It is much harder now to follow that path you described than it was 30 years ago. That is, fewer portion of people who would like that path successfully get it. (Yeah, the early 90s is 30 years ago. Shocking to me too).
Whether students now "know what they were signing up for" or not (or should somehow be expected to or blamed if they didn't, which is not quite the same question), I couldn't say. None of the survey questions mentioned in the article seem to cover what their expectations were before enrolling, or if they have now changed. I wouldn't assume that they did, or didn't.
It doesnt even sound like a particularly attractive outcome. 70k/year after being a very strong candidate. Wonder what the salary progression has been like over 30 years.
Yes, I absolutely think that it is incumbent that adults who pursue graduate degrees do a perfunctory bit of research on their career options and what they can expect upon entering the job market.
Sure, I mean of course, who could disagree with that statement.
I'm curious. I don't know what field you are in, but if when you pursued a doctorate in the 90s, it had been the case that, say, only 5% of PhD graduates in your field wound up with a tenure-track job in your field (this is a realistic number for many fields/disciplines currently), would you have still done it? Figuring you'd be one of the 5%, or that you'd find a non-academic career path with the PhD instead if necessary? Or, armed with that perfunctory bit of research on the job market, would you have chosen an entirely different path?
I'm in every "data science" field except the one I want to be in (computational chemistry/drug discovery).
Absolutely true that I would have still gone the way I did anyway.
Although there wasn't access via the Internet to as much information as people have nowadays to do that perfunctory research, I was well aware of the low pay that the tenure track offered, mostly due to the fact that I assumed that my public school teacher parents (both of them, elementary school) made peanuts compared to the lawyers/doctors/stockbrokers at the time. My assumption that this translated to higher education was not entirely wrong. I just didn't care and thought that making maybe $80K/year sounded damned good to me to do something I loved.
But the point is, I went into it coming from a background where there wasn't a lot of money and I wasn't interested in being a doctor or lawyer or getting an MBA. I might be accused of romanticizing the professorial lifestyle at the time, but I certainly fell in love with the research and the lifestyle.
The other things to note are that my Master's in geology is a very, very employable degree from a top-ranked school. My Ph.D., not so much. So there was/is a fallback option to work in the geosciences - turns out I'm not much of an oil guy, and water doesn't pay much - and I could have gone into industry at any time.
So, yes, I would still have made the decisions I made.
Low pay (relative to other professional careers) is one thing. I have a number of friends who were prepared for the pay, but simply cannot secure a tenure-track position at all. They thought they'd be able to. And yeah, they were willing to move wherever.
I don't know for sure if they didn't know the truly low rate of success here, or just thought they'd be one of the successful ones, or just didn't think too hard about it.
To them, you are living the dream -- that they have not been able to achieve. I don't know about "data science", but in many fields (including things like mathematics and physics, we're not just talking humanities), it is lot harder to do what you did now than it was then. What you did is what they want to do, and would also be happy with $80K (at least in early career; 80K now is a lot less than 40 years ago!) to do something they love too.
But should people know that before going in? And then not complain about it, if they chose to go in anyway? I don't know, I'm not too invested in determining who "should" be complaining vs stoically and silently accepting their fate, I don't think there's really an answer.
I just know that it's really hard in most fields to turn a PhD into a tenure track job now. And that's probably not as widely recognized as it could (or "should") be. I think universities and advisers recruiting hard into their PhD programs despite this, without being clear, are probably not treating their students respectfully, even if the students perhaps "should" see through the recruiting spiel.
(I also have a couple friends with PhDs in the past 10 years who have succeeded in getting tenure track jobs, or even tenure already. it is not unheard of, although moving in that direction. I have a pretty academic social circle)
Whether students now "know what they were signing up for" or not (or should somehow be expected to or blamed if they didn't, which is not quite the same question), I couldn't say. None of the survey questions mentioned in the article seem to cover what their expectations were before enrolling, or if they have now changed. I wouldn't assume that they did, or didn't.