Anybody? I'm sure this is not the case.
> Nobody wants a tenure track job because their kids will go to college for free and give up other work opportunities for that carrot.
You conveniently left out the job for life part which is a huge part of why most professors want a TT job. There are other bonuses of course but "can't be fired" is a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. Hence the couple hundred applications for every open TT role.
> The last problem academia will have is not enough people applying to tenure track jobs.
Well we're talking about what would happen if there was no tenure track so I guess this is pedantically true. But I'm not saying we'll suddenly have open professorial roles with no applicants, I'm saying maybe without tenure as a carrot we'll go from 200 applicants for each job to something more reasonable like 30-50.
Also, age makes you better at doing jobs but worse at getting them. You do not want to be on the open labor market after 50, especially if you’re specialized and probably (possibly undiagnosed) neurodivergent.
This might be true in something like software development (I don't strictly think it is but I'm at least open to the argument) but it's definitely not true in academia.
People want old professors. If anyone I'd expect it to be easier for a 50, 55, 60 year old professor to get a TT role than a 29 year old with a wet ink PhD.
I think that most people who haven't spent time doing a PhD, doing post-docs, etc. have very misguided ideas about how the academic world works, and their notion of "professorship" comes mainly from movies.
Especially at R1 universities, researchers are hired primarily (90%+) for their research; teaching is very secondary. The "genius discovery" is the improbable outcome of their research; the most likely outcome is a substantial scholarship in some field, which is built up over time, initially individually (PhD, postdocs) and then collaboratively.
I spent ~15 years in academia between PhD, post-docs, and prestigious fellowships. I have never heard anybody saying they wanted a tenure-track job because of the institution of tenure (thousands of post-docs have objectively no chance of landing a tenure-track job, and they are not even looking outside of the ivory tower) or because after getting the job, they cannot be fired. That's a huge misrepresentation of the motives of the vast majority of academics.
"I'm saying maybe without tenure as a carrot we'll go from 200 applicants for each job to something more reasonable like 30-50." - I don't know the answer, but I would bet one would see 190 applicants instead of 200.