How do you decide which scientists to pay? Pay them all? Then everyone becomes a “scientist” but does no work and draws a free paycheck.
Pay the ones that produce good work? What is good work? Right now, that is decided by number of papers. That metric is gamed to death, that is what publish or perish culture did. Choose any other metric, it will be gamed too.
What if the PhD meant something such that having it was enough? That was all you needed, then you would just get paid to do science. Such a gatekeepeing would require graduating a lot fewer PhDs. How to do that is open: admit fewer? Or psd fewer? If the latter, maybe master out a lot more? Anyone that makes it through gets a guaranteed paycheck, but almost no one makes it through.
Where you are mistaken is that there are a large number of graduates because there is a large demand for research. There isn’t. A given professor needs N papers to get tenure. Say that N = c*k for c researchers and k papers. N is so large that c must be >2, so for the professor to get tenure, they need assistants. Where do they come from? Graduate students. What do those students do when they graduate? The professor doesn’t care because they have tenure now.
Research funding has been decreasing over time, which means N increases, which, counter-intuitively, means c increases, which starts a negative feedback loop because the amount of researchers competing for funding increases while the amount of funding available decreases, still further increasing the number of graduate students needed. That explains what you see.
Pay the ones that produce good work? What is good work? Right now, that is decided by number of papers. That metric is gamed to death, that is what publish or perish culture did. Choose any other metric, it will be gamed too.
What if the PhD meant something such that having it was enough? That was all you needed, then you would just get paid to do science. Such a gatekeepeing would require graduating a lot fewer PhDs. How to do that is open: admit fewer? Or psd fewer? If the latter, maybe master out a lot more? Anyone that makes it through gets a guaranteed paycheck, but almost no one makes it through.
Where you are mistaken is that there are a large number of graduates because there is a large demand for research. There isn’t. A given professor needs N papers to get tenure. Say that N = c*k for c researchers and k papers. N is so large that c must be >2, so for the professor to get tenure, they need assistants. Where do they come from? Graduate students. What do those students do when they graduate? The professor doesn’t care because they have tenure now.
Research funding has been decreasing over time, which means N increases, which, counter-intuitively, means c increases, which starts a negative feedback loop because the amount of researchers competing for funding increases while the amount of funding available decreases, still further increasing the number of graduate students needed. That explains what you see.