There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs. In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs.
If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors.
Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.
CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree).
For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills.
> If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad.
This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger.
The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students.
> This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts
Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.
If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors.
Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.