You must have enjoyed the DaVinci Code, judging from your nonsensical attempt at a flame. I'm very sorry for you.
Look: the book has no character development, bad dialogue, and not much plot. On top of that, too many of the chapters end with cliff-hangers &mdash this plot device gets old pretty fast. The only worthwhile thing was the back story, and I don't think that that was particularly well-presented, either.
That is, I'm saying that it's badly enough written to not really qualify as a book. Maybe as an outline or a rough draft of a screenplay or something else, but not a book.
As Dorothy Parker once said (about another book), "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
(Besides, you referred to my post as "nonsensical". If you don't want nonsense, you shouldn't be reading Slashdot.)
I think the conventional wisdom about people about to retire was right, but then a few things happened in the early 90s to screw things up:
Mandatory retirement ages went away, so many retirements came later than expected.
The Soviet Union collapsed, leaving lots of very talented scientists and engineers without reasonably paying work.
Tiananmen Square happened, and the US responded by changing immigration law somewhat; I think they allowed Chinese students currently in the US to remain there, instead of requiring them to return to China.
There was a recession in many parts of the US, which meant that when some people retired, they were not replaced -- their positions just disappeared.
There were probably other factors (like other changes in US immigration law) which also had an effect, but they are harder to document (and also more likely to start flame wars, hence omitted).
So the job market got tighter because of the recession, there weren't as many positions as expected because retirements were delayed, and the market was flooded with top-quality people because of problems in the former Soviet Union and China. Boom: no academic jobs.
Regarding the growth rate of new PhDs, I think the relevant questions are: how many of them are US citizens or permanent residents? How many of them want academic jobs? And conversely, how many non-academic jobs expect PhDs? Has this number increased significantly, either for good reasons or because of degree-inflation in job requirements?
1. Even having free tuition doesn't "nullify the cost/reward argument": you need to take into account the wages you would have earned had you been employed full-time instead of being in school. (This is probably more of an issue for PhD candidates, since they're typically in school longer than those pursuing an MS, and it is also probably more of an issue for people who want to enter academic careers in which the salaries are lower than in industry, especially since some people can get a job as an "engineer" at a computer company with a BA and make more than lots of professors. It could still be an issue for you, though: you need to run the numbers.)
2. How do you know that your experience was typical? It can be a big mistake to generalize from one data point. Maybe your department is at one extreme, and the papers and studies are accurate. Here's a different example: I teach in a math department at a public university, and about 70% of our new PhD students are from the US. Should I generalize from my observations? Maybe we should just trust the NSF on this one...
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You must have enjoyed the DaVinci Code, judging from your nonsensical attempt at a flame. I'm very sorry for you.
Look: the book has no character development, bad dialogue, and not much plot. On top of that, too many of the chapters end with cliff-hangers &mdash this plot device gets old pretty fast. The only worthwhile thing was the back story, and I don't think that that was particularly well-presented, either.
That is, I'm saying that it's badly enough written to not really qualify as a book. Maybe as an outline or a rough draft of a screenplay or something else, but not a book.
As Dorothy Parker once said (about another book), "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
(Besides, you referred to my post as "nonsensical". If you don't want nonsense, you shouldn't be reading Slashdot.)
It's a book for people who don't read books
written by a person who doesn't write books.
So the job market got tighter because of the recession, there weren't as many positions as expected because retirements were delayed, and the market was flooded with top-quality people because of problems in the former Soviet Union and China. Boom: no academic jobs.
Regarding the growth rate of new PhDs, I think the relevant questions are: how many of them are US citizens or permanent residents? How many of them want academic jobs? And conversely, how many non-academic jobs expect PhDs? Has this number increased significantly, either for good reasons or because of degree-inflation in job requirements?
Two comments:
1. Even having free tuition doesn't "nullify the cost/reward argument": you need to take into account the wages you would have earned had you been employed full-time instead of being in school. (This is probably more of an issue for PhD candidates, since they're typically in school longer than those pursuing an MS, and it is also probably more of an issue for people who want to enter academic careers in which the salaries are lower than in industry, especially since some people can get a job as an "engineer" at a computer company with a BA and make more than lots of professors. It could still be an issue for you, though: you need to run the numbers.)
2. How do you know that your experience was typical? It can be a big mistake to generalize from one data point. Maybe your department is at one extreme, and the papers and studies are accurate. Here's a different example: I teach in a math department at a public university, and about 70% of our new PhD students are from the US. Should I generalize from my observations? Maybe we should just trust the NSF on this one...