Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Basic Reproductive Number R₀ in Academia

The academic job market has become increasingly competitive for PhD graduates. In this note, we ask the basic question of ‘Are we producing more PhDs than needed?’ We take a systems approach and offer a ‘birth rate’ perspective: professors graduate PhDs who later become professors themselves, an analogue to how a population grows. We show that the reproduction rate in academia is very high. For example, in engineering, a professor in the US...