I know this is controversial but there are so many foreign students in the PhD programs across the country. Some programs actually favor non-US students. Some professors quite explicitly pick their own race despite that being highly illegal. I think higher ed in the US became a major scam.
The collapse of the econ PhD job market
61–70 of 386 posts
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#62I still couldn't quite grasp the underlying issue. People are not studying economics so schools are not creating those positions, but then it seemed to draw the line to people not studying economics due to the lack of positions in academia, so chicken and egg? I guess it's just that it compounds with the hiring freezes in the public sector mentioned? I came away feeling unsatisfied, is there a bigger cultural thing g…
There are multiple issues in the Phd/Faculty market. Different fields are at different phases of the cycle. The biggest trend is that Universities expanded in the 1950s and 60s, and are now contracting as population declines. Universities continue to increase Phd production despite declining total employment numbers as Phd students provide cheap labor. Numerous non-tenure track positions have been created to fill the void with mixed results.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economics involves studying how the economy should be managed, it is an inherently political field. Declaring one school political and another non-political is itself a political sleight of hand.
One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.
I'm pretty sure UNLV still has Hoppe and they only let go of Rothbard because he died. Which pairs pretty well with the pretty laissez-faire roots of Nevada.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#64This highlights an unspoken danger of AI. People are up in arms about AI taking jobs in Human Resources, customer service, low level coding, etc. But education will take a massive hit. PhD, masters and even BS degrees will be devastated. Unless an individual has documented real benefits to a bottom line of some business, the CV will be window dressing. The only field that will continue to offer steady employment will…
Dont forget the worlds oldest profession.
Thank god TikTok and Insta are grooming us already. We will be ready!
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#65I still couldn't quite grasp the underlying issue. People are not studying economics so schools are not creating those positions, but then it seemed to draw the line to people not studying economics due to the lack of positions in academia, so chicken and egg? I guess it's just that it compounds with the hiring freezes in the public sector mentioned? I came away feeling unsatisfied, is there a bigger cultural thing g…
There are multiple issues in the Phd/Faculty market. Different fields are at different phases of the cycle. The biggest trend is that Universities expanded in the 1950s and 60s, and are now contracting as population declines. Universities continue to increase Phd production despite declining total employment numbers as Phd students provide cheap labor. Numerous non-tenure track positions have been created to fill the…
This is the case in many fields but not in Economics. There is little incentive to pad out PhD counts for cheap labor since the vast majority of the Econ PhD is either taking classes in first and second year or working on independent research after that. All job market candidates are expected to have a solo authored paper on the market with some asterisks I won't get into. There is little in the way of big labs or PIs who require endless RAs. To the extent we need RAs it's often undergrads or predocs doing data cleaning stuff.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
CS and DS people are getting more applied and gaining domain expertise, and can do a lot of economics work now. Academic economists, especially those who primarily do data science / big data, seem to basically be doing Masters-level data science projects for their Ph.D. The hard part in their Ph.D.s is collecting the data, which used to be a very manual job that relied on connections, but more of them are getting the…
Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. Twenty years ago if you were interested in what is now called data science, you were getting a degree with some kind of exposure to applied statistics. Economics is one of those disciplines (through econometrics).
> Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago.
It was called statistics
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#67UCSD this year said they are not taking any new math PhD students due to the fiscal situation. The world of academia is in more flux than I've seen in recent memory.
This is some long horizon impact. Really just wildly unfortunate to see a disruption that feels unique. It's not due to war, even if academics could 'flee' to another institution, its a discarding of the prioritization of knowledge generation. The thing humanity has been built on.
It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It tends to go the other way around; politicians and academia pick economists that favor the way they'd like economics to be managed. Consider that Ludwig Von Mises, one of the most famous economists never held a tenure track position. And Milton Friedman won a nobel prize, including a study of monetary history that damned the fed for helping bring on the great depression -- later nobel prize to Bernanke for works th…
Ludwig Von Mises was never qualified for a university appointment. Even today he would never have a chance at a reputable economics department -- only GMU gives any credence to that kind of witch doctor nonsense.
It's amazing Hayek won a Nobel after being the student of such a washout.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#69Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the economy.
It tends to go the other way around; politicians and academia pick economists that favor the way they'd like economics to be managed. Consider that Ludwig Von Mises, one of the most famous economists never held a tenure track position. And Milton Friedman won a nobel prize, including a study of monetary history that damned the fed for helping bring on the great depression -- later nobel prize to Bernanke for works th…
Von Mises was a hack. He got accolades as a form of early affirmative action, to somehow balance all the Keynesian economists getting awards.
The whole Austrian "school" of economists basically _prides_ itself on not making predictions but using their dogma to explain whatever happens later. They always have an explanation why everything is a result of rational decisions of individuals. And if anything can't be explained by that, it's just because the government interferes with the perfection of markets.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#70I was on the market last year as a fairly strong candidate, my advisors expected me to get a good tenure track job in a Finance department. I had first round interviews at multiple top 10 departments before things really went pear-shaped. Here's what actually happened. The market looked pretty normal until November 5th, and then after that things went downhill. First the Fed Board of Governors stopped hiring (some re…
Good luck; we probably crossed paths (I was helping a bit on the hiring side at some point). A postdoc is a really great option, I've seen lots of people do that before going for a bschool so it can definitely can work.
BTW one other thing besides what you mentioned is not just the freeze but the firings. FDIC lost 30% of staff, BOG is going to reduce maybe 10%, CFPB is no more, etc. so the market is actually being flooded with senior economists. They won't compete directly with the posts you want but still flood the market.