Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational
system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate
those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own
pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these
students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid
graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,
universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing
undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still
encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper
to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as
little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire
full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard
for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the
illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical
presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there
will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
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