1) There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor. So the number is a lot higher than 1.1.
2) I can only see it as naive on the part of students to think they can become one unless they’re able to be in the top ~5% of grad students and then work incredibly hard for 10 years. We should be telling everyone this. And encouraging professor aspiration only for PhDs with the heart for this. If we did that then the universities would work things out. But expecting the universities to fix the problem is backwards because they have zero incentive to.
> There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor.
Sure; that's why I said, "PhD student looking to enter academia". CS PhDs for the most part go into industry (as I did). But if you're a CS prof, you should basically default to telling all of your students except maybe three in your entire career to plan to go to industry. The same thing should hold for physics/chemistry/biology/history/whatever profs: if you have more than one PhD student per decade going on to get a post-doc, you're failing your mentorship duties.
> But if you're a CS prof, you should basically default to telling all of your students except maybe three in your entire career to plan to go to industry.
Except it's not like 3 PhD students from $topschool become $topschool professors while 3 students from $randomschool become $randomschool professors.
What happens is the top students from top schools become top schools professors. The middling students from top schools become professors at random schools. The students from random schools are unlikely to become professors anywhere.
So if you're an MIT professor you can encourage more students into academia. If you're a random school professor, you should encourage them all into industry.
1) There’s _tons_ of other reasons to get a PhD than to become a professor. So the number is a lot higher than 1.1.
2) I can only see it as naive on the part of students to think they can become one unless they’re able to be in the top ~5% of grad students and then work incredibly hard for 10 years. We should be telling everyone this. And encouraging professor aspiration only for PhDs with the heart for this. If we did that then the universities would work things out. But expecting the universities to fix the problem is backwards because they have zero incentive to.