> Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.

Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated.

How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school?

What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?

First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards.

As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt.

-------

For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period.

So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.

> there isn't a safe route

That's my point. You want to talk about personal "bad decisions", but what's a "good decision" and why, given that all of the lucrative careers require a series of risks in order to enter the field and become successful in it?

> we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards

Agreed, but I wasn't arguing against that, just against the criticism of individuals for having personal ambition and taking risks.

I think their point is that certain careers are sufficiently important to society and the risks of failure so high that not enough people go into them, so it's a benefit to society to reduce the risk. More teachers, more doctors, more defense attorneys who can afford to work with the downtrodden.

there will of course be a subset of people for whom the loans will be a very good risk, of those people some will fail despite it being a good risk - the unlucky.

there will be a subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk but some of them will succeed - the lucky. It seems unlikely there would be many lucky in such a hotly contested area.

But most of the subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk will fail.