The first among equals at Power Line - John Hinderaker - looks at employment for Humanities PhDs. He finds we are graduating many more of them than there are faculty job openings, and it has been like that since roughly 2010. In History, for example, there are twice as many graduates as jobs. He concludes:
The phenomenon at work here–a huge cadre of well-educated people who think they are entitled to make good money, be treated with deference, and play a significant role in public life, but who in fact are not very employable and whose expectations are doomed to be frustrated–explains a lot about the demented quality of our current culture.
The DrsC had the extremely good fortune to get our PhDs early enough to take advantage of the mid-1900s boom in higher education. It is unlikely anyone now alive will ever again see university conditions so favorable.
I believe the explosive growth in higher education was triggered by the post-World War II GI Bill of Rights. It was instituted to keep many ex-GIs out of the work force for 2-4 years and thus avoid mass post-war unemployment.
The resultant greater supply of college degrees paradoxically created demand so that those of us graduating high school in the post-war era found we needed a B.A. to get a decent job.
