the career rat race

One of the most relevant issues that I have faced since starting schooling is the seemingly endless rat race that is one’s educational and career pursuits. As a kid growing up in a run of the mill middle class suburb, this race began early—with kids being sorted into different levels of math classes and reading groups in elementary school, to maximizing the number of AP classes one could take at increasingly younger ages. What was once something rare like traveling from our Junior High campus to the Senior High campus to take AP Chemistry every day soon became a norm in the later years and the cycle of continuously trying to gain the upper leg keeps accelerating. I’ve seen a lot of this behavior now too in the context of economics graduate applications.

At a purely reactionary and emotional level, this rat race strikes me as unfair. Why is it that the new generation is forced to deal with an increasingly competitive environment that always demands more effort? Why were academics of earlier generations seemingly able to lead less hyper-focused academic lives and end up in the place that they are right now? It seems as if it is increasingly becoming the case that to reach the same goals, one has to be more deliberate, more singularly driven all from an earlier age than those that have come before. Surely there has to be some limiting factor other than age for what experience one can squish in to gain an upper hand later on.

On the other hand, from the lens of an economist: I wonder more so about how the race got to where it is now and what equilibrium it will tend itself towards rather than if it’s fair or not. Since the economics phd application process is what I have experienced most recently I’ll focus on that, but a lot of points have parallels in other fields as well. The push and pull dynamics here at play seem straightforward; the demand for economics phd degrees is pretty high (I’m not so sure about the trend of the demand but I would like to say it is at the very least not decreasing) relative to supply so there is a pushing force on applicants to boost their resume relative to others, and the supply of such opportunities to gain experience before entering the applicant pool rises to meet that demand as well in the form of masters programs or predocs. It is quite uncommon nowadays for a student to gain admission into an econ phd program without having done either a predoc or a masters and not so uncommon for someone to have done multiple predocs/masters¹. The main pull force that are the opportunity costs: these pre-PhD experiences take time, cost money, and delay higher future earnings. This model so far incentivizes a world where people who have a lot of time, money, and industry know-how to succeed. People who have no time or money constraints can take the time to build their experience before applying to phd programs, and people who know already how academia works can plan out their path from an early age. Qualitatively, this usually means socio-economically priveleged groups of people. I would argue, however, that the real world has another pull force: the cost of the homogeneity of applicant pool. I don’t think we have seen any specific costs that I can quantitatively point out to just yet but the main idea is that as people are forced to focus on similar experiences and also come from similar backgrounds they tend to think similarly as a result. Homogenous groups of thought, in the realm of academia, may be detrimental to the rate of making drastic breakthroughs.

Now that we have discussed the push forces that incentivize applicants to gather more experience before applying to PhD programs and the pull forces that incentivize applicants to just shoot off an application, I think it would be interesting to have a discussion about how we could quantitatively wean out the magnitude of these effects to see how important they are and make some predictions about where this “rat race” will head in the future. The first step to doing so is writing out some sort of model that spells out how each of these forces effect the chance of being admitted and the preferences of a given applicant.

1. To begin, let’s say that the applicant generally prefers to start their PhD earlier rather than later but also benefits from entering their PhD with some level of experience but there are diminishing returns (meaning that getting 2 years of experience is still better than getting 1 year of experience but not more than the difference between 1 and 0 years of experience).
2. Let’s say that each year after graduating, the applicant makes the choice between trying out their hand in the application process, using the year to get more econ experience, or using the year to get more life experience (i.e. a not strictly academic economics related job).
3. The utility that the applicants achieve in this model can be summarized as two-fold. On one hand they experience monetary utility, so supposedly choosing one year of gaining life experience would give them more money that year than choosing one year of an econ experience or even choosing to apply to grad school if they are already quite old and won’t benefit much from the increased lifetime earnings after grad school. Second, applicants supposedly also have some desire to have a career in economics so they also gain some personal utility from being in grad school.
4. The final component is the probability that an applicant makes it into a PhD program. Depends on how much econ experience they have (the more econ experience, the high chance they will make into a program), how much innate ability they have (this basically encompasses how likely they are to get into a program without any econ or life experience, just how cracked they are), and how much life experience they have (life experience does contribute positively to the chance of getting into a program but this is always less than a econ experience even if a very homogenous class increases the effectiveness of life experience).

To summarize, our model focuses on the agent’s (applicant’s) choices throughout their post grad life until retirement. Each year, the applicant is faced with three choices, either to shoot in a PhD Application, spend the year pursuing some economics experience, or spend the year pursuing some other job outside of economics. They get the most monetary compensation if they decide to pursue a job outside of economics, second most if they pursue some economics experience, and the least if they send in a PhD application; the utility for personal satisfaction goes the opposite direction. The probability that get into a PhD program if they choose to submit an application is based on how much life experience they have, how much econ experience they have, how much inherent potential they have, and the homogeneiety of the existing phd classes (the more homogenous the class the more life experience will increase the probability of success).

There are a few areas in the model described above that feel a bit iffy to me but I like this representation as a starting point, feel free to comment below or shoot me a text if you think of any driving questions/assumptions you think need to be answered. For those more inclined to look at the model described above in specific mathematical terms, you can refer to the pdf below. Ultimately, the original question I had asked was how far will the rat race go. You can answer that using this model from the perspective of an individual who isn’t fully noticing what’s going on around them in that this model doesn’t incorporate any concepts of agents strategically reacting to others based on how many years of life or econ experience they have for example.