Eating our young.

If scientific world was studied by aliens from out of space the way we study animals and birds and insects, they would be appalled to find that we "give birth" (figuratively speaking) to a few dozen of offsprings, most of which are raised in harsh and brutal environment to be expoited for about a decade only to be eaten (once again, figuratively) by us later. This makes me rather depressed and angry at the system, where a lot of faculty are obviously blind to these simple facts. Those who "survived" the battle of the fittest and made it to the top of the food chain (in academic world) very quickly forget what it's like to be a grad student or a postdoc. I am forgetting already...

A basic calculation goes something like this - in my field we have about 4 students per faculty for most departments. Typically a well-sized department has 30-40 faculty and 120-150 students.
Considering that it takes 6-7 years to get PhD, but most faculty careers last from when they are 30 well into their 70ies, an average faculty goes through 20-30 students in their career. I know someone who graduated his 100th PhD student, so some people have larger groups, obviously, while others have little or no students.

But since the departments don't undergo any significant expansion (not since Sputnik years), this means that an entering graduate student has only about 3-5% chance of ever getting a tenure-track faculty position. A fact that is not advertised openly to entering grad students.
These numbers are a lot better for top schools, but some second-tier schools (or even schools that don't get ranked in top 15-20 or so) have less than 1% chance of making fundamental scientific research their career.

Someone might point out that there are other, "alternative" careers for PhDs, but let's be honest - that's not what the students are being trained for. In fact in many fields the opportunities for industrial or government lab research are quite minimal (astronomy or high energy/nuclear physics, for example), and other non-conventional jobs (such as Wall Street quant, "consultants" at places like McKinsey or even a community college/high school teacher are utilizing a small fraction of skills obtained in grad school plus whatever subsequent postdoc stints one goes through).

Seems like we want to have it both ways - we like to pretend that we are "teaching" grad students some important skills and they will thank us for this later, while in reality they are an incredibly cheap labor force (and postdocs too, albeit slightly more qualified and slightly better paid), and can be manipulated to do just about anything because faculties pay their miserable salaries and decide when they get their degrees.

This is also why I am so disgusted with certain attitudes in hiring new faculty or new staff members (if we are talking about the parallel universe of national labs). The attitude is basically - we created a situation when there are hundreds of candidates desperately applying for every position available, and because we can afford to be so selective, we can scoop the best of the best of the best, invite them for a song-and-dance presentation ("Impress me!" approach), and treat the rest of applicants who didn't make the shortlist cut as garbage not worthy our attention. The arbitrary nature of selection process never ceases to amaze me, even though it's remarkable how programs that are not even nationally ranked can attract people with stellar research records (as far as I am concerned) in hope that they may get desperate enough to accept a position that utilizes those skills in a very marginal fashion, if at all. It's as if classically trained opera singers were hired to sing catchy commercial tunes at a supermarket to attract more customers for minimum wage pay.

Therefore, I find it somewhat disingenuous when people start talking about how to encourage certain underrepresented groups enter graduate schools in sciences. We should encourage interest in science, but should we encourage more bright and talented people to follow the career path that has 95% chance of leading nowhere (after 6-7 years of living on Raman noodles through grad school and relocating a few times for a couple of 3 year postdoc stints that quickly become the norm)? I am not so sure...

Just pondering (but mostly ranting)...