I think this is a natural result of having so many kids that have no idea of what to do in life.
Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one of those kids what they'll want to do when they stop formal education, they'll go back to the few things that they are taught are desirable, and the few other occupations that are close to them. One of which, for every single kid, is to teach, since they've been surrounded by them all their lives.
Keeping studying after getting a Bachelor's is also a very tempting option for kids that are afraid of change. Think of something very different from college, or get a master's? Go look for a job, or get a Ph.D? Inertia makes some people go for advanced degrees, even though they don't really understand the road they are getting into.
I know plenty of people who finished a Ph.D, started doing post docs, then realized that now their options had narrowed significantly, that the tenure track was not going to happen any time soon, so their options were to become adjuncts, study even more to consider teaching at a high school, or accept that 5-10 years worth of education was completely wasted. This leads to a major glut of qualified people, which then get paid very little.
I believe we should spend a whole lot of effort teaching kids what odds they are actually facing when they make their career choices. I still meet interns that are doing post graduate education at the same time that don't realize how terrible the odds really are, and that's with them working in a company that is one of the few industry outlets out there for people that went into Ph.Ds and then saw how scary the teaching market was, so it's not like they cannot hear plenty of stories.
Bad information just leads to bad resource allocation for all of us. We should help with that.
Passion is a weird thing. If a prospective adjunct walks up to you and says "I'm passionate about teaching in higher education," or "I derive what I judge to be a large amount of utility from the prospect of teaching in higher education," is it bad resource allocation for him or her to enter that market, because you think that if they had had a different set of inputs (information) earlier in their life, they may have become passionate about something else, or had a different weighting on their utility function? Who are we to say our ideas for what they should do are better?
By all means, we as a society should discourage people who don't know what they want to do from taking post-graduate education as a default choice, and we should discourage people who don't derive utility from teaching from being in the adjunct labor market. But I think that the majority of people in the adjunct labor market would actually say quotes like the ones above - they're not just "kids" without agency or passion for the work. And they would probably find it demeaning for the top post here to deign to "help" them to choose "rewarding... career choices." I'm pretty sure they've already chosen.
If we're going to spread information, let's focus on spreading transparency about hiring practices at universities to the students and grant-givers who fund their budgets.
Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one of those kids what they'll want to do when they stop formal education, they'll go back to the few things that they are taught are desirable, and the few other occupations that are close to them. One of which, for every single kid, is to teach, since they've been surrounded by them all their lives.
Keeping studying after getting a Bachelor's is also a very tempting option for kids that are afraid of change. Think of something very different from college, or get a master's? Go look for a job, or get a Ph.D? Inertia makes some people go for advanced degrees, even though they don't really understand the road they are getting into.
I know plenty of people who finished a Ph.D, started doing post docs, then realized that now their options had narrowed significantly, that the tenure track was not going to happen any time soon, so their options were to become adjuncts, study even more to consider teaching at a high school, or accept that 5-10 years worth of education was completely wasted. This leads to a major glut of qualified people, which then get paid very little.
I believe we should spend a whole lot of effort teaching kids what odds they are actually facing when they make their career choices. I still meet interns that are doing post graduate education at the same time that don't realize how terrible the odds really are, and that's with them working in a company that is one of the few industry outlets out there for people that went into Ph.Ds and then saw how scary the teaching market was, so it's not like they cannot hear plenty of stories.
Bad information just leads to bad resource allocation for all of us. We should help with that.