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System wastes Ph.D. brainpower

... Roughly 45,000 new Ph.D.s will be graduating this year, double the number from 35 years ago. Almost all believe they will turn their long, underpaid pursuit of truth into professorships - the tenured kind in which they can't be fired and can research what they spent five or more years studying. But universities, despite dangling tenured professorships like carrots to their graduate students, haven't doubled their tenure-track hiring. So, particularly in the humanities, new graduates such as Paul who want to stay in academia face years of part-time, benefitless "adjunct" positions in which they try to teach and research despite having no job security and working other jobs to pay the rent.

The world has worse tragedies than Ph.D.s driving buses. Still, this mismatch between professorships available and Ph.D.s granted is a colossal waste of brainpower sorely needed elsewhere. Universities that glut the doctorate market bear much responsibility for the situation. But graduate students aren't blameless.

These men and women have chosen to spend years training for jobs that don't exist by accruing knowledge no one will pay for. The most devoted to their passion may decide that's all right. But the "starving Ph.D." phenomenon is here to stay. Even the ivory tower can't save anyone from that reality. ...