Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions.
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, and giant pile of broken dreams.
I'm sure over the years you've known students who have started a PhD and not finished. What (if anything) have you said to them? Do you feel their efforts had any value?
In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered by major universities are taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty without doctorates.
Your job title probably won't be 'professor', but you'll be doing basically the same work as one.
I think this result is obvious to anyone who has spent any time in the academic world, although it is nice to see some solid numbers behind it.
The harsh truth is that key to academic career advancement is who you know much more than what you know. I every single person I knew in graduate school who got a postdoc position did so through informal means (i.e. knowing someone who knew someone), and having letters of recommendation written by the right people from the right departments at the right schools opens all sorts of doors to the academic hierarchy that would otherwise be closed.
A generation ago or two ago, it was common for chemists to use taste and smell as a tools for qualitative evaluation of chemical compounds.
So older scientific literature is full of all sorts of knowledge that was obtained in ways that are shockingly unsafe by modern standards, including gems like the taste of all sorts of poisons and how large quantities of plutonium are warm to the touch.
I immediately Ctrl-F'd for 'funding'. There's your problem right there. If there's no money to support graduate students, you're never going to get enough researchers to replace the ones you have.
Additionally, graduate students tend to avoid selecting research areas they dislike or find disgusting. The most disturbing presentation I've ever watched was a slideshow given by a parasitologist in which I saw worms in parts of the human body I never imagined it possible for worms to be in. No wonder students aren't lining up to spend years of their life working with them.
That brings back memories. One of my first research projects in school was doing sketchy things with a Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser. I remember the distinct 'tack-tack-tack' sound of the Q-switching at 10 Hz which I used to create a laser-induced plasma right around eye level.
Fortunately I had the proper goggles on but was always terrified of catching a stray reflection and blinding myself. Now we live in a world of dirt-cheap high-powered diode lasers, and when I see all the stupid things YouTubers do with them with almost no discussion of proper eye safety, I wince.
As someone whose early scientific career was destroyed by null results, no. No one will publish your negative results. Unless you win the lottery and stumble across a once-in-a-generation negative result (e.g. the Michelson–Morley experiment), any time you spend working on research that yields negative results is essentially wasted.
This article completely glosses over the fact that to publish a typical negative result, you need to have progressed your scientific career to the point where you are able to do so. To get there, you need piles of publications, and since publishing positive results is vastly easier than publishing negative ones, everyone is incentivized to not waste time on the negative ones. You either publish or you perish, after all.
Simply put, within the current framework of how people actually become scientists and do research, there is no way to solve the 'file drawer' problem. You might see an occasional graduate student find something unusual enough to publish, or an already-tenured professor with enough freedom to spend the time submitting their manuscript to 20 different journals, but the vast majority of scientists are going to drop any research avenue that doesn't immediately yield positive results.
I also wish there were ways to publicly acknowledge (and hopefully support) those who spend years of their lives working towards PhDs they never finish. For many it is a deeply private loss, with so few people knowing what happened and even fewer understanding the biting sense of personal failure you can feel.
I never made any sort of announcement when I left, and so had very little closure. Graduate school just ended and just trying to survive demanded my full attention in other areas. All I have left now is my unfinished dissertation, complete with the acknowledgement section I wrote.
It reads like a eulogy to a life I never had, to the shattered dreams I left behind, and to the naivete of my younger self. Perhaps there is some poetic value in there, but no one but myself will ever read it now. When it finally disappears it will, appropriately, be in a manner similar to how my failed PhD ended, with no one noticing and no one mourning its passing.
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.