The Ph.D. Job Crisis Is a Needed Market Correction

“Universities across the country are slashing admissions to doctoral programs and freezing faculty hiring as they come under financial strain. Facing a $160 million deficit, the University of Chicago paused admissions this year into more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, including anthropology, social work, social thought, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and visual arts.

 

Brown University suspended doctoral admissions for six humanities and social-science programs including Egyptology and Assyriology.

 

"The University faces an urgent need to address the increasing cost of supporting Ph.D. students, which now ranges from a total of $700,000 to $1 million per student," a faculty committee reported this spring.

 

 "The current costs are unsustainable and are already having significant, negative consequences on research productivity and graduate education more broadly."

 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison isn't accepting doctoral applications this year for its social-welfare program. Nor is the University of California, Irvine for the history and theory of music. Harvard has slashed admissions of new doctoral students in various social-science programs as it evaluates "the future model of Ph.D. education."

 

Many college grads pursue doctorates to escape the real world. Now they are getting a real-world education in economics. For years universities spent with abandon, expanding bureaucracies and graduate programs on the assumption that the federal subsidy train would keep rolling.

 

Grad students for a time served as relatively cheap labor. In return for funding doctoral degrees, universities generally required students to help teach undergraduate courses. The result: A profusion of Ph.D.s in fields with little practical application.

 

Recent doctoral recipients enter a saturated academic labor market and struggle to find work. Hiring freezes at universities have further limited academic job opportunities. At long last, colleges are having to tighten their belts after Republicans curbed federal student aid and pork that flows to universities under the guise of supporting research.

 

The result: Increasing numbers of underemployed, overcredentialed and aggrieved young people. The unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds with doctorates (3%) was the highest for any August, with the exception of the pandemic, since the 2009 financial crisis. New Census Bureau data show that median inflation-adjusted earnings for people with Ph.D.s has declined since 2017 by $3,500 for men and $2,400 for women, while median pay increased for high-school and community-college grads.

 

A recent report by California's Employment Development Department found that unemployment for workers with doctoral degrees jumped to 3.9% in June from 2.3% in January, while the jobless rate stayed stable for bachelor's degree holders at 4.7% and declined for those with high-school diplomas (to 6.3% from 6.8%) and associate's degrees (to 3.5% from 4%).

 

"An uptick in the unemployment rate for workers with doctorate degrees may be tied to an oversupply of PhD graduates and a limited number of tenure-track professorships within institutions of higher education," the report noted.

 

Many people with Ph.D.s in social sciences and humanities don't want to work in business, and businesses may be loath to hire them.

 

What business wants an employee who thinks corporation are evil and has spent 11 years in a left-wing cocoon? Maybe some were willing to hire overcredentialed progressives at the peak of the "environmental, social and governance" movement several years ago, but fewer are now.

 

Thus, a softening academic labor market is prompting people with doctorates to turn to other forms of gainless employment -- to wit, left-wing activism. Notice how many Democratic Socialists of America candidates have Ph.D.s.

 

It's good news that the academic labor market is starting to self-correct. Reductions in federal subsidies have impelled universities to cut Ph.D. admissions in programs that enroll few undergraduates, meaning there's less demand for graduate student labor. Grad students are also pricing themselves out of work.

 

In recent years, grad students have unionized and collectively bargained for more pay and generous benefits, in addition to free tuition. Cornell's labor contract with its grad students provides a $48,367 annual stipend for 15-hour-a-week jobs. Given that fall and spring semesters run for a combined 30 weeks, this works out to roughly $107 an hour. Sweet.

 

The United Auto Workers, which represents more than 50,000 "academic workers" at the University of California, this spring struck a labor agreement that boosts pay for graduate teaching assistants to between $4,100 and $4,600 a month for 20-hour-a-week jobs. That works out to as much as $57.50 an hour, plus medical insurance, child-care subsidies and other benefits.

 

The UCs and other colleges have responded by employing lower-cost undergrads to assist faculty and reducing Ph.D. admissions. Boston University in 2024 cited costs from its collective-bargaining agreement with grad students as a reason for pausing admissions into several humanities and social-sciences doctoral programs.

 

Universities claim that reductions in Ph.D. programs prompted by Republican spending reforms endanger critical research. In what, critical race theory? Most programs coming under the knife are in the humanities and social-science programs that do more to subtract from the sum of human knowledge than add to it.” [1]

 

1. Life Science: The Ph.D. Job Crisis Is a Needed Market Correction. Finley, Allysia.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Sep 2026: A17.