One of the first things that any student of public administration learns is that bureaucracies don’t like to change. Once you set up an organization and procedures, it s is very, very difficult to make alterations, because the people who operate these bureaucracies have some skin in the game. Paychecks and ego and plain old resistance to learning something new are the sand in the gears of reform. This is a hard lesson for outsiders to accept. More often than not, a stubborn bureaucracy can weather any storm. They outlast reformers, who get discouraged and walk away.

Last week, I opened my big mouth about some obvious flaws in the administration of the special ed program in town. My first instincts are to give a “Make it work” statement and walk away. But that only works on Project Runway. In reality, if you want to make changes, it involves a lot of sweet talking and compromise and reduced expectations — things that don’t come naturally to me.

There’s a big discussion in the higher newspapers and twitter about making reforms to graduate school education. Clearly, we making more PhDs than there are jobs. Greg Weeks sums up the conversation very nicely.

So, here’s the latest report on jobs for history PhDs. Since Steve was briefly on the market for a history job a decade ago, these numbers caught my eye. These numbers are even worse, if you understand how the system works.

Field	Number of Openings	Number of New Ph.D.s
North America	199	441
Europe	129	187
Asia	110	73
Latin America	51	64
Middle East	41	60
Africa	40	38

Steve’s PhD was in European history, so that means he could only apply for a European history position. That’s 129 jobs in entire country. But those numbers are even worse, when you break them down by sub-subfield. Steve’s expertise was in Modern European history with a specialty in Germany history. Of the 129 jobs, he could only apply to about 30 of them. After you consider the jobs that are located in places that you would be actually be willing to live, then you’re maybe looking at 5 jobs. Imagine spending 10 years in school and only have 5 job openings. Then imagine that you’re competing not only with the 187 recent PhD grads, but the previous ten years of PhD grads who don’t have jobs and who have had ten years to write books and things that make your right-out-of-grad-school CV look pathetic.

The system of producing grad students does not sync up with this tragic job situation. There is a nearly, rock-solid consensus on the fact that there are too many PhDs and not enough jobs. Everybody knows changes need to happen. So, why doesn’t anything change? Because academia is a bureaucracy, just like my kids’ schools. Grad programs have no incentive to reduce their number of students. Even worse, it’s a bureaucracy without a head. There is no President of American Colleges that can institute changes across the board. So, it is nearly impossible to respond to problems like this in a clear, logical manner.

What happens when problems add up and a bureaucracy doesn’t change? Well, the system breaks entirely. People are hurt. Unwanted changes occur.

Libertarians say that the answer to the difficulties is to not create bureaucracies in the first place and to let the market step in to answer the demand for a particular service. In higher ed, that means MOOCs and the adjunctification of higher ed — not great answers to these problems. Others say that unions that represent the interests of grad students and adjuncts are the answer to these dysfunctions, but these unions have never gotten off the ground. Perhaps changes can be made by public shaming of schools engaged in bad practices and by providing greater information to all consumers of public education. Shaming and information spreading are something that bloggers and pundits can do, so I guess I’ll keep talking.