An Overabundance of PhD's

Over the weekend I was catching up on some blog reading and I was quite happy to see this post on "The Professor Is In" about supply and demand for PhD's. Here is a snippet:

Never, ever, at any time, not even once, was there a discussion of the question: do these Ph.D. students we’re admitting have a reasonable chance of using their Ph.D.s for employment after leaving our program? That question was entirely irrelevant to our deliberations. The ultimate professional fate of the graduate students had absolutely no significance in their value to us as faculty. Instead, their value to us as faculty hinged on:

• Our egos. The “best” (ie, most successful and famous) faculty members had the most students. The quantity of a faculty member’s Ph.D. students boosted the faculty member’s status vis-a-vis colleagues and conferred bragging rights.
• Our teaching needs. The department quite literally could not run without the teaching labor of the graduate students. In one of my departments the entire first, second, and third year language programs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (some 30,000 credit hours annually) were handled entirely by graduate students.
• Our legitimacy. A department without a Ph.D. program is a second-class department nationally and on campus. A department with a smaller Ph.D. program is a “lesser” department than one with a larger Ph.D. program. No faculty member would willingly work to reduce the size of the department’s graduate program, because it would reduce the status of the program, and thus the status of the faculty members associated with it. Ultimately, it would reduce the standing of those faculty members for things like raises and research funding.

A few points to add based on my own experiences:
1) part of a department's budget comes from how many students they have. More grad students often means more money in the department coffers. I was pretty shocked when I found out that PhD students were worth twice as much money to the department as MA students... and then the 'fast-track' program to get students into the PhD without finishing their Master's made a whole lot more sense.
2) In my experience with individual faculty members it has been less about 'ego' when it comes to having many grad students and more about productivity and the ability to obtain funding. The (often misguided) idea is that having more grad students means you can get more research done and this will increase your odds of obtaining grants. It is typically the quality of the students and the quality of the student-supervisor relationship that matters much more than their sheer number. One superstar grad student paired with the right supervisor will likely accomplish much more than five good grad students paired with a sub-optimal supervisory match.

Anyone who has been on the job market in the past 5 years knows that there are far more PhD's graduating and needing jobs than there are academic jobs available. For some this is not a problem, they are excited to leave academia and move into the (typically much higher paying) world of industry. Most grad students, however, are accepted into PhD programs with the hope and promise of one day being tenured professors. Sadly, many will not get tenure-track faculty positions and will feel like they have to "settle" for a position other than the faculty position they were working towards for the better part of a decade. In my opinion, fixing this problem really requires that faculty are more thoughtful about which students they take on, everyone is realistic and honest about their job prospects, and students are taught about (and prepared for) jobs other than tenure-track faculty positions so that they know what their options are.