> Hundreds of thousands of doctoral students investing huge amounts of time and money to chase a relatively tiny pool of prestigious teaching and research positions.
That's a pretty cynical take on academia. There are plenty of good reasons to go for a PhD that don't amount to prestige chasing and it isn't accurate to view PhD programs as a jobs training program to push you into academia similar to a coding bootcamp, but longer and more expensive.
The experience of learning research by generating new knowledge with the top experts in your field is intrinsically valuable even if you don't use it every day. The one high school teacher I had who had done her PhD was by far the best teacher at the whole school. Everyone benefits from having a more educated society. Plus, most PhDs are funded. That money doesn't get thrown on a fire. It is paid for by the student teaching undergrads (which is a huge profit driver for universities if you need a selfish reason to support PhDs) and then is turned around into research which benefits society. Most PhDs don't end up going back into academia either. In fact the profit from cheap teaching assistants in the form of PhD students is probably the biggest driver of getting more of them at the university level, not some sort of academic circle jerk. Universities just want money.
That's a pretty cynical take on academia. There are plenty of good reasons to go for a PhD that don't amount to prestige chasing and it isn't accurate to view PhD programs as a jobs training program to push you into academia similar to a coding bootcamp, but longer and more expensive.
The experience of learning research by generating new knowledge with the top experts in your field is intrinsically valuable even if you don't use it every day. The one high school teacher I had who had done her PhD was by far the best teacher at the whole school. Everyone benefits from having a more educated society. Plus, most PhDs are funded. That money doesn't get thrown on a fire. It is paid for by the student teaching undergrads (which is a huge profit driver for universities if you need a selfish reason to support PhDs) and then is turned around into research which benefits society. Most PhDs don't end up going back into academia either. In fact the profit from cheap teaching assistants in the form of PhD students is probably the biggest driver of getting more of them at the university level, not some sort of academic circle jerk. Universities just want money.