This article is clearly written by someone without much perspective into the actual people getting these degrees, the programs that offer them, or the process by which they are granted. But why let that stop you from writing an article based on some numbers you saw?

First of all, yes, the market for academic jobs in general is pretty bad, despite increasing demand for college education, because of relentless government slashing of public higher education funding over the past 20 years. The comparison to what has happened recently with law schools is completely senseless, though. Law school was seen by many to be a certain path to an extremely high-paying job, and was pursued by the most ambitious, most money-driven individuals. And for a long time, the reward really was there. That all changed suddenly, and the jobs dried up, so when most of the reason applicants choose a law career goes away, of course applications will drop.

But many academic fields have always had poor job markets, few tenure-track positions, and cruddy pay. It may be getting marginally worse every year, but it's not like there's a sudden sea change in what you can expect if you go get a degree in English. And in any case, the sort of person who pursues a PhD is almost never motivated by a desire for money, or a "great career". The people who are so motivated are the ones who look at tables of graduate school ROI and used to choose law. Your Art History PhD student probably has never seen such a chart, wouldn't care if they did, and doesn't think in terms of ROI.

The other problem with the law school comparison is just raw numbers. Law schools likely put out an order of magnitude more JDs each year than all typical PhD fields combined. The PhD pipeline is far more stable.

The author questions why schools are pushing more people through graduate programs when demand is decreasing, but that's easy to answer. First of all, at the micro level, each individual department and PhD program has an internal incentive to continue the work they've been doing for years. This is their job, after all, and there are customers.

The universities that run these programs also have every incentive for them to continue. 1) Accreditation boards, US News and World Report rankings, and research funding all give you bonus points for having a PhD program. 2) Graduate tuition is higher than undergraduate tuition. 3) PhD students are an even cheaper source of labor with even fewer rules about mistreating them than adjunct faculty! This one is huge. There are some schools where most of your classes will be taught by PhD students, not by actual professors.

The author also doesn't seem to have ever talked to anyone who's gotten a PhD. Those median time-to-completion numbers are meaningless. Yes, some fields (mostly hard science) have their PhD candidates doing research for their dissertation for years on end, but in most fields, you do a couple of years of PhD coursework and then you work on your dissertation until you finish. Many programs will pay you a tiny bit to stick around if you will teach classes, at least for a couple more years, but in general the onus to complete this massive project is on the individual student. And given that they probably have families by this point in their life and that they're most likely working some unrelated or semi-related job in the meantime to pay the bills, yeah, sometimes it takes years and years to complete the dissertation.

Go to any academic-related administrative department at a large state university and you will find it filled with people who have full time jobs supporting the university, but are also slowly working through their PhD in Education or something similar. They get a slight bump in pay and respect when they complete it, but for the most part they are there working for the university and working on their PhD because they love their field, and they're passionate about helping students learn.

Of course, the stats given also leave out the fields in which there is plenty of demand for PhD-holding professors. If you want a six figure starting salary and schools falling over themselves to hire you, go get a PhD in Accounting.

Finally, there's not enough context in the article on the stats showing "no job commitment" for PhD students. It apparently means "tenure track professorship", but I think you'll find that most of the people in those fields know exactly what they're getting into, end up in totally acceptable jobs, and are pleased about doing the work to get their PhD.