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Jewish World Review Feb. 18, 1999 /2 Adar, 5759
Thomas Sowell
Too many Ph.Ds?
(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) WHEN ANYONE WHO OWNS A BUSINESS discovers that unsold products are piling
up on the shelf or in the warehouse, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to
figure out that it is time to cut back production until the inventory
declines.
But no such logic applies in the academic world.
Complaints about the excess number of Ph.Ds in the humanities have gone on
for years. The answer? Have the government create new programs to hire the
excess Ph.Ds that no one else wants to hire. Create more post-doctoral
fellowships, so that the taxpayers can carry these people for a few more
years before they are finally forced out into the cruel world that the rest
of us live in all the time.
Every year, for 12 consecutive years, American universities have broken all
previous records for the number of Ph.Ds awarded. The number of doctorates
awarded in 1997 was nearly one-third larger than it was just a decade
earlier. Forget about supply and demand when it comes to academia.
Ironically, doctorates in science, engineering and mathematics have come
down somewhat in recent years, even though American companies are recruiting
engineers from India, Russia and other places. But in English, history and
other humanities fields, the graduate schools are flooding the market with
people for whom there are no jobs.
Behind all these strange goings-on in academia is the simple fact that
colleges and universities are spending other people's money -- and neither
the donors nor the taxpayers have the time to monitor what is happening on
campuses across the country.
Professors of English gain prestige and professional advancement by
spinning esoteric theories of literature and promoting other avant-garde
notions. Whether the sophomores understand English grammar or know any
adjectives beyond "awesome" is not their problem. Lower-level courses are
taught disproportionately by graduate students who are working toward their
own Ph.Ds and earning a meager salary by teaching basic courses that
professors disdain to teach.
Reduce the number of graduate students and professors will be forced to
sully their hands teaching introductory courses, instead of spending their
time preparing papers on sexuality and Sophocles for the Modern Language
Association meetings. It is impossible to caricature the papers presented at
the Modern Language Association meetings. Indeed, it is impossible to cite
some of the titles in a family newspaper.
A rich country like the United States can afford to waste money on many
foolish projects. But no country can afford the degeneration and internal
strife bred by idle hands for whom the devil finds work.
One of the great curses of the Third World are large numbers of people with
degrees and the pretensions that go with them, but without any productive
skills to contribute to raising the material standard of living in those
countries.
Worse, these superfluous degree-holders promote political
instability and economic chaos through demagoguery and policies based on
fashionable ideologies that have never had to stand the test of results.
It has taken decades for Latin America to get over "dependency theory" that
blamed that region's lag behind the industrial nations of Europe and North
America on the evil machinations of Yankees and other imperialists. The
living standards of whole generations have been sacrificed trying out
policies based on half-baked theories that each country should become
"independent" of the world market by producing its own products to
substitute for the products it formerly imported.
Nor has Latin America been alone in promoting self-defeating economic
policies, based on the ideological fashions of superfluous degree-holders.
It took many African countries decades of disastrous experiments with
socialistic policies before some of them belatedly turned away from these
nostrums and toward market-oriented policies that have finally begun raising
their people's standards of living above where they were when they were
colonies of European imperialist powers.
The United States is not a Third World country, of course. But it has many
less fortunate people, whose aspirations for a better life can be needlessly
frittered away by ideas from those who have been shielded from reality in
the name of
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