I have spent a great deal of time looking for better ways to support research training (I do a lot of work for health research funders). While individual results may vary, the above article is, if anything, a somewhat rosy portrait as far as health/ life sciences go.
Canada and the US are producing PhDs by the bucketload, with limited skills to make it in modern uber-competitive academia, almost none to go anywhere else, and thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that "anywhere else" is failure for second-rate scientists - despite it being where 90% go. To add insult to injury, a life sciences PhD will get you a salary cut around here.
The horrific part is that increasingly, people scramble through 8, 10, even 12 years of post-docs, providing the barely-paid labor necessary to keep the grant mill productive and NIH grants cheap. And no chance in there to pursue an original idea during their creative years, and mostly, there's no actual training going on. Then finally the candidate scrapes up a soft-funded adjunct role and a first grant - on a super-conservative, low-risk idea, of course. And only THEN, after all that, they don't get renewed and get the boot out of academia. After 20-something years invested in creating an academic career that was never going to exist for 90% of them. (Double the attrition rate if you're female).
Of course there are exceptions - but the data is clear and this trend has been inexorably ramping up for 40 years. Unfortunately, there's huge incentives for funders, universities and profs to encourage more doctorates/ PDFs. Everybody wins - except the trainees.
It's broken and unethical.
