I’ve hesitated to write about this since I contribute to the forum only rarely, and since my last few posts have concerned my perpetual underemployment,  I don’t want to come across as entitled or a habitual complainer. That said, any time I see funded PhD studentships advertised on here, I find myself questioning the wisdom of training so many people for a diminished and increasingly precarious job market. 

Obviously I know that not everyone who does a PhD plans to work in academia, and that some graduates are able to find work right out of their studies. I also understand that universities have an obligation and desire to educate PhD students for reasons that none of us need explained here. I’m more concerned about the imbalance between PhD and post-doc funding (Does anyone have some data on this?). For example, there was recently an ad posted to the forum for 16 new PhD fellowships and 4 post-docs. Putting on my (rather uncomfortable) neoliberal university administrator hat for a second, wouldn’t the research institute get more ‘value’ from using the same budget for, say, 8 post-docs and 4 PhD students, given that the post-docs can start publishing much sooner and don’t require anything like the same level of mentorship / training (‘resources’) as PhD students? I’m not asking rhetorically – I’d really like to know the answer, from someone with inside knowledge of how these things work. University funding strategies seem to be lagging far behind economic realities, resulting in unprecedented applicant numbers for every vacancy. Anyone now undertaking a PhD should be well aware that, statistically speaking, they are highly likely to spend many months after graduation receiving letters stating, ‘We received (insert number between 50 and 100) applications and were very impressed by the high standard of the applicants. Unfortunately you were not successful on this occasion.’ In fact, I know that I’m not alone in discouraging friends from applying for PhD funding, given the bleak employment prospects that follow. As much as it pains me to say it, getting a doctorate was probably the biggest financial blunder I’ve ever made (even though I had a funded studensthip), as I’m now apparently unsuitable for any job outside academia and not qualified enough for one within. This will almost certainly become the condition of many of the people who take the studentships that I regularly see advertised. 

My own woes aside, it seems logical to me that one way of addressing this situation would be to reduce the number of funded PhD studentships and reallocate that money toward creating actual jobs. I’m sure there are more complicated issues that I’m not addressing, but that’s why I brought this up. Is this situation even being discussed at senior administrative levels? Aren’t academics on hiring panels also a bit sick of reviewing 60+ applications for every post? Is this a 'situation' at all, or have things always been this way - in other words, am I just paying more attention now that I"m acutely affected? Looking at things from a more positive angle, what specific contributions do PhD students bring that justifies their relative over-representation? 

I realise that what I'm saying  might sound rather ungenerous to funded PhD students, and I don’t mean it to. I was one recently, and I’m still very grateful for the opportunity and the support I received while doing my PhD. However, I’ve been applying for research and teaching jobs since 2011. Currently I do full-time manual labour work for which I earn less than half the US median income. A huge amount of my spare time is spent on job applications, article writing / editing / reviewing and research into funding opportunities, and every day I seriously consider just giving up on all of it. Scores of news articles, blog posts and forum discussions confirm that my situation is not at all unusual, and people involved in PhD programmes - as students or administrators - should be aware of that. I don't want, nor expect, some kind of paternalistic answer to all my problems, but it seems to me that, viewed objectively, what I'm discussing is in fact a problem, but one that I haven't really seen addressed here or in any other forum.