1/Today in @bopinion, I discuss why America has been producing too many PhDs in recent years, and what we need to do to solve the

2/First of all, many people don't realize just how many PhDs we produce! More than almost any other rich country.
3/And we've kept ramping this number up and up.
4/But the problem begins when PhDs start looking for (usually academic) jobs.

https://t.co/M8hhoap12d
5/The U.S. built a ton of universities and then we stopped.

Professors have tenure.

That means there are just going to be fewer new tenure-track jobs than before. Everyone in academia already knows this well.
6/Here's the market for history professors.

https://t.co/sAwByQikS0
7/Here's the market for anthropology professors.

https://t.co/APb5NbB6Np
8/Here's the market for English and foreign-language professors.

https://t.co/rzzuFsoGCT
9/Now, to make matters worse, college enrollment has been flatlining. Even before COVID-19 came along and kicked colleges' butt.

https://t.co/nsbwhqaoYp
10/And colleges, under huge pressures to cut costs, have switched from tenure-track faculty to adjuncts and lecturers.
11/The life of many PhDs after graduation has thus become "adjunctopia" -- or more accurately, Adjunct Hell. Desperately hanging on year after year, hoping for that big break that never comes.

https://t.co/z9GjZkmAhB
12/Of course, PhDs can go into the private sector. BUT, many doctoral advisors push PhD students toward academia. And grad school culture stigmatizes private-sector jobs as failure...
13/Plus, while STEM PhDs and some social science PhDs can often find private-sector jobs in their fields, many humanities and social science fields don't have good private-sector analogs.

This will lead to underemployment and resentment.
14/And social unrest really is a threat here. Dashed expectations can lead to deep rage at the system. And who better equipped to overthrow the system than a bunch of brilliant underemployed people?

https://t.co/HEp0Hf5Egs
15/Some historians, like @Peter_Turchin, have warned that "elite overproduction" is a recipe for unrest.

https://t.co/23VstFoiAd
16/And the insanely shitty job market for PhDs is taking a massive psychological toll.

https://t.co/Mmuovpg3u5
17/So what do we do about this?

For STEM PhDs, we can have the government employ more. A massive expansion of federal research funding is in the works. We should pass @RoKhanna's Endless Frontier Act.

https://t.co/4Nd91Fcejr
18/But for many humanities and social science fields, a big federal bailout simply isn't in the cards. Nor is the private sector prepared to employ ever-increasing humanities and social science PhDs without severe underemployment.

We need to cut back on production.
19/Some universities are already cutting back on production in these fields.

This will be painful but necessary.

https://t.co/iK92UoN6Zd
20/We need a PhD production system that is more in line with new economic realities -- flat or declining college enrollment, cost-cutting, and the end of the 20th century college building boom.

(end)

https://t.co/o36CkgHRlU

More from We need 3 million vaccinations a day 🐇

"Competitive wokeness", like "virtue signaling" and "preference falsification", seems to be something people on the right say in order to pretend that people on the left don't really believe what they claim to believe.


Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.

Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.

A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side.

It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.

"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real.

"Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team.

Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.
1/I'm thinking about the end of Apu in the context of the national debates on immigration and diversity.


2/Apu's presence in Springfield represented a basic reality of America in the late 20th and early 21st century: the presence of nonwhite immigrants.

3/As Tomas Jimenez writes in "The Other Side of Assimilation", for my generation, immigrants from India, China, Mexico, and many other countries aren't strange or foreign. On the contrary, they're a

4/But that America I grew up with is fundamentally ephemeral. The kids of immigrants don't retain their parents' culture. They merge into the local culture (and, as Jimenez documents, the local culture changes to reflect their influence).

5/Simpsons character don't change. But real people, and real communities, do. So a character who once represented the diversity that immigrants brought to American towns now represents a stereotype of Indian-Americans as "permanent foreigners".
When Republicans started to believe in racial bloc voting - when they stopped believing that nonwhite people could ever be persuaded to vote Republican - they started to see immigration as an invasion.

This explains why immigration is now at the center of partisan conflict.


Of course, the belief in ethnic bloc voting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When a slight Dem tilt among Hispanics and Asians caused the GOP to turn against them, Hispanics and Asians shifted more toward the Dems. Etc. etc. A self-reinforcing cycle.

Bush's 2006 amnesty attempt, and the 2013 intra-GOP fight over immigration reform, were two moments when the GOP could have turned back to the approach of Reagan, and courted Hispanics and Asians.

But they decided against this, and...here we are.

What will disrupt this bad equilibrium, and save American politics from being an eternal race war?

Either:
A) More white voters will grow disgusted with the GOP approach and defect, or
B) The GOP will find some non-immigration-related issues to attract more Hispanics and Asians.

As long as both parties see elections in terms of racial bloc voting - where the only way to win is to increase turnout among your own racial blocs or suppress turnout by the other party's racial blocs - American politics will not improve, and the country will decline.

(end)

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