That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.
They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.
So Yale's PhD count grew a bit, but nowhere near as much as the rest of the country's.
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But mostly, PhDs used to be way rarer in the back in the 50s (along with college degrees in general). If you look at Figure 1 in this NSF report (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/figure/1#), it shows the number of PhDs tripling in just 15 years from 1958 to 1973. After 1973 it slows down to merely doubling over the next 50 years.
Admin growth might be a factor, although I'd want to look at national data first. Your own article says "... Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges" so maybe it's an outlier.
63 years ago, they were rare, but my father was able have his professor and department secure funding within a few months. ( yes, Engineering has a lot of money available from the defense department ).
50 years later, the Molecular Biology postdocs were not so lucky. Not even an honorarium. "Maybe in a few years..."
Just to raise the number from 0, I did exactly that. The post-doc was in a research institute, a department that focused on usability. It seemed worthwhile to learn how to really do user tests and usability evaluations in practice, in the best way possible academically (or so I thought) but with real enterprise projects. Contrasted a lot with the quite theoretical PhD.
We can always argue about whether it was worthwhile ofc. Moneywise, definitely not (though the pay wasn't all that bad compared to industry compensation in my countries). But I learned what I wanted to learn, and the issues the position had were speficic to the place, not the concept of the position, if that makes sense.
A postdoc can also act as temporary employment when one can't immediately find a position outside academia. They tend to be very low commitment as a result of the laughable compensation.
Nope. All it takes is the first tenured professor to say "Well, yes, this was all good work you did for the last year... but we are not going to put your name on the paper... wait... where are you going? Are you leaving?"
"The door will not hit me in the *ss on the way out."
