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It doesn't matter--the number of PhDs is an order of magnitude larger than the number of tenure positions opening.

MIT graduates about 400 PhDs per year and only has about 40-50 tenured positions open each year.

I suspect every other program is similar. There are simply too many PhDs being graduated, but the universities are dependent upon them for slave labor.

It sounds like his pay as a "professor, post-tenure" was reduced to 49% of what it was before, so it's almost certainly a money problem.

Money.

Then they 'd have to enroll more students.

need more management:

https://sandiegofreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/MSM...

https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BJ720_NONCLA_G...

Just because the average retirement age moves later does not necessarily mean the average term of tenured service is longer. (The average age at earning tenure could well move up.)

> To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you’ll need replacements at a lower rate.

I feel dumb right now that it wasn’t obvious to me. I was thinking in terms of throughput vs latency, and how for a single pipe, increasing latency doesn’t affect throughput. So why would it change for multiple pipes? My bad intuition was that letting people stay longer would drop throughput until everyone that was in the pipe during the latency change retired, and then throughput would restore to the same as before.

Doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to see why you’re right, but because it wasn’t obvious to me, I’m not surprised it wasn’t obvious to others. Or at least it makes me feel better...

I was hoping to find this comment here. Exactly my thought as well. I mean, a professor at the MIT, that is someone supposed to be a smart person, right? But still so dead wrong about the obvious here. Pains me a bit to see, honestly. I wonder if this is a case where the "intuition" is influenced by the classic, you know "it can't be true, because I don't want it to be true"..

It's about an old dude just realizing that by staying in his job past 65, he's put 9 people out of work.

Not sure about the corporate sector, but it certainly seems to at least have an impact on American politics. Some 2014 statistics [0] have the average age of representatives and senators at 57 and 62, and several current senators have served for well over 25 years (3 senators right now have been in their offices for over 35 years) [1]. I'm sure it's hard for even the brightest young politician to oust someone who's been in office since before they were born, especially if they're in the same party.

[0] https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/0b699eff-adc5-43c4-927e-f6304...

[1] https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm

Tenure is a pretty artificial condition intended to prevent controversial research from being eliminated out of fear of losing your job. It seems in the corporate world execs do something controversial, get fired and get paid off. I believe average length of tenure in c-suite positions is actually decreasing, so moving in the other direction without any law limiting it.

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, how do you plan to do this? Grants? Investors? Trust fund?

If you can sustain yourself longer than 6 months, have you considered just starting your own lab/business?

Article isn't paywalled. Did not need me to login/register. They did not ask me for my email. Don't care about http/https. Should I ?