He has some interesting ideas, such as rotating faculty to bring students more exposure to other researchers and ideas. His points about narrow fields of study are spot on – I could not communicate with most of my colleagues at my last university, and the fact that they were and are teaching students but have no skill or passion for teaching is deplorable.

I do think he's a bit alarmist about the horrors of 12 years of graduate school and no job. I held no lofty illusions in graduate school: my personal goal in my PhD program was to get a job when I got out. That was it. That meant focusing on resume-building. I graduated knowing very little but got four job offers. I used the next 10 years to build my experience and knowledge before anyone noticed that I really didn't know what I was doing.

Funny thing is I then moved from a university to a national center focusing on practice instead of theory, and now I'm moving into the private sector. The experience I've picked up in the past 3 years removed from academia have made me so much more qualified for the job I've left that I would now rank as a highly-desirable candidate should I decide to return to academia.

So is the PhD overrated? Absolutely. Private-sector experience can be much more valuable, especially when seeking jobs further down the road. The PhD does opens doors and can serve as a stand-in for experience early in a career. I think you can judge the quality of a professor by how highly he or she regards his or her academic credentials... and it's an inverse relationship.