What you're forgetting is that if there are a ton of hungry PhD's running around looking for work where your Joe-Master's Degree or Jim-Bachelor's Degrees are looking for work, chances are they may displace quite a few of those guys if they look to enter the standard work force. Not because a PhD makes one inherently better, but because it seems like so many employers look at paper qualifications, and actually a lot of PhD's did work REALLY HARD to get their PhD...so at least they've shown they can work really hard on something and come up with a contribution.
Also, government budget cuts never seem to affect military research, where a TON of research dollars stems from. I have a feeling that the government will get its house in order without massive research spending cuts.
Also, my guess is that academic jobs don't influence the earning premiums that much... the pay is quite low, unless you really reach the top
I wonder what this number would be like if you cut the number of academic jobs in half. Because that's what I see happening in the future.
I mean, I don't want to say the people on HN are smarter than the rest of the world but we do tend to spot trends earlier only because of the collaborative nature of the site and that people here actually evaluate the world around them. Which means societal trends can become apparent here before the rest of the world realizes they're going on.
So I think it's instructional that we see a "Higher Education is broken" item about every couple of days. In the years to come I suspect we'll see a lot more competition from lower priced options that provide education using online tools and who don't need armies of research fellows and "postdocs". Combine that with Governments making serious budget cuts and I think you'll see the demand for PhD's plummet.