I believe that the poster means that the University system (in the US at least) has been overtaken by "management theory" over the past four decades or so. This is the same theory prominent in business schools / MBA programs. As a consequence we see the vast expansion of academic bureaucracy, completely different metrics for "success," and an attitude towards students that treats them as customers rather than pupils.
It's worth noting that the core aspects of academia have been either pushed out or dramatically altered. Universities might be flush with cash, but they do not pay their teachers (it's no coincidence that adjunctification of the system begins with the management theory era). Professors are left to fight for resources that are being spent elsewhere: on sustaining a much larger bureaucracy (this or that "provost"), or on ancillary services like college sports or other customer-focussed amenities.
I want to believe this won't be sustainable but given the demand for college increasing every year it looks like it will continue until something cracks.
University governance has been aligned by dollars to departments like the business school, which literally didn't exist just a few decades ago. Provost's plan using dollars as the metric of value. These changes have completely changed what the word university means, although these institutions have the same names.
Academia in its modern, McKinseyfied, perverse form doesn't do much good for anyone/anything besides endowments. It's really hard to admit that after you've sunk a decade into it (and are supposedly lucky enough to be faculty).
For my own sake, I wish there had been a faster way to look behind the curtain... C'est la vie!