Bret Devereaux

They assumed that because it was true in the job market they remembered. But that job market is dead. Super dead. Cadaverrific. 6/25

The other comment I've seen is the assumption that, on a year-to-year comparison that the bad years now aren't that much worse than the bad years then or that 2021 isn't meaningfully worse than 2012 was. 7/25

The issue with that is that this is a stocks-and-flows problem. Each year that the number of new PhDs is much higher than the number of jobs, the job market is essentially picking up job-debt, because those PhDs do not go away or poof out of existence. 8/25

Some handful of them, each year, give up and do something else. Of the people I know in that category, very few of them are happy about it. Universities and sometimes departments like to say nice things about alt-ac, but fairly few people in alt-ac WANT to be. 9/25

It's not *none* mind you, some people thrive in alt-ac jobs...but there's a lot of bitterness and broken dreams in alt-ac too, especially since many supposedly alt-ac jobs don't even remotely require a PhD. They're not alt-ac jobs, they're just jobs. 10/25

I missed whatever Discourse spawned this, but I find the idea that PhD programs should prepare students for alt-ac jobs very frustrating. A PhD is meant to prepare you for an academic career. It's vocational training.

If someone decides they can't or don't want to be a plumber halfway through plumbing school, no one tells them to finish and look for "alt-plumbing" jobs and then fault the community college for not providing sufficient alt-plumbing options. They just quit and do something else.

The difference, I suppose, is that success in academia is tied up with personal identity in ways that other jobs aren't.