Twenty-first century doctorate blues

December 29, 2020. Interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal. Some premiere research institutions are not admitting new doctoral students for this fall. Current candidates are backlogged in their search processes. There appears to be little demand for the number of doctorates in these fields. Perhaps the most disingenuous, self-serving comment came from "Ed Liebow, executive director of the American Anthropological Association, .... who said, “It’s not a question of an overproduction of Ph.D.s. It’s an under-utilization of them in business, government and nonprofit sectors,” he said. “The world needs social scientists.”

Really? As the Journal reports,"At Brown University, a first-year PhD student in humanities or social sciences without external funding costs the school $98,075." There has been a long-running oversupply of doctorates in the humanities and the social science, primarily to justify employing the senior faculty of the schools that admit these students.

The interests of the educational institutions are not aligned with the interests of employers. They act analogously to an auto company that allowed the senior union leaders to decide how many cards to make, how to make them, and what features those cars will contain. And then expecting the customer to buy their product, arrogantly assuming that the union leaders know what is best.

Let's face it. A private liberal arts major has become an expensive proposition, with little value-added in the process of spending $300,000 for four years of courses from faculty an department with 'studies' in their title, or faculty who openly condemn institutional racism, income inequality and capitalism, while all the time being a very part of those institutions, earning high incomes and maximizing their profit and wealth better than most capitalists. Or they look around and see the grotesque oversupply of doctorates in unmarketable fields and soon realize the futility and lack of value of their degree, so they join the ranks of the ill-paid, part-time and adjunct faculty. And all the time, they accept not responsibility for their poor decisions.

My doctorate in business served me and the market very well. In forty years, my annual income increased ten-fold. Over my career I taught almost 15,000 students, preparing them with skills for the real world, namely management, leadership, and a willingness to be held accountability for their actions. In my later years I measure my own productivity and found that my compensation was one-fifth the value of the tuition the students paid, so the university profited greatly from my teaching. And my students graduated with life and career skills.

While a career without a meaningful life may be disappointing, a life without a meaningful career can be tragic. Universities may have once been able to appeal to those with an inherent 'love of learning,' but that is impossible at today's prices and admissions standards. Admission to college -- and soon, perhaps, low or zero tuition -- ha become a right rather than a responsibility. At least twenty percent of the students I taught -- both in public and private universities -- were in college without a good reason to be there other than to respond to the mantra of college presidents who claim a college degree is a passport to success, a guarantee of a meaningful life, regardless of one's major. The oft-quoted positive salary differential of college graduates as compared to high school graduates reflect people who graduate twenty, thirty, even fifty years earlier. There is little reason that this positive differential -- the million-dollar incremental income over forty years -- will be there forty years after todays's student completes college. And with a $300,000 investment, the return is nowhere near what it would be when college cost $10,000 for four years.