That magazine factoid has a coupla primary corollaries. First, if you're curious about why something is so or how something works or what anybody who's ever published a thought thinks about anything one might think of, then probably somebody knows and has written a dissertation on it.
Second, you encounter people with Ph.D.s everywhere you go. Some of the more forward-thinking universities probably have as a final requirement for Ph.D.s in some fields, principally the humanities, an ability to enunciate clearly when saying "Do you want fries with that?"
Who, if anyone, reads all these dissertations? Well, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to know that: people who are working on doctoral dissertations of their own of course! In fact, much of the work of writing a dissertation is figuring out if someone has already done what you're trying to do (at 65K a year, probably so) and if you can get your degree before someone on your committee finds out that you're reinventing the wheel.
The indispensable aid in these matters for both the graduate student and his or her committee is UMI. UMI's name is initials only now, the full name having been derived from a obsolescent technology (University Microfilms [inc.? International? I don't remember]). UMI used to be owned by Xerox and based in Ann Arbor, but now it's part of Proquest. Proquest says you can get 2,000,000 dissertations and theses from them in some form or other, mine among them. And the "UMI microfilm vault" has "5.5 billion page images.... Every year we add another 37 million images of contemporary information."
In Laputa (Gulliver's
Travels, Part III) there is a computer that puts together words in every
possible order in order to generate every possible sentence, so as to attain
thereby all possible human knowledge (see this description).
In some of the humanities, all we have is words. This is particularly true in
theology, since our principal focus of study does not like to have his picture
taken. Hence "Welcome to Laputa" is one of the signs you might well see hanging over the entrance
to your graduate school. The other two popular choices are
"Arbeit macht frei" and "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Depending on just
how crazy are the professors you'll be dealing
with.Now a mystery: If we have so much schoolin', how come we're so stupid? Somebody has probably written a dissertation on that.