>> After all, the number of available tenure-track faculty slots is essentially fixed—at MIT, there are approximately 1000. To create room for a new faculty member, an existing one has to leave. But after a brief dip, we thought, retirements should return to normal, creating room for new recruits.
I would have hoped for better intuition from professors at MIT. To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you'll need replacements at a lower rate.
To me it just pointed to the fact that there are more people looking for such positions as there are positions. The later retirement just made an existing problem worse.
Just because the average retirement age moves later does not necessarily mean the average term of tenured service is longer. (The average age at earning tenure could well move up.)
> To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you’ll need replacements at a lower rate.
I feel dumb right now that it wasn’t obvious to me. I was thinking in terms of throughput vs latency, and how for a single pipe, increasing latency doesn’t affect throughput. So why would it change for multiple pipes? My bad intuition was that letting people stay longer would drop throughput until everyone that was in the pipe during the latency change retired, and then throughput would restore to the same as before.
Doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to see why you’re right, but because it wasn’t obvious to me, I’m not surprised it wasn’t obvious to others. Or at least it makes me feel better...
Think of waiting in line for an amusement park ride. If the ride runs 4 minutes, you'll have to wait in line longer than if ir runs 3 minutes. Same thing, if the guy in the office will leave after 30 years instead of 40 the line waiting or it will move much faster.
And don't feel dumb. We all get hit with it at times ;-)
I was hoping to find this comment here. Exactly my thought as well.
I mean, a professor at the MIT, that is someone supposed to be a smart person, right?
But still so dead wrong about the obvious here. Pains me a bit to see, honestly. I wonder if this is a case where the "intuition" is influenced by the classic, you know "it can't be true, because I don't want it to be true"..
I would have hoped for better intuition from professors at MIT. To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you'll need replacements at a lower rate.
To me it just pointed to the fact that there are more people looking for such positions as there are positions. The later retirement just made an existing problem worse.