An interview with Instapundit on his new book
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, Academia, winter is still coming for you:
…a lot of people would like to be research professors: no boring students, job security, lots of conferences, prestige, research! (This is what the profession looks like to 22 year olds who have spent all their lives in school environments and have been trained to see professors as authority figures and mentors.) Sprinkle in student loan programs, the natural ambition of colleges to become universities and small universities to become big ones, and there are a lot of forces pushing academia to expand. The result is one of the more cruel and exploitative workplaces in the United States today. While the lot of day laborers and poultry plant employees is worse still, they at least haven’t spent a decade of their lives preparing for jobs that they are then denied.
This system is now coming undone. There aren’t many jobs for entry level doctoral grads, and even fewer for tenure track. Oversupply pushes wages down and keeps desperate hangers-on thronging around looking for adjunct positions. Older professors who were once obliged to retire at 65 now keep teaching. The result is a huge jobs crush.
To resolve the oversupply, we’re going to have to close down many PhD-generating graduate programs and shrink most others. The result will be that demand for professors in the affected field will shrink even more. With fewer grad students to teach, most schools will not need the large tenured faculties they have today, and tenure positions will shrink more still. That in turn should lead to another round of grad school shrinking—even fewer openings as more universities cut department size to adjust to the shrinkage of grad school programs—until at some point the process reaches an equilibrium.
And that point could come sooner than later.
I’d also like to see more lawsuits like this. As that report on the nation’s educational system said almost a third of a century ago, if a foreign power had imposed it on us, we’d consider it an act of war, but we did it to ourselves. Finally, it’s starting to come undone.
There’s also the lower need for lower end school teachers as more coursework moves online to a nationwide lecture, local discussion lead model for mid tier college courses and exclusively online for lower tier courses.
The basic problem is these students didn’t bother to look at what the job market actually is for Ph.D.’s in different fields. As I noted before I always enjoyed astronomy and assumed I would get my Ph.D. in Astronomy, but when I did research on the job market for Astronomers I found it was just a quick trip to the unemployment office, so I switched to Business Administration. Friends I know who stuck it out and got their Ph.D. in Astronomy ended up as High School science teachers, after retraining to get their teaching credentials, since the number of college level positions is so limited in those fields. The same is true of many other of the sciences which is why I find the continual focus on driving students to STEM so amusing. All its doing is contributing to the number of unemployed Ph.D.s. If you want students to study STEM fields then creating good paying jobs for them – i.e. demand.
By contrast there are always positions for business Ph.D.’s and always seems to be a shortage of them. Often schools have to settle for instructors with only Masters Degrees and teaching experience because they are unable to attract a Ph.D. In fact the shortage of Business Ph.D.’s is so severe that the group that accredits business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, has a special program to retrain individuals with non-business Ph.D.’s to fill the shortage.
http://www.aacsb.edu/BridgetoBusiness/about.asp
Maybe some of those unemployed Ph.D.’s in the sciences should think about correcting their bad career choices. Dr. Deming is a good example that this is not a new problem. He did his Doctorate in Mathematical Physics in Quantum Theory in 1928 at Yale but ended up going to industry (Bell Labs) when he couldn’t find work in academia, then switched to teaching/lecturing in business administration.
Again, its about being rational about your career plans and doing your market research. Sure its fun to write about rockets and study history, but you have to pay the bills first, something those student pursuing Ph.D.’s in saturated fields seem to have forgotten and now they are blaming the schools for misleading them.
Both of my daughters are pursuing degrees in business fields and are already employed by a major bank that is paying their tuition for them. When they graduate they won’t have a dime in student loans to repay and are looking to stay on the same path with a goals of getting Ph.D.’s in business. Given the shortage they will probably have multiple job offers on graduation.
BTW I still enjoy astronomy, I have both a 120mm Meade refactor and a 8″ Springfield.
I know we disagree on things political, sometimes, but I am being sincere here.
Having gone the STEM track — engineering, actually — I know what is taught to engineers and what engineers do. And yes, the actual practice of engineering is sometimes prosaic like ordering the right stuff from the Grainger catalog and learning a CAD package that you can do circuit layouts. And learning how to rub two words together to write a report.
But what do they teach you in a business degree, and what do you end up doing with such a degree? I mean, isn’t business administration kind of like software development only you organize networks of . . . people?
Gee, where do I start.
You learn the principles of accounting, financial, managerial and tax accounting. How to understand and use financial statements, how to use accounting information to make rational business decisions, basic microeconomics, macroeconomics, and managerial economics, finance strategies, capital asset pricing models, managing ROI, global finance strategies, financial analysis, exchange pricing, how to identify, segment and target markets, conducting market research, determining markets needs, promote products successfully to markets, new product development systems, value chain management, develop pricing strategies, design and manage distributional systems, design and manage supply chain logistics, outsourcing and insourcing, organizational structure, organizational behavior, designing and managing compensation systems, motivating workers, work design and performance management, managing and planning workforce needs including training, managing global workforce needs. difference management models, chains of command and spans of command, designing production flow, different production models, quality control, designing, implementing and managing business models, Business strategy at both the corporate level as well as business unit level, leadership models, developing leaders.
As to who hires business graduates? Anyone who wants their business to be better managed and more successful. Also the majority of the business functions above are not easily outsourced like manufacturing and engineering is because country specific knowledge is needed. A Chinese firm may design computers and software, but when they sell them in the U.S. they will hire an American advertising agency and work through American retailing outlets.
And sharp students recognize this. Why get an engineering degree when you will be competing with an engineer in India will to work for a tenth of the salary when you may get a degree in accounting and make a lot of money working for a firm in the U.S. keeping track of the profits the firm is making by importing software from India?
And yes, you could probably learn those principles “on the job”, but then the same is true for engineering. But firms prefer to hire those with a basic level of knowledge which is why business degrees are in such demand.