Tenure's not the problem, the problem is that in their academic career, a PHD will produce X new PHDs. Where X is substantially greater than 1. Until this is fixed, it doesn't matter if academic jobs are for life, or are contracts that get renewed (or not) every 8 hours.

This pyramid scheme was fine while demand for PHDs was increasing (By industry, and growth of academia), but now its really not (Industry doesn't want to pay, academia can't grow anymore). Universities must start greatly restricting their grad school programs. Of course, this will absolutely kill the practice of using underpaid grad students to do research... And would have to be offset by public increases to research spending.

I will say that those who can do research probably dont become adjuncts, but continue as a researcher on soft money or go in industry. The more liberal arts, philosophy, turn to adjunct positions.

>I will say that those who can do research probably dont become adjuncts, but continue as a researcher on soft money or go in industry. The more liberal arts, philosophy, turn to adjunct positions.

I know a bunch in engineering and medical fields who are adjuncts. It's not rare. They do get paid a lot better than liberal arts ones, though and often get benefits as well. But they're situation is as precarious - they could get cut any semester.

Seems surprising that such can't find a position outside of academia. I am cog-neuro so a little more bound.

I'm sure they can, but they usually either like what they're doing and are OK with the pay, or have other constraints (do not want to leave the city, etc).

Interesting to note grad students. My university found they could increase income by taking in more international students, but when those same students wanted paid GTA jobs, they had to find a way to pay for it. So they did what all universities do: They made the undergraduates pay for it, by requiring those students take paid "labs" for classes that never before had labs, for no course credit.

Another way is to have the grad students teach, and grade all the courses, so that you don't have to hire any faculty. (Which means no academic jobs for them once they finish grad school.)

As a PhD who never went into academia, I can easily take the pledge not to have any (academic) children.

Alas, while that saves us having X^2 PHDs for each PHD position, it doesn't stop us from having X PHDs for each position.

You aren't training new PHDs - your teachers were, and still are.

All PHds don't need to go into academia. Nothing wrong with having lots of people with advanced degrees.

I'm a tenured professor who is almost certainly on my way out. Academics is a mess.

I don't think getting rid of tenure is the solution. Tenure is almost gone in practice if not on paper, and the effects of this have been detrimental. The current crisis of replicability is a side effect of this. Tenure is often for soft money positions one way or another: the university might guarantee you a position, but what that position looks like is a different issue. If anything tenure needs to be strengthened.

People get hung up on tenure when it's really irrelevant.

Top-heavy administration is a problem, but capping salaries isn't really the solution. What is required is self-governance, where administration is voted on by professors and staff, policies are voted on by professors and staff, etc. Basically, things need to be more democratic.

I also think research funding and public financing is to blame. Basically more state financing has to occur, or more reliable federal funding needs to happen. Grants are underfunding things, and are too unreliable and fickle.

Finally, none of this will change until employers in the private sector change and stop mindlessly demanding degrees, or demanding overly specific degrees. E.g., assuming that you can't do X unless you have a bachelors or master's in X. In some ways this is most important. Employers don't want to train employees, or do research, or even be bothered to discern actual ability or qualifications, so they treat degrees like rubber stamps, and demand that universities do their research for them for free. The bubble exists because the private sector demands the bubble. You could cut government loans, but that doesn't cut demand for the degrees.

Like a lot of things, the crisis in academics is very complex, and a lot of proposed cures are actually worse than the disease.

I think what it is going to amount to eventually probably is some hard decisions as a society whether or not we really value education and research or not (from K-12 all the way to post PhD). Many of these issues are pretty similar to healthcare in this regard, and other public services.