> “Stipends, insurance and the five-year funding guarantee all remain in place for students making satisfactory academic progress,” Colla wrote. “Advising relationships, qualifying exams, degree requirements and teaching and research appointments will continue as planned.”
If you, dear xhevahir, wanted to buy a math phd attempt and had the chops, you could self-fund the training, courses, and examinations of a Math PhD, and it'd be up to your own abilities to finish.
But nobody, nowhere, would (should!) stop you because "the jobs" aren't there. You could do it because you can find the money to do it.
Asking universities to set their intake numbers according to the perceived demand 5+ years down the road (let alone the coursework + specialization of those PhDs)? Madness - they'd effectively be planning the whole economy at that point.
The reality is that a PhD means just about nothing these days. Speaking as someone with a PhD (very thankful I graduated before LLMs ruined academic publishing completely), I’d like to see a bit more meaning to the degree.
Moreover, basically no one wants to stay in academia anymore because the pay is laughable and the prestige isn’t what it once was thanks to the last political decade. Salaries need to increase.
Does scarcity convey meaning?
I’m asking earnestly as I know nothing about PhD programs, holding a worthless bachelor’s degree from a tiny liberal arts college myself (still changed my life for the better and wouldn’t do any differently again but I digress.)
Whoever makes these decisions should get admitted to the drama school!
""" Beilock announced at the meeting that the College is “working to reduce Dartmouth’s spending by $50 million,” in order to increase faculty and staff salaries “especially if and when inflation continues to rise,” according to a transcript of her speech published on the Office of the President’s website. """
Uh huh. Increase staff salaries. That'll fix things.
Discretionary spending largely aligns with what the organization is supposed to do. A university can choose how much effort it puts on educating the students, because education is discretionary. Mandatory spending, on the other hand, is what the organization must do, due to external reasons or earlier commitments. Because mandatory spending is beyond the direct control of the organization, it tends to bloat.
The biggest sources of administrative bloat seem to be regulations, student expectations, and running a residential campus. None of which are particularly easy to change.
There is a special case of the poor adjunct faculty people, who are not paid well at all. They, in fact, need more support than the other staff.
(Source: I'm a retired, soft money, academic.)
> Everybody's attacking this but when have graduate school programs ever been responsive to the job market? They're constantly minting more PhDs, MBAs, and LLBs than the professions can absorb; even MDs have begun to find it hard to get a good return on their investments. Maybe getting out of that business is the responsible thing to do?
Not sure how this is an unreasonable take