I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively.<p>Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends.<p>If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist.<p>Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost.<p>Biotech, data science, AI/ML are also good bets. What's not a safe bet is generic "programmer" likely to be automated out of a job and salaries are likely to crash when there's an oversupply of lower-skilled talent. Most programming will become trivial or eliminated by automation, as is already beginning to happen with AI code completion.
While it is true that getting a traditional tenure track job is very tough in the current market, programs like the one in the article can make modest changes to better prep students for other roles.<p>For a simple example, pretty much all of the PhD students could get a quantitatively oriented job with "analyst" in the title (why is the kid with an econ degree working a call center job?!?). That requires nothing besides telling students where to look.<p>For private sector data science gigs programs need to typically do a better job with training programming skills, but many govt research positions and think tanks they will be qualified for as is. Likely the case students can independently pursue projects that make them better qualified for data science positions or take courses already available in other departments at Bloomington to make up for gaps in the current PoliSci curriculum.
In math, chemistry, psychiatry, physics, etc, a person with a PhD will be much faster and more effective at getting things done that relate to their area of expertise. As such there is a strong job market for PhDs in those areas in general, though of course most of those jobs aren't academic.<p>Does a political science degree actually indicate a similar quantifiable increase in capability beyond just having more writing experience? I don't know much about what professional political scientists do so perhaps someone can enlighten me.