Overproducing PhDs seems to be a necessary aspect of how research is conducted in the current university. Most serious lines of work are pursued by a PhD student or Postdoc and advised by a Professor. They need a critical mass of PhD students which is definitely a much larger number than 1 per professorship. This is especially true in fields where industry jobs aren't readily available.

I think that's a huge part of the problem though - we've made it so the only way we can get research done is by training a new researcher - even though there's already plenty of trained researchers who are struggling to find a decent job.

I'm suggesting that we re-direct some of the funding for training PhD students into funding for postdoctoral positions (via either fellowships or research grants). Professors would still get their research team, but rather than consisting mostly of untrained PhD students, they'd have a smaller, but more effective team of trained researchers.

Isn't that the case simply because professors are expected to be highly productive, to the extent where it is not possible to meet the bar without offloading the work to students and switching to a full-time manager?

> I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but don't think your solution is a good way forward - immediately after undergrad is way too early to be evaluating research potential and would just shift the hyper competitiveness earlier.

Immediately after undergrad is how it used to work in the golden days of science, more or less.

If the competitiveness is the problem maybe tenure should be a lottery that you enter once at a fixed stage, preferably before you're expected to start publishing in journals.

I think we had a far smaller number of people going to university back in the "golden days of science" - not sure you can really compare.

A tenure lottery seems like an extreme option - there has to be a middle ground between what we have now and something entirely random.

The system that produces PhDs isn’t that bad. It is a good way to create research portfolio useful for employment in private sector. We need to pay less attention to the title though - this is not a distinguishing achievement for life.

Correct, it's not a laurel to rest on.

The act of producing a doctoral dissertation usually leaves something of a mark on one's outlook, skills, etc. I claim it is a _distinguishable_ achievement for life.

Yet the principle of pursuing knowledge is not for pecuniary interests. So your judgment demonstrates the temporal shift of the Western University towards rubber stamping people’s vocational aptitude. This leads to corruption, of course.