Everyone is responsible for their own stupid decisions and …

Remember the recession? I do, since it happened right when I was entering college. One of the big things that tipped off Burry and other autistics was fraud in the mortgage market.

The PhD is the same: everyone lied to the recent buy-ins about their likelihood of success.

I interviewed at five different graduate schools when I was looking into PhD programs. 4 out of 5 directly and blatantly lied about their placement rates.

It was hard to figure this out because it wasn't on their website; I had to look up all the school's completed dissertations

Why would they do this? Well, professors want grad students for several reasons: teach more courses, get more students, grow the dept, get more funding, etc.

So many completely hoodwink students into signing into PhD programs.

https://t.co/VoCDQ0O5u0

When I was working on my PhD our department brought in an outside group to evaluate the department and it was recommended they scrap the grad program. Advice was rejected because would result in faculty positions lost. So they keep churning them out.
— Max Castle, deposed former president (@realMaxCastle) January 15, 2021

It keeps getting worse. Two years ago I interviewed for a job at a mediocre university that created a _new_ PhD program. There are already no jobs, and they created a new PhD program.

https://t.co/UydGCW3AM1

I bombed a Skype interview two years ago because I said, "you _created_ a new PhD program?" Turns out it's nice to vote yourself RAs who will have terrible job prospects. Little sign of slowing, except for a few departments that took covid breaks.
— Evil (Political) Scientist (@knrd_z) January 15, 2021

They gave me a whole runaround about how they place their PhDs in small teaching colleges.

This was a lie. Again I dug in and found 2 out of 15 their students got TT jobs. Of course, even Harvard PhDs are competing for those jobs; this was, say, U of Arkansas.

Sometimes profs lie in subtler way. They might say, "ah, all our students who _publish_ get jobs."

That's a lie. A story, whose details I'll change slightly, about a friend from undergrad named. Let's call him "Tom."

Tom and I studied econ in undergrad but he was really into economic history, so he applied to history PhDs.

Every single professor told him that there is no way someone who goes to an elite program and writes a good book will go with a Professorship.

Indeed, Tom went to Harvard and took 6 his PhD in six years to write an awesome book. He got a Postdoc and published his book with Cambridge University Press (the best); his book won three impressive awards. Everyone told him he would get an awesome job.

He applied to over 500 jobs in two years and got exactly 0. (He did get, I think, two phone calls).

What happened? Well, according to his _advisor_, who never brought it up before, "it's a great book but _nobody will hire in economic history_."

Everyone asked him, "why didn't you write on race or immigration?" (Tom is Hispanic). Of course, we all know these are popular topics, but nobody said his topic was a dead end.

His professors got seven years of relaxed teaching, he got a useless PhD.

On the website at Tom's school, there is a page called "Job Placement."

It's fake. It lists adjunct jobs as TT, omits the 3/4 of students who don't get jobs, etc. It takes some digging to figure this all out. Tom's Postdoc is listed as TT still, two years after he left it.

None of this is uncommon. PhDs programs deliberately engage in fraud on a massive scale. Everyone knows it's dumber to get a PhD in history than Electrical Engineering, but almost _nobody_ knows how bad the situation is because it's hidden. You need to read 100s of SEC statements

Some younger professors try to be a little more transparent, will not lie so blatantly. It's too late. PhD overproduction has inflated so much over decades that the only thing to do is bail them out---free gov't supported jobs---and it's still not nearly enough.

We're already seeing the terrible consequences of this, of course, but the true threat to the stability of our society is much greater than realized. And everyone will suffer from this, everyone.

As much as I loathe the New Woke, on a visceral level more than anyone, they are like the 2007 coke and hookers 23 year olds on Wall Street. They are loathesome, of course, but they're at the tail end of a long, terrible cycle. Their predecessors are the real cause.

Now imagine you're 30, busted your ass off, and are _the best_ at your Wall Street job and some boomer assholes _crashed the economy._

That's happening. Tom legitimately is one of the best historians of our generation, with a great book to prove it, and he got fucked.

All the unemployed and underemployed PhDs, yes, I want to throw rocks at them until they get real jobs.

But it's their predecessors that I think should be beaten with sticks forever, for their blatant fraud. But do you know what will happen to them?

Nothing.

Everyone is responsible for their own stupid decisions and we should laugh and throw rocks at Woke PhDs on welfare.

But let's not forget how the boomers royally fucked over their juniors. Do you know the surest sign of a bubble? FRAUD.

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Everyone is responsible for their own stupid decisions and we should laugh and throw rocks at Woke PhDs on welfare.But let's not forget how the boomers royally fucked over their juniors. Do you know the surest sign of a bubble? FRAUD.

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Everyone is responsible for their own stupid decisions and we should laugh and throw rocks at Woke PhDs on welfare.

But let's not forget how the boomers royally fucked over their juniors. Do you know the surest sign of a bubble? FRAUD.