The unsustainable model of higher education

Graduate Programs

Let’s assume a department has 15 faculty members, each of them advises 2 Ph.D students at the same time, then there can be 30 Ph.D students in the department. Assume the program is for 5 years, so each year the department can accept 6 students. To fund each 1 Ph.D student, the department has to get about 2 Master students to pay full tuition, many of which has to be international students.

Each year, 6 Ph.D students graduate. If they can go to industry and organizations to find jobs or start their own companies, perfect. However, here comes the problem: Most of the Ph.D students couldn’t find jobs. Just to name a few reasons.

• First, Ph.D students are over-qualified for too many jobs. Neither the students are willing to apply, nor the employers are willing to consider them for those positions.
• Second, the highly focused technical training of Ph.D study put each Ph.D student in his/her own niche that only fits for a small set of opportunities, leaving the student’s skills highly irrelevant for all other jobs.
• Third, the Ph.D training are limited within academia with the aim of developing the student into a scholar/professor, but does not prepare the student to work in I/O.
• Fourth, the Ph.D students are usually from families that are not powerful enough to help their children get jobs in America. That was probably the reason they had to do Ph.D in the first place. Well, if they couldn’t get a job without a Ph.D, they would face the same problem even with one.
• Fifth, the higher education system has produced too many students on all levels, undergrad, master, Ph.d, in the past decades. There are just too many people for too few jobs on all levels. No matter what level of degree you got, you are guaranteed lack of jobs.

Many Ph.D students try to become faculty members in universities. That is probably the only job outlet most Ph.D students have. But as we have assumed, conservatively, each faculty produces 2 Ph.D students every 5 years on average. If we further assume half of them become faculty members, the number of faculty members in universities will double every 5 years. But faculty members only retire every, who knows, 40 years? Even without holding the numbers accurate, the trend is clear: the number of faculty members will grow exponentially under the current model. And they did in reality.

What does a larger number of faculty mean? It means the universities will need more people to pay tuition to fund the faculties and more graduate students to work for them, which means more undergrad students, more Master students and more Ph.D students. There is no balancing mechanism to this self-reinforcing loop. (build a system dynamic model around this if you want.) According to this model, the number of faculty members will grow exponentially. But we all know, that’s not going to happen because the population size is limited, the number of college-aged people is limited, the number of parents who have jobs to pay tuition is limited, and the capacity for faculty position is limited. The insight is clear: becoming a college professor is not a solution to Ph.D unemployment but only a temporary make-do that exacerbates the problem in the future.

The unemployment problem

The media keep saying that the unemployment rate is low. Well, it may be. But unemployment rate is no longer a good indicator of the economy’s condition. What does unemployment include? Does being in college mean unemployed? Does selling things on amazon mean unemployed? What about uber drivers? Are contractors unemployed? What about post docs, visiting scholars, adjunct teachers? I don’t think they are counted in unemployment. These people may not count as unemployed, but they are not employed either. These positions usually don’t have the same health insurance, retirement plan or job security as full time employees and their wages are significantly lower too. While the unemployment rate may be low, so is the employment rate. Many people are swept under the “in between” rug to keep down the percentage of unemployment. The economy cannot afford to employ so many people, so it created what I call the “in between” or the “on the way” positions to temporarily hold people. These people are stuck on their way between the point they grow up to leave parents and the point they can settle into the society. This road is getting longer and more jammed.

To self-disclose, I am currently job hunting and only doing temporary contractor works. This fact should not weaken the above opinion in case someone accuses me for making the loser’s accusation. On the contrary, my unemployment should be yet another piece of evidence for the ailing condition of the job market. You may argue that my unemployment is due to my immigrant status. But I know in person citizens of the U.S. without a real job: young, white, male, non-first-generation citizen with Ph.D degrees on the job market for years. How do you explain that?

Reverse-selection

It may be many people’s adamant belief that good qualities in a person such as diligence, intelligence, innovation and faith lead to better and more opportunities in the society. The society selects better people and evolves upward and forward. The development needs of individuals coincide with the development needs of the society. Such belief may be true in history, but we are not living in those times. Our society tends to select those with little faith in anything, mediocre in everything, barely able to form their own opinions and eager to appear as successful and decent. The society has “a seller’s market” with “an employer-oriented mindset”. Under this social culture, what’s useful is what serves the employers’ purposes; What’s good is what protects the employers’ interests; what’s right is what makes the employers look good. If the employers think it is better looking to have more female employees, they would choose female employees just because they are female. This to some extent has created a reverse discrimination against male. Speaking based on personal experience, almost all the young couples I know consist of an employed wife plus an unemployed husband.

It is fine with me if the society now is over-favoring females. Who doesn’t have a mother, sister or wife? We all could at least see some people we love benefiting from it. But the worse problem is, the employer-serving market gradually selects the worst and eliminate the better ones in the population. I don’t say this without evidence. In my Ph.D cohort, the one we all consider to be the least interested in or capable of research published the most papers and got a tenure track job in an R1 university. She was even put on the EB1 route for extraordinary scholars. Come on. She couldn’t even finish her homework in time, had to ask for help to do something that was just taught that day, and she thought a simple sentence meant the sentence was simple and a complex sentence meant the sentence was hard to understand, the list goes on. She was tall and good looking indeed. Another girl that was better than her in research, as good looking, got a job in a small college. The rest of the cohort got postdocs or contractor jobs. I still am surprised today by how far reality deviates from what common sense deems right. It seems the number of publications is positively correlated with job opportunities, which is negatively correlated with one’s academic intelligence. One can put this statement to test. Just let professors and cohorts vote on each person’s research ability and correlate it with each student’s placement and publications to see if I am right. I bet on it.

If the reverse selection hypothesis is right, those second-class scholars who got into first class jobs will become reviewers soon and fail miserably at selecting the research that’s way above their level. They will teach their students their incompetently learned knowledge and advise their students with their winner’s strategy. Out of their students, come more people like them.

A few years later, I saw that girl who got into the R1 University in a conference. By then she was already acting and talking like a full professor. A middle-aged student with gray beard was listening to her advice carefully and humbly. She kept talking and he kept nodding. I feel sorry for him. Students shouldn’t fall for looks or titles or prestige. Incompetence is incompetence. I said hi to her. That look on her face was so strange and complex. It’s fine with me if someone I don’t adore got better jobs than me, but please don’t poison the students.

This is yet another self-reinforcing loop without any balancing mechanism. (Model this if you like.) Some may argue that if you are really a good scholar, you will publish your research eventually and you will get the fame and money you deserve. So, in the long run, justice is still done. Well, yes - no. Yes, the scholars who are good at research will eventually crack their topic, make breakthroughs and publish their work with true value. But they will have to do it at their own expenses. Since their work benefits the whole science community, the community is supposed to help them throughout the process, instead of leaving them in years or probably a life of loneliness and poverty. Yes, the good scholars will eventually get the prestige and job security they truly deserve, but the only way for them to do that is to be employed by those good universities. Then this defies the purpose of proving those universities wrong for not picking them in the first place. It allows the universities to safely believe that “it doesn’t matter if we reject a potentially good scholar, because we can still hire him/her when he/she publishes more papers and as long as we hold out the olive branch to him/her, no matter how late, he/she will still be more than happy to take our offer; so the best strategy for us is to hire the person with most publications now”. The scholars, caring either too much or too little about their jobs, can hardly punish the universities for their choices. The invisible-hand-picked scholars are weak and ununited. They only care about their own careers and are more than happy to have what they are given. They allowed and willingly helped the market to suck up the livelihood of the scholar community.

The mechanism underlying today’s job market is no longer capable of promoting scholars and research. The market puts the employers’ needs for development and preference for efficiency over scholar’s interest in topics and values of academic integrity. It doesn’t mean no scholar can have topic preference or hold academic integrity; it only means they cannot hold them above the employers. And that’s enough for reverse-selection of bad over good to happen.

To sum up, the higher education system has 2 self-reinforcing loops without balancing mechanisms. One loop is the “more Ph.D – more faculty – more Ph.D” loop, which leads to over production of Ph.D and unemployment. The second loop is the “mediocrity selects mediocrity” loop, which leads to the reverse selection of scholars and elimination of good scholars from the field. I don’t speak for all fields, but I am pretty sure this applies to the field of communication in the U.S., and probably all social science disciplines.

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