The baby boom and Sputnik-inspired fear of the Soviets combined to create high demand for professors in the 1950s and 1960s. The federal government poured money into universities during those decades, and virtually anyone who finished a Ph.D. could find a berth on a faculty. If you attended college in the 1980s or 1990s, your occasionally incompetent professors were probably hired in Sputnik's shadow. In many fields, demand for additional faculty dried up by the 1980s, making the Ph.D. taxi driver a staple of the parental cautionary tale.