This may seem more harsh that I intend, so I apologize. I've just been in too many committee meetings and academic fights, so that any time someone even mentions the word *committee* I start getting bad flashbacks and scream in horror.
Committees exist to make sure that nothing gets done and that nothing changes. Academic committees in particular work through consensus which means that all you need is one person on the committee to say no, and that's the end.
The problem of Ph.D.'s has existed since 1970, and if we could "fix" the problem through the committee system, we would have fixed in 1975. The one new thing is facebook and social networking, and that allows you to totally bypass the committees.
Don't start a committee, write a blog. Even a blog can be difficult.
Choppy said:
One possible option is for universites to strengthen their relations with industry and thereby make it easier for their PhD graduates to get jobs, or at least enter the industrial world in some respects.
It's not an easy option. The problem is that any time you have to go through university bureaucracy, you end up with a dozen people that can and will veto any new idea you have. If you really want something done, you have to totally bypass the university bureaucracy, or else you will be spending 95% playing office politics wars with people that have decades of experience at it.
(1) Set up an office dedicated to assist students and young investigators with patenting and marketing products that come out of their research, starting up companies, and establishing connections with venture capitalists.
Or else encourage people to join the MIT Enterprise Forums that have already set this up. You don't have to be an MIT alumni to join the Enterprise Forum or even start a chapter. Also, you don't want the university bureaucracy to touch any of this, so you don't want to set up an "office." You want to set up a "club."
The other thing that is poison is that tenured faculty have a tendency of wanting things done their way. If you make this an official university project, you may well have a professor start lecturing a VC about how to run their business, at which point the VC will stop attending meetings.
Also you run into weird politics. One of the funny thing is that University of Texas at Austin has some *excellent* connections with business. Unfortunately, they are all in the McCombs School, which means that if you are engineering or natural science you *WILL NOT* be allowed to access those resources. They won't even let you into the careers library if you are not in McCombs. Which leads to the weird situation that UT Austin as at least two competing MBA programs that seem to hate each other.
You have to understand that the primary motivation for university bureaucrats is to protect their fiefdoms. You see this also in businesses, but businesses will at least go bankrupt if there is too much politics, which isn't true for universities.
It's a losing game. If you really want to connect VC's with Ph.D.'s then start a blog, and you'll get 100x times as much done.
(2) Offer graduate courses in marketable skills that are perhaps only accessible by PhD-level students. Say for example, in addition to graduate physics courses you also require your PhD cadidates to take a course in something like: financial modeling, actuarial science, engineering courses that could make PhDs legally competative for engineering jobs, product design, high-tech management, high level network design, high-level programming, etc.
Don't take this the wrong way, but NO, NO, NO, NO, NO. I've been in too many meetings.
You do not want to add any curriculum requirements. Curriculum requirements just make things worse. Curriculum requirements in universities for "score keeping". If you have any curriculum requirements, you are going to be in meetings for the next five years deciding whether it's a 2 credit requirement or 3 credit requirement.
What *will* happen if you require something is that you will just add work for an already overworked Ph.D. student. Since the main goal of a required class is score keeping, that class will be totally useless, since there is no incentive to make the class useful, and there are a dozen reasons to make it useless.
Ph.D. students are smart. The problem is lack of information. If they get information, then people will make rational decisions. You can get information with google.
Also, you don't want any restrictions on who can take the class. The last thing that you want in a class on making people marketable is for everyone in the class to have Ph.D.'s.
The other thing is that schools already have classes. If you really want to know how HR works, then take the same classes that HR people take. If you don't have time to take a class, then just go to the college bookstore, and buy the books that they read.
(3) You could also attack the problem at the committee level and rather than focus only on research, include emphasis that will prepate the candidate for a non-academic career. Why could you not, for example, invite professionals from outside academic to be on a supervisory committee?
Because the next step would be to invite professionals from outside academia to teach classes, apply for grants, become department heads, and run the university. At that point, tenure is dead, and professors without industrial experience may find themselves without jobs.
(4) Post-PhD certification programs.
No more certifications. Certifications are just a way to monopolize money and power. If you have to get paper X to get job Y, then the people that issue paper X are going to make a ton of money.
Of course I do realize there are obstacles to these ideas.
The big obstacle is that you are playing the old game with people that are a lot better at it than you are. You need to change the rules if you want to get anything done. Once question that you need to ask yourself is "why didn't people do this in 1975?" (And more often than not, you'll find that people did try it in 1975 and it didn't work.)
Also education is too important and too complicated to happen only in the universities. One idea that universities have been able to brainwash people into having is that universities have a monopoly on education. That's not true, and if you accept the idea that universities have a monopoly on education, then you are going to be a serf to the people that run the universities, and their interests are just not the same as yours.
Some PhD students are already taking over 6 years to finish. Adding even more work may keep people in school into their mid-30s.
And then you hit biology. If you want kids, you have to have stable sources of income by 30 or so. People have been putting off starting families, but we've hit basic limits in biology.
On the other hand, those who are avoiding the scary real world by dragging their feet as grad students may finish faster.
Real world is less scary than academia.