That's exactly what I have been saying. The problems of the scarcity of good academic jobs, low wages of TAs & adjuncts, etc. explain the very high attrition rate in Ph.D. programs (= the rate of grad students abandoning degree programs): 50%, according to Barbara E. Lovitts and Cary Nelson ("The Hidden Crisis in Graduate Education: Attrition From Ph.D Programs" at <http://www.aaup.org/ND00Lovi.htm>).
Yoshie
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I want to point out another problem here. It is what I consider the more threatening crisis in graduate education. I tried this before in the form of a question and that lead didn't seem to work: Saturn eating his children. This is a painting by Goya that shows a hoary eyed human monster eating a headless body.
Graduate programs are supposed to produce an intellectual elite class. It is the existence of this class that is threatened by the constant economic erosion and attrition practiced on the arts, humanities and sciences, including of course the social sciences. The larger problem and one that has serious political implications is that without this class there are no institutional means for the critical appraisal, plans for social, economic and political change, and the general intellectual climate necessary for a representational governance of an open and progressive society.
The Right, together with the neoliberal free market ideologues in their constant political drive to limit and curtail spending on public education institutions have virtually guarantied the disappearance of any critical intellectual class at all. The institutions may survive or be utterly transformed into some shill called institutions of higher education, but these will not perform their critical socio-political functions.
Part of the Enlightenment program for a modern society, was the creation of this intellectual class through publicly supported institutions of higher education, national institutes, and academies and their social purpose was to provide the means for self-critique and correction, and hence social progress toward some future utopian ideal. The combination of a managerial mentality of preserving orderly efficiency at all costs, and the neoliberal ideology of the economic marketplace as the measure of all social functions and relations, has combined to effectively erase the critical functions of this entire institutionally founded intellectual class.
A very good example of what I am talking about is found on another thread: ``A scientist working with the USGS was fired because he placed maps of caribou calving areas in the Arctic Nat'l Wildlife Refuge on the web. This map was one of more than 20,000 maps he'd placed on the web. His web page (with all 20,000 maps) has been removed. This apparently happened in the last few days.'' (fwd Joanna Bujes)
But the examples can be enumerated ad nausium---in public education curriculum debates over evolution and biology; in the physical science community over the uses of physics and chemistry for weapons of mass destruction; in the geo-physical science community over global warming, ecological disasters and threats to human health; in the biological sciences over the marketplace abuses of molecular genetics; in medicine and human health sciences over the market abuses of drug distribution and development; in the social sciences over the market place abuses in developing ever more compelling propaganda methods of mass media persuasion and control methods for channelling whole populations onto some politically preferred course of conduct.
The political establishment has sought out the academy as the primary source of its institutional critics and then systematically curtailed this critical role through at least three decades of economic starvation---that, among many other methods. In place of these theoretically independent public institutions and their critical function, the political establishment has created a entire industry of high level propagandistic machines, i.e. the think tank community. The key difference, and the point of critical erasure is that research reports and information manufactured by these publicly funded agencies have not undergone even the formal semblance of peer review or any other means of independent critical appraisal. In fact, in a process that turns empiricism on its head, the result is given in advance, and it is the research assignment to find the supporting empirical demonstration of the conclusion's validity. Thus some report issued by some institute or other, some times undisclosed is simply mouthed into the public record by some political hack, and then that becomes the central focus of public debate. Rest assured, a pointed critique of this entire system of manufacturing the information in order to gain consent is utterly absent.
So, then the real threat to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of political action to change, has become this information manufacturing and marketing mill. Ironically or dialectically if you will, this mis-information industry (and its mass media relatives) are absolutely dependent on the continued creation of a non-critical intellectual class who have been neutered in advance in the PhD mills of public higher education.
And, just for the record these are obviously not my thoughts but derived from Noam Chomsky, Paul Feyerabend and many others who obviously did not forget part of the reason for their existence was an endless critique of all that is. They are old points, but I think they are worth remembering.
So much for the same old bad news. What of the good news. As long as an intellectual class and its social function as a critique of the bourgeois order is continually alienated, starved, and ignored it remains a possibility that this class can re-constitute both itself and the means to economic, social, political, and cultural change, outside the public institutions that were theoretically created for that purpose. That they might also live working class lives as a matter of necessity only adds to that eventual likelihood.
Chuck Grimes