If you’re planning on staying in academia, a sometimes-reliable source of good information is the Deans’ Weblog. If you’re planning on leaving, there is an occasional post there that might pertain to you. I’ve learned a lot from this blog, including how compassionate deans can be towards the plight of graduate students. But I was kind of agitated when I came across this post:

In bureaucratic and academic circles, HQP is the acronym for Highly Qualified People (or Personnel if you like). According to Statistics Canada, the definition of an HQP is a person with at least a bachelor’s degree from a university…

The employment record for PhD graduates is also mixed. Fewer than 50% of them will go on to academic jobs of any kind, never mind tenure track positions in research intensive universities, the position for which they are Highly Qualified… In summary, we are training people for careers that don’t have have anywhere near enough capacity to absorb the graduates at the same time as we are unable to attract and retain students for careers that are crying out for people.

As a society, it does not seem like we are doing a very good job of allocating our scarce development resources in a way that is going to get the right mix of HQP. I don’t know what the answer to this might be. But it is clear that we share responsibility with the students themselves. Somewhere, somehow, we have got to do a better job of teaching them how to do their own “due diligence” prior to starting down a path that is going to end with huge debt and poor prospects in their career of choice.

Well, yes and no. Faculty and administrators do need to do a better job of making it clear to prospective and current doctoral students what their job prospects in academia really are. And sure, it is up to students to make sure they have investigated their career options at some point on the way to getting a Ph.D.

But I kind of bristle at the idea that faculty have to teach students how to do that “due diligence,”as though the current problem was that students don’t know how to investigate their career options. To put it like that entirely misses the point by misplacing the burden onto students. The problem is not with the students–it’s with programs (faculty, administrators, institutional inertia) that do nothing but groom students for lives in academia, completely complicit in the fabrication that if you just work hard enough, you will get a tenure-track position.

The fact is, most faculty a) don’t, b) won’t and c) can’t teach students how to do their “due dilligence” regarding the students careers because they haven’t a clue themselves how transportable academic skills are to other industries. Many faculty are also heavily invested in building up their own field of work by grooming their proteges; it would not at all be worth their while to emphasize the difficulties of the academic job market with their students.