Amid a lively debate about exploitation in academia, McArdle suggests a simple solution: “If we want the job market to get better for academics, then graduate programs have to admit fewer students”:
The “tournament model” of employment, in which a lucky few win the lottery while most people scrape by on very little, is a cruel and unattractive way to run a business. But it is cruelest in glamour industries such as the arts. Growing up on the Upper West Side, before it became the exclusive province of the wealthy, I inevitably met a lot of the people this model destroyed. The worst off were the folks who’d kept getting just a taste of success – a minor part in a Broadway show, a critically acclaimed performance at a second-tier festival. Those folks kept waiting until their late 30s or early 40s for success and security that never arrived. By the time it was clear it never would, they were broke, and trying to start another career at a time when most people are heading into their peak earnings years. And the slow crushing of hope over a process of decades often did something tragic to their souls.
Professional sports also runs on the tournament model, but with one key difference: athletes find out pretty early that they’re not going to make it – early enough to still have a basically normal life doing something else. As the time it takes to get a PhD has stretched out, academia is looking less and less like athletics, and more and more like the theater. The students would be much better off if they were weeded out earlier, in the application process for PhD programs. A substantial fraction – maybe the majority – of PhD programs really shouldn’t exist.
Caplan is supportive. Freddie, not so much:
If there’s one group that shouldn’t throw stones about job prospects, I’d say journalists applies. I still marvel at the way people throw shade at grad students while their career To Do List reads “become big-time successful writer!”
McArdle waxes sympathetic for all of us saps in the academic game, pointing out that the academy is a tournament-style employment field where many take risky gambles but few succeed. She does this from her position in political punditry. I can only assume she’s aware that there’s several thousand desperate youngsters trying to be journalists and bloggers and pundits for every one spot among the elect, so I’m not sure why she doesn’t similarly indict her own profession. I mean, if I was going to decry winner-take-all lottery style employment, I likely wouldn’t do it from the vantage of writing for Bloomberg, you know what I mean?
Megan responds:
[M]ost people don’t spend five or six or eight years just preparing to be eligible to get a job in journalism, and an additional four years or so cycling through post-docs before it becomes clear that that journalism job isn’t going to happen. Nor, when they are six years into their first permanent job, do they have a committee that meets to decide whether to fire them and put them back on the job market, quite possibly with very poor prospects. They don’t have to move to towns in the middle of nowhere or give up relationships because their partners will never be able to find work in the Ozarks. Female journalists do not have to put off starting a family until they’re pushing 40 because it would be insane to reproduce before the tenure committee approves them. The opportunity costs of trying to become a journalist are quite a bit lower than the opportunity costs of trying to become an academic.
(Graph via Jordan Weissmann)
The Dish 