It's also worth pointing out that this is pretty necessary from the lab's point of view, especially in some of the more high-end labs: PIs (in my experience, anyway) are frequently spending >90% of their time just writing grant proposals and dealing with the funding side of things.
There's very little time for them to do anything besides the funding circuit, and so the actual research part falls to graduate students and postdocs: People who obviously have less experience as professional researchers (and thus many more of them are required).
Universities decide this ratio. It's self contained. We can either have a different ratio, the current issues, or an exponential professor crisis that'd make brontitall look like childsplay
I don't think this is true at all. Why do PhD (4-6yrs+), when a MS is enough to find a job and get an H1-B/GC ??
This fits my personal experience as well. All of the foreign students I know who did MS's in the US were very wealthy, whereas only some of the foreign students doing PhDs were.
To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust.
The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 2017/18, the EPSRC has an 'indicative fee level' of £4,195 (and a national mimum stipend of £14,553 paid to the student) [1].
> Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
Not really: banks do not consider the stipend to be a salary, so when assesing loans treat PhD students as if they had no income at all.
I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs who can't find academic jobs are that
1. Education is becoming more universally accessible and overall education is increasing. This causes a larger proportion of the population to be interested in getting PhDs and also to be qualified (academically) to do so. Similarly, to stand out in the job market, some people may be getting PhDs to differentiate themselves from people with masters/bachelors (or equivalents), since there are so many people with these degrees now.
2. A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of professors: a graduate student will work for 10-25% of a professor's salary, and without tenure. Maintaining this ratio requires having many more graduate students than professors, but doesn't give those graduate students anywhere to go when they graduate.
3. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as preparation for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so that they could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-paying job. I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.
4. Research spending hasn't caught up with the increasing number of PhDs.
5. Because of the research boom in the post world-war period (this occurred in the US as well), most people getting academic jobs around then were around the same age. Many of these people haven't retired yet, and they may subconsciously have introduced a new part of academic culture: you need to be old before you get a professorship.
6. Many students graduate with PhDs but without having done significant enough research to merit continuing in academia. This could have a variety of causes: publish or perish, admitting unqualified/unmotivated candidates, the academic "low-hanging fruit" getting harder to research with time.