I didn't say that there aren't jobs that require a PhD (even ones with a lot of openings and great pay). I said "you probably shouldn't get a PhD."

I feel that it would be a great service to prospective students everywhere if colleges (or the government) tracked outcomes and reported on them.

Something like "89% of history PhDs are employed in these salary bands (list them with percentages), and 3% are employed in the profession associated with their PhD".

It is not uncommon for departments to provide placement information for the graduate students that have completed their program. I've never seen salary information though. No one goes into academia for the money.

The University of Michigan has a really nice online tool:

https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDocto...

According to that 22% of history grad students from 2015-2020 got tenure track positions. That's quite a crapshoot for investing 5+ years in a career path. And of course you could fall off the tenure track. And Michigan has a top history program.

I'm not arguing that student's don't stand to benefit from this sort of reporting, but...

I bet most history departments would tell you that they are not interested in the commercial success of their PhDs. That's not the purpose of their institution or in alignment with the academic tradition.

Exactly. I've seen this rationalization so much. It's like practically outrage at the mere suggestion that education should have some kind of functional purpose outside of itself.

I somehow get a feeling that if the prospects were actually good in any sense, colleges would advertise them whenever they had the chance (is there even reliable information about how salaries are distributed? Not just means and standard deviations).

I got an undergraduate degree that has 0% unemployment rate with good salaires because there are so few graduates, but for a PhD (that I was thinking of getting) there is no guarantee that even the places where I would work are good enough in terms of research or teaching.

I seem to recall during the Obama administration they we trying to require this but I think the colleges lobbied to water it down.

I'm in an R&D job as well. I agree that a PhD is expected, but I disagree that it's necessary. Most R&D work is so specialized that PhDs are not much closer to it than MS graduates, PhD dropouts, or just people with relevant work experience. Hiring is much easier if you relax the PhD requirement.