The collapse of the econ PhD job market

Post by LPisGood » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

nxobject wrote: post #119

colechristensen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sources of university funding and spending on administration has been broken for a long time. What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors. What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the m…

…and money to go to conferences and summer schools, and money for software licenses (especially in applied programs), and department funds to bring visiting academics, and the following things that get lumped under administration: money for grad student food pantries and childcare because funding streams for PhDs don’t provide for good salaries outright, and job advising centers because the math job market is a craps…

Post by awesome_dude » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 11:07 PM UTC

sherburt3 wrote: post #312

awesome_dude wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those links (thanks for providing them) only talk about raw numbers, no real in depth analysis of whether the administrators are needed at those levels, or not, nor even how they classify someone as being an administrator.

Feel free to do your own analysis

Post by selimthegrim » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

mathteddybear wrote: post #200

mjhay wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Data science is different than statistics, because it is done on computers. It also uses machine learning algorithms instead of statistical algorithms. These advances, and the shedding of generations of restrictive cruft - frees data scientists to craft answers that their bosses want to hear - proving the superiority of data science over statistics.

yeah, we called that data mining, decision systems, and whatnot... mapreduce was as fresh and hot as the Paul Graham's essays book... folks were using Java over python, due to some open source library from around the globe... essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 1:13 AM UTC

monkeyelite wrote: post #280

searine wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is anti-intellectual propaganda. Seriously, 90%? None of what you said is happening at anywhere near that scale. Touch grass.

Professors have told me it doesn’t matter which administration is in - they just need to rebrand their project to meet funding requirements. Isn’t that a scary thought? We have no visibility and they are skilled enough to transform into any form.

Post by snapplebobapple » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 1:56 AM UTC

dsjoerg wrote: post #260

lkrubner wrote: post #256

"Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust." This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 w…

> the majority of all economists are Republican citation for that please? quick Gemini work gives me the opposite so could you please back that up? Federal Reserve Economists: A 2022 analysis of voter registration data found the ratio of Democrat to Republican economists at the Federal Reserve System to be 10.4 to 1. American Economic Association (AEA) Members: Studies have found the D:R ratio among AEA members to be…