I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.

This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.

So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.

Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.