Yet at no point did universities seem to consider slowing the flow of students into the Ph.D. pipeline. The opposite happened. In 1988, the number of doctorates in the humanities conferred was estimated to be 3,570, and it increased to 5,145 in 2018.

Tenured professors like having graduate students around. They teach the boring undergraduate sections for little or no pay and provide inexpensive research assistance. For many veteran scholars, training the next generation is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

There was another complication. In 1994, a new federal law outlawed the widespread practice of requiring professors to retire at age 70. The effects of this accumulated as the baby boom generation aged. The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s.

Consumer preferences also shifted. Stung by ever-rising tuition costs and anxious about a treacherous job market, many students left the humanities for more job-focused majors after the Great Recession.

All of this resulted in a severe misalignment of supply and demand. Universities had spent the better part of two decades training more people for jobs that universities simultaneously decided they didn’t need, just as economic, demographic and legal conditions began further depressing the need for professors. It’s no wonder that many humanities majors are using their considerable creative and rhetorical skills to liken their job searches to various post-apocalyptic imaginings.

As competition for tenure-track jobs becomes more fierce, only the graduates of top-ranked programs have a realistic chance, and even they increasingly settle for positions at less prestigious institutions that emphasize teaching and service over research. For example, the University of Michigan’s English department is ranked in the top 12 by U.S. News & World Report. Of the approximately 50 scholars who have graduated from the department and won tenure-track positions since 2008, only one is employed at a top 12 department, and that is Michigan itself.

Senator Sanders’s proposed legislation would be a highly unusual federal intrusion in the way universities conduct their academic business, and would probably be attacked by the higher education lobby. Some have looked to the example of K-12 teachers, who have used mass strikes and protests to earn substantial wage increases in recent years.