<p>The original article is basically crap. Of course it does’t even bother to cite a source, but we had this exact “talking point” on a different thread 6 months ago. Quoting my post form there,</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1338249-number-ph-d-s-public-aid-triples-u-s.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1338249-number-ph-d-s-public-aid-triples-u-s.html</a></p>
<p>"So if we actually read the article, we have the following numbers:</p>
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</p>
<p>These numbers are utterly negligible. I’m not surprised they’re using the “tripling” language, rather than the actual increase, since 20 thousand people is absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>Just for fun, the number of PhDs in the US is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million (based on the 2000/2010 census). So we’re looking at an increase from 0.65% or so to 2.24%, at most. "</p>
<p>It’s not really terribly surprising that the number of food-stamp eligible people increases during a recession across all educational levels. Of course, the increase in food-stamp usage in highly-educated people is extremely small compared to all other groups. Numbers are pretty important.</p>