> unable to transition from grad school or postdoc to Professor

But were they all intending to do that in the first place?

Do you think most people who go to graduate school are intending to become academics? Lots of people say that, but it's not what I see in PhD students - many want to go into industry from the start.

In my field- biophysics- and also in the larger bio field, the vast majority of PhD recipients intend to go on to be professors, or research scientists at a national lab (I went the latter route when the former turned out to be too hard), rather than academia. Nearly every single person who graduated in my program went on to do either med school (to be a research MD), or postdoc (path to professor). Now, my school was in SF, so a fair number of people were highly incentivized to start companies (NOT go work for companies- to be founders), but I'd say that's rare and fairly specific to prestigious programs in larger cities/higher profile universities.

I don't know a single person in my program who actually said they wanted to work in industry (other than the company founders).

Perhaps it's different in other fields.

Some limited info for other fields.

For the engineering PhD programs (chemical, biomedical, electrical, and mechanical) I'm familiar with at (what was once termed) Carnegie R1 universities, the split ends up being around 50/50 for academia vs industry track after graduation. For bio at the same schools, I saw the same as you, near unity for academia. Of my engineering PhD cohort, I was the only 1 of 14 who founded a startup.

I think research md is the field to be in. Md/phd. Plenty of jobs always in demand.

I don't think you can really encourage someone to go for a MD/PhD in good conscience now. It takes too long now and is of questionable benefit. I've interacted with many smart MD/PhDs who were pushing 40 and were still not attendings / lacked their own lab. Your career prospects are severely constrained at that point.

You can always go into practice?