Maggie's Farm

I was my department's P&T chair for a decade or so. Faculty are evaluated on the basis of research dollars obtained, numbers of publications in high impact journals and Ph. D. graduates produced. Teaching and service are threshold items; you get punished for not doing them or doing them badly, but you don't get rewarded for them.

Also, universities are evaluated by the total amount of research dollars obtained each years and the average SAT/ACT of the their entering freshmen.

So, the Ph. D. glut will continue unabated because everyone involved, except the Ph. D. candidates, benefits from it. And a large Marxian surplus benefits the schools.

By the way, there is a very large surplus in STEM, too, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. At the Ph. D. level, as many as 75% of all STEM candidates are foreigners, mostly Asians. Under current law, they go home. Under the proposed immigration bill in the Senate, they all would qualify for HB-1 visas and nearly all of them would stay, crushing STEM salaries. This, of course, is the desired outcome.