>>16538472
>What's the purpose of a PhD if you need a PhD-level of education before applying?
There's a clear purpose.

PhD programs are low-cost/high-performance programs centered around achieving maximum cost labor efficiency. This is why...

1. Institutions hire more PhD candidates than they need, resulting in a massive excess of PhD graduates relative to the market for which PhDs were originally meant. Most prominently in humanities, but it's visible everywhere.
Because the market adapts and has to cater to human excess production, some ordinary (non-academic) jobs that very obviously do not require PhD-tier skills (which is mostly centered around "research" skills, read: repetitive lab or stats work) come to demand a PhD diploma, similarly to how a large array of jobs now require people to have Bachelor's degrees despite them being irrelevant for the job.
2. Maximum efficiency means that, from an institutional perspective, workers have to be poorly salaried. How do you achieve this? If you don't have the power to force people into this, you go over to the next best option: Tricking people into it. And you trick them into this by presenting them with a false cost-volume-profit analysis which claims that their (four) six years of working below-minimum wage in an abusive 60-hour-week setting will be compensated by an increase in earnings once they got the PhD program. This is NOT true.
3. PhD programs will naturally select for those candidatest that have shown maximum labor efficiency, e.g. those who work 12 hours a day consistently six or seven days a week. You find East Asians to be more receptive to that kind of work "philosophy", hence PhD programs tend to be staffed full with East Asians. They draw in people known to be intellectually barren because of their fixation on following authoritative commands. This is also the reason why PhD programs are hotspots for political correctness or any other type of ideology centered around correcting your state of mind.

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What's the purpose of a PhD if you need a PhD-level of education before applying?