system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there any talk of scaling back PhD programs in light of the higher ed bubble collapsing/demographic cliff?

For example, the academic job market has been bad for decades but has gotten worse and worse as the predicted wave of retiring professors never materialized, research funding has been flat since the end of the Cold War, and we keep pumping out more PhDs every year with a relatively fixed number of faculty positions available.

Now we have COVID popping the higher ed bubble ahead of schedule and the demographic cliff, the situation is going to get historically bad.

Is there *any* talk in your departments of admitting fewer grad students to avoid contributing to the problem, or is cheap grad student labor just too valuable to pass up?

Do faculty in your area tend to dissuade people from going to grad school or what?

EDIT:

I retract the claim about funding after the Cold War, it’s more complicated than that.
gpt
I hope to see them start saying the quiet part out loud: most grads never go into academia, and it's been that case for some time.

And programs start putting far more focus on helping students build pathways via the translatable skills they acquire.