Can High-Tech Academia Survive Silicon Valley's Talent Binge? 137
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon had one of the most capable robotics research centers in the world. Then, Uber hired away dozens of workers in a frantic push to jump start development of autonomous driving technology, which left CMU reeling. Now the NY Times asks whether such high-tech labs can continue to exist; Silicon Valley seems ready to flood such organizations with money whenever a vital new technology is almost ripe. "Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. When researchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; they usually can't publish what they discover — or even talk about it over drinks with former colleagues. ... [Also], the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, ''basic'' problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money."
If they want to make money (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If they want to make money (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's really no downside for them either as if they get tired of Uber they'll likely have no problem getting a new university position as they'll be bringing a lot of experience to the table, never mind potential connections to industry that can be beneficial to a university.
Re:If they want to make money (Score:4)
It's almost as if different universities have different standards. CMU doesn't pay world class robotic professors the same as the local community college pay the CS 101 teacher..
Re: If they want to make money (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Because there are elves that create lesson plans and homework marks itself.
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Elves otherwise known as grad students, yes.
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OP talked about his wife, who was a public school teacher. They don't get a lot of grad student assistants.
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OP talked about his wife, who was a public school teacher. They don't get a lot of grad student assistants.
OP is a liar. Or a fool, if he really is an "Engineer" who makes half what a public school teacher makes and works 80 hours weeks for 18 months stints.
He probably failed Eng 101, slops burgers and whines about the "fat cat" teachers unions. Vote Trump!
Idiot.
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Apparently you value your wife less than a bowl of cornflakes. Like that will end well for you.
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Why doesn't he work a few extra hours so he can have his own place instead of living with such a retarded fuckwad?
P.S. why don't you?
Re:If they want to make money (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I believe any of those numbers. A decade ago, I think I got $3k–$4k (I forget the exact number) for teaching a 10-week CS class as an adjunct. I think they're paying closer to $6k per quarter per class now. The only problem is, most folks only get to teach one class per quarter (at most), and you can't live on $18k per year in the Bay Area, so college adjunct faculty end up taking two or three jobs just to make ends meet. The problem isn't the pay per hour so much as the lack of sufficient hours. That and the fact that most classes involve spending lots of time outside of class grading papers, preparing lectures, etc. Three classes could easily be close to a full 40-hour work week, depending on the class. So even if you could manage three classes at $6k per class, you'd be working full-time for $54k per year (assuming you can't teach summer school). Again, you can't live on that out here.
As for your current salary, that isn't much higher than what I'm making at a startup, but I'm working roughly a 40-hour week, give or take. Where I work, we manage our project goals sensibly, we don't over-commit, and we deliver a quality product that is used by over a million people (and by about a quarter million in any given day). If you're really working 100 hours per week, your management is incompetent. No competent manager would work people 100 hours in a week, or even 60, because the productivity of programmers starts to diminish after barely twenty. By 60 hours, you're getting less done in a week than if you only worked 40 hours. By 100 hours, you'd get more work done by coming in for a single eight-hour day and spending the other four sitting around doing nothing.
You see, 100 hours per week, if it is a 5-day week, means that even if you have a cot to sleep on in the office, you're still getting less than 4 hours sleep. If it is a 7-day week, you would still have to live within a few blocks of the office to get eight hours of sleep, without doing anything else but working. Besides being very psychologically damaging, that is physically damaging, putting workers at dramatically elevated risk of premature death due to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and pretty much every other disease you can think of. And on top of that, working so close to when you go to sleep would cause severe sleep disturbance, so even if everyone somehow managed to do that for more than two or three weeks without completely burning out and saying "screw this" and spending most of the day goofing off, they would still not be able to function at more than a fraction of their normal mental capacity.
Even menial jobs like factory work require better concentration than can reasonably be achieved with a 60-hour work week, much less a 100-hour work week. There's simply no way anyone remotely competent as a manager could ask for such things of employees, so if your management is doing so, you should start looking for another job right now. Because that's not the way the Silicon Valley normally works—not even at startups... except maybe game companies.
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There are a lot of those companies, and the names of those companies keep changing, because they keep going out of business after two or three years. After all, it doesn't take long at those levels of abuse before most of the competent engineers start looking for other options, leaving mostly the people who can't find a job anywhere else. Such mass departures are usually a harbinger of doom for the companies involved.
If you want to find a job that doesn't suck, look for a pre-IPO company that has been ar
Re: If they want to make money (Score:4, Insightful)
This wouldn't be a problem if enough public money was being put into basic research. I doubt 1960's NASA or the Manhatten Project had trouble keeping top talent. Increasing this funding also solves any public and private STEM shortages since kids will follow the money even without manipulative iniatives to get kids into science and programming.
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True, if by "political-theists" you mean the crony capitalists in both parties. "Basic research" is basically just funded by the NSF and the NIH, and they make up maybe a quarter of all federal R&D spending. If we wanted more basic research, it would be easy to shift funding from DOD, NASA, DOE, and USDA over to NSF and NIH.
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This wouldn't be a problem if enough public money was being put into basic research. I doubt 1960's NASA or the Manhatten Project had trouble keeping top talent. Increasing this funding also solves any public and private STEM shortages since kids will follow the money even without manipulative iniatives to get kids into science and programming.
The public sector at the time of the manhattan project was still mostly farming; there was no "silicon valley" at that time, and if you were talented, the government and only a handful of large corporations (e.g. IBM) were worth working for. 1960 wasn't a whole lot different, though shortly after that saw the beginnings of the tech boom.
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The [private] sector at the time of the manhattan project was still mostly farming; there was no "silicon valley" at that time, and if you were talented, the government and only a handful of large corporations (e.g. IBM) were worth working for. 1960 wasn't a whole lot different, though shortly after that saw the beginnings of the tech boom.
I completely agree that the private sector in the 1940-1970 was much different than it is now. But that is basically part of my point. Private industry has massively increased spending on R&D over the past 40 years, while the federal government has not. These graphs [nsf.gov] show just how sharply this R&D spending has diverged between private and public sectors. Private R&D spending was only double public spending in 1950, while it is closer to a 10x difference now.
It is a good thing that research done b
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Yeah, 200K a year isn't "poverty" by any stretch of the imagination. And the promise of tenure sweetens the deal.
Plus as long as you can attract funding, you've got more freedom than you do in the real world. From what I can see, Google et al doesn't say "here's a boatload of money, do whatever you want" - they say "here's a boatload of money to keep working on Specific Project X under our auspices". That's probably nice, for a while, but what happens when you want to look at something different but can't s
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Part of the issue is that all university departments have a mix of people, some of whom have skills tha
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Washington state salaries are all public record and easily findable, if you want to check what EE and CSE faculty make in our state.
We have assistant professors making $100-130K. Plus if they have research funds they can do an A/B plan which can bump it up another 15-20 percent (which I do not believe would show up as part of their state-provided salary). Full professors are mostly in the 200K-260K range, and also can do the A/B thing if they wish.
Note that some show up with lower values - these generally w
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Given how trivially easy it is to find both the names of CSE and EE faculty at places like the University of Washington, as well as the availability of state salary lookup tools (like the one from the Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper) - it's pretty obvious that salaries you can find by looking up specific people trumps some generic survey article.
astroturfage (Score:1, Insightful)
This 'story' is just an attempt to create the illusion of a shortage of AI researchers. I think it's pretty clear that a) there is no such shortage, and b) if there were, then colleges, as teaching institutions, would be uniquely able to deal with it themselves.
Re:astroturfage (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, it's like everything else in the US economy: the cream of the crop (real or apparent) get huge options and money, while the rest grovel and scrape for Door #2.
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the cream of the crop get huge options
If you were planning an economy, that's kind of what you'd want, right? The ones with most potential getting the most capability to use their potential?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not the concept that people have trouble with, its the particular gradient we have now that is the problem... Far too top heavy
How are you measuring it? What do you consider to be a reasonable gradient?
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From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs.
That's fine until you have provided for everyone's needs. After that, how do you allocate the surplus?
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That's a moot point as we're not providing for everybody's needs at the present
You don't see people starving to death. The only thing you could argue is we aren't providing for healthcare, but even that is a weak argument because poor people have medicare.
In America, even people on welfare have television. That's not a need.
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How about we teach them to work and give them a job instead, so they can decide if they want a TV for themselves.
Why it's top-heavy (Re:astroturfage) (Score:2)
Part of the problem is that it takes experience to get experience. There are only a few top positions that have access to plenty of resources. Thus, only a few get a chance to learn how to work in such conditions where they have a lot of leverage, meaning those with the talent AND experience leveraging a lot of resources are very limited in number and thus highly sought after. You can't find that combo with a written test.
Warren Buffett can take bigger risks than medium-sized investors, and uses that capab
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Nope, absolutely not. It's grotesquely inefficient and in this case we're talking about valuable research getting taken out of the 'market' by pockets of exaggerated capital and relegated to probably little better than a pyramid scheme, a high-tech Enron built of nothing but stock valuation based upon willingness to break laws to 'disrupt'. It's a lot easier to break stuff than it is to build lasting structures. Academia and the mass of scientific discovery is such a lasting structure, and corporate pillagi
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The ones with most potential getting the most capability to use their potential?
You are talking about something besides potential.
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The tricky part is that very few of the newly minted PhDs have anything to do with AI.
They'll start working on the next thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this talent was started and cultivated out of the 2004 DARPA project. That was a decade ago. The technology is finally ready for prime time. It's no longer "10 years in the future".
What academia needs to do is figure out what needs to be done in 2025, not 2015.
A lot of R&D follows a pretty repeatable pattern.
Self driving cars are now in phase 2. Google, Uber, and Apple are going to push hard to get the first cars out the door ASAP. In 2 decades what was once PhD level math and controls classes will be an introductory class for freshmen.
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Generally agree, except the last comment. The technology developed from the PhD level math and controls classes will show up in undergrad courses, but the math and controls theory won't. Essentially more black boxes will be added to the tech development toolset.
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Any academic promoting a project for 10 years into the future will get shot down by the bean counters now employed by funding agencies. The stupidity of "what will it do for the next quarter's report" has infiltrated the government funding agencies, DoD, and private "research" funders.
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What academia needs to do is figure out what needs to be done in 2025, not 2015.
In my view the research that needs to be done at academia, is the stuff that has no immediate return on investment, and will thus never be done by industry.
Some research might never pay off, some might take a century.
That's the research that should be done with public funding, because the biggest breakthroughs have been from fundamental research, but their return on investment periods are too long for industry to ever bother.
I get the concern, but .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately, part of me is screaming "Good! Who cares?!" inside.
That's because educational institutions should be staffed with people who have the burning desire to teach other people. It's not for everyone, but there's a big difference between the person who is really interested in a subject, and the person who is really interested in sharing knowledge about the subject with as many others as possible.
If an entire lab full of faculty was poached by corporations, that tells me those people were more interested in big paychecks and/or being a part of a commercial project than in teaching.
It's a big mistake for a college or university to go down the road of trying to pay more and more, to "compete" with businesses for staff. That just raises the price of tuition and puts the education out of reach of more people. Precisely what the schools should NOT be about. Maybe they need to consider more flexible options to let experts in these industries come in and teach 1 or 2 classes, part-time? Otherwise, maybe they're getting too specific with what they're teaching, if their workers keep getting pulled right out for very specific corporate projects. Seems to me you can run a technology or science lab that teaches all sorts of concepts useful to a person interested in building an autonomous vehicle, without running autonomous vehicle research labs themselves.
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That's because educational institutions should be staffed with people who have the burning desire to teach other people.
That's one way to look at it. Another is that educational institutions should be staffed with the best people in their field, and only accept students who have a burning desire to learn. If the students need someone to spoon-feed them information, they can go to University of Phoenix or something.
That is how elite schools should be. In practice it gets hard to find the students who actually have a burning desire to learn, instead of just a good GPA.
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I think you're confusing the undergrad and graduate parts of the house. These professors probably are doing research and then teaching and advising graduate students. Graduate school is more about independent thought than the hear and repeat of the undergraduate experience.
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That's because educational institutions should be staffed with people who have the burning desire to teach other people.
So what kind of institution is a "research university"?
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It's something other than an educational university, it appears.
The way it is now, the 'best' academics hang out as far away as they can from the unwashed undergrads. And yet the undergrads pay a high tuition that funds said academics.
Perhaps there's more to work at a University than hanging out in the labs and research spaces that the undergrads aren't even allowed to enter.
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Hah! Of course it does, and researchers spend so much of their time chasing grants just for the fun of it.
Our research group got very little money from the university. Tenure salaries, maybe, and the occasional TA/RA position, but of course everyone was required to teach, self-funded or not.
You don't know what you're talking about if you think university is only about teaching undergrads. It isn't, and shouldn't be.
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A burning desire to teach people generally comes with a burning desire to not do cutting edge research or be able to find the time for it. So following your formula for unis, the U.S. can expect to relinquish any scientific lead and generally devolve into a bunch of followers who cannot do anything new.
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Well, this or it might tell you that society has been distorted to the point where you WILL NOT SURVIVE unless you join the race to the bottom, doing your work for something like Uber because they fully intend to starve and kill anything else in the sector you're training for.
This distorts the 'market' for your intellectual labor.
In a world where you can choose what you're going to do, people have a certain flexibility and can opt for a humbler, cozier existence doing what they care about. If pockets of cap
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Ordinarily, yes, it works out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Usually private industry can outbid universities in terms of salary but lags behind in terms of academic freedom, access to talented colleagues.
However, usually there are sufficient (good) academics who opt for a poor (typically for post-docs and junior assistant professors), modest (assistant to associate professors) to adequate (associate and full professors) salary (depending on whether or where you can get tenure) in an academic atmosphere over a more highly paid job where you're just another employee.
It mostly works out in the long run. Of course there are blips when you get patented ideological nutcases like gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and even core staff are pushed out. But mostly it evens out. Even for valuable tech subjects.
Very good professors (full, associate, and assistant) often manage to combine academic work and consultancy (especially at technological institutes). Especially when they aren't bogged down by their teaching workload.
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Pretty much all of my profs did consultancy on the side - some were owners of a business that had its labs on campus.
That was in England. Is this not allowed in the US?
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It's generally allowed in the US. But for it to be worthwhile (i.e. to get interesting projects) you have to offer something interesting. Various consultancies have people of the calibre of (run of the mill) assistent profs. under contract.
Such consultancies also offer support services. E.g. people able to do the grunt work in projects (e.g. datacollection, production of drawings, coding up solutions and algorithms in end-user proof software, writing documentation, training, a helpdesk). Stu
maybe its a sign of our values as a society (Score:1)
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It's really not about simple social value, or people in general being motivated only by money.
Mostly it's about the ability of local concentrations of capital to distort the situation so that there's a stick as well as the carrot: you can't just urge people to make more money, you have to also be able to burn everything else to the ground and salt the earth and force people to go your way.
This is what happens now. Stuff gets 'disruptive' and jobs are wiped out and it becomes literally impossible to survive
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Basically agree...except "advanced stage capitalism" literally is "endless usury, central banks, interest (kickbacks) on "money" that doesn't even exist, a planned "socialist" economy (state socialist, the pre-Marx socialists all hated Marx too)"
Capitalism ate itself centuries ago, when they learned that:
- all that matters is you make money
- the way to make money is to control the money
- you can get interest on money that doesn't even exist
In general, those are small numbers, but they found that "spending o
That's the dumbest question I've ever read (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Academia is severely threatened right now; but not by better job offers...
Re:That's the dumbest question I've ever read (Score:5, Insightful)
Einstein was a patent clerk for fucks sake.
That really wasn't his preferred employment situation.........but he made the best of it.
people who are that fucking smart are _not_ in it for the money.
People who are smart do smart things, even in bad situations. They make the best of their situation, but they would also prefer to have money. There were plenty of people at the Advanced Institute who went after money, and they were definitely smart.
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Einstein was a patent clerk
No, he wasn't. He had a PhD and was already known as one of the top theoretical physicists in the world when the patent office hired him to be an expert witness (because nobody else at the office understood the patents being challenged, the first involved inertial navigation). He took the job to make some money while waiting for offers from the elite European universities.
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He wasn't "waiting for offers"; his applications for university positions had all been turned down (not a big deal given how young he was). It wasn't until nearly a decade later that he became a professor. He also wasn't an "expert witness" for the patent office, he was a regular employee ("technical expert third class").
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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people who are that fucking smart are _not_ in it for the money
What a stupid remark. Intelligence is not at all related to motive. Furthermore, what would it matter if they were in it for the money? Is, say, a scientific conclusion wrong when it's was reached with the goal of earning money? I conjecture that you just resent the idea of money and think it evil, and are projecting your belief on the heroes that you worship, expecting them to hold the same ideals as you do.
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If only that were true. In reality, the federal budget has been increasing pretty steadily for a long time, and so has the deficit. US R&D funding has remained relatively constant as percentage of GDP and grown substantially in real terms. Public funding for higher education has also been increasing.
That's in contrast to countries like Germany, which really have cut their budget and lowered their debt. Apparently, modern, pr
CMU (Score:2, Informative)
The summary glosses over the character of CMU itself. CMU is a research focused, selective private university that operates in large part from public and private grants and research contracts. It is not a public land-grant university set up to provide education opportunity to the general population. Teaching is a responsibility, but obtaining grant funding, then producing marketable research to obtain more grant funding, is a much bigger priority.
In addition, CMU benefits from patents. Just because
Research dollars means more research (Score:3)
If big business starts poaching smart people, more people will have incentive to get an education. It's not like university research is going away, but there will just be different faces as always. The net gain for society is more R&D and more educated folk.
I probably worked with some of those guys who got in with Uber when I also worked with the self driving car down Carnegie Mellon. Good for them.
Get your head out of your ass (Score:2)
What a terrible problem: your organization dedicated to furthering human knowledge was too successful and now has to train a new crop of employees.
Just to be really clear, places like Carnegie Mellon are not education focused institutions, they're research focused. We are absolutely not talking about people with a passion for classroom work. In the early 1990s, the federal government removed the requirements and incentives for contractors to dedicate significant budget to basic research. In many cases,
It's GREAT when research groups go make products.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at some examples from Stanford University: SUN Microsystems was founded in 1982 as "Stanford University Network" created by Andy Bechtolsheim as a graduate student at Stanford. SUN productized RISC systems, NFS, Unix, etc. Really great stuff. This didn't bother or hurt Stanford one bit, just made it a more attractive place for future entrepreneurs to attend/work for a while.
In the same 1982, Jim Clark was an (associate?) professor at Stanford doing research in 3D graphics, and he split off Stanford and formed Silicon Graphics with his graduate student team (Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Kurt Akeley, etc) that they basically had created without taking any personal risk while working at Stanford. Nothing but great news for Stanford, people FLOCKED to join the university that produced that talented team.
A couple years later in 1984, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were running the Stanford University computer systems and they split off forming Cisco.
A few years later in 1998 Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum, with his Stanford grad student Ed Bugnion, and some others spun up VMware.
The list goes on and on for Stanford alone.
All these really awesome people came up with solid ideas in academia that were applicable in the next few years as viable products, then these people stepped up to form companies and make products I buy and use every day (or I use their descendant products) and these people formed companies that employed a lot of good people (I worked at Silicon Graphics for four really fun years), putting out solid products and making enough money to let some of us save up and do our own startups in time.
Seriously, this is really positive stuff. Why is anybody afraid of a team stepping up and out of academia? Usually it just means the possibility of a product that will make my life better. Heck, succeed or fail, I've seen some of those early guys back in the University system helping out again and finishing their PhDs they started years earlier when they got distracted (Rocky Rhodes, Ed Bugnion, etc). And there always seems to be a flood of new blood feeding up into the University, earlier successes CONTRIBUTE to recruitment to these Universities, it is a selling point that Stanford has produced some great companies.
If Uber grabs up a lot of great people from Carnegie Mellon, a flood of 18 and 22 year olds will flow in to replace them and get trained up. And I say good for EVERYBODY.
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Well, except that if you are half-way through graduate school, you might have just been torpedoed and suffer a multi-year setback. If I recall correctly, CMU had something on the order of US$19M in robotics research grants from various organizations. (19M might not be the right number, but it was around that, or somewhere in the 20's, my memory is fuzzy.) That's funding for a lot of graduate students. Uber hired away PI's representing something like 40% of that. So, you lose your principal investigator,
Isn't most Academia going private after their PhD? (Score:2)
If a deep pockets company buys out the whole research group, that's something else. But even University research teams are smart
Top Universities Attract Top Talent = No Worries (Score:2)
Ask anyone trying to get any academic position at a top tier university, the competition is fierce. At best, the universities are losing established talent only temporarily. The people who left will return, and with their newly acquired industry experience and networks, they will make academic positions even harder to get.
tl;dr - the universities aren't the victims here, new grads and prospective academics are.
Huge surplus of qualified PhDs (Score:2)
Thank you Google Facebook Microsoft (Score:2)
Re:What's the big deal about universities? (Score:5, Insightful)
A university probably is involved in literally everything you mentioned. Especially curing your disease.
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Except for the business schools, you are basically full of shit. Universities (as opposed to teaching colleges) are mainly interested in research and rather esoteric knowledge. The fact that business decided to use them as gatekeepers is the fault of business. In that, they aren't using the knowledge kids get by going to uni but rather they are using unis as weed out programs because they got tired of hiring people who will say anything to get a job. Yes, the sainted proles also bear some responsibility for
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Actually, it's no "fault" at all. A four year college education may only be the equivalent of a few weeks of on-the-job training, but it's a few weeks that the employer doesn't have to pay for, given all the public subsidies of college educations.
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The universities are pretty big on pushing the idea that a university degree is part of the path of landing a good paying job. This resulted in lots of people going to university, flooding the market with people holding degrees. The end result being that businesses started requiring degrees for positions that didn't really need one, pretty much because they could. Even with this, there's still lots of people with degrees who couldn't land a job with it.
This is actually coming back to bit the universities
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Kids, please hold this up as an example as some dumb shit that sucked the corporate cock a little too often and contracted Stockholm syndrome as a result.
Never listen to retards like this. Unchecked corporations will ruin your freedom as surely as any government.
Ignore this advice at your own peril.