Basically, the entire premise is stupid. We are adding a few thousand highly skilled people into the workforce. There's no way that's a problem.
CMU is a great university. I image there are 2-3 PhD students at the top 50 school who will be looking to work there. CMU might even be able to lure away a couple other professors from the top 25 who'd love the chance to rebuild the program.
In truth, I am completely ambivalent as to the value of NCAA; but I do not believe that professors and students have any obligation to be 'loyal' to university research labs, as the universities pay the researchers as little as possible, and would be more than happy to sell the researchers down the river for a small increase in their endowment or government grants.
Universities also produce lots of things that people actually use directly in the form of Free or Open Source Software. BSD, GNU, Mach, etc. Many of the architects of the Internet were working at universities too. It's not fair to dismiss them as you did.
And some companies publish plenty of research. Microsoft is very impressive. Google good but less. Apple not so much.
I'm not bashing the act; government wasn't getting the job done.
I would rather see something like a prize system in tech, and medical discoveries. For instance, we need a cure for a certain disease. The government could offer, say a 1 billion dollar prize, to the first company that solves the problem.
The discovery would then be required to open sourced to U.S. companies? Hell, it might prevent some companies from relocating overseas to avoid taxes? So instead of outrageous drug prices, generic drug companies would bring the price down due to competition?
(a little off topic, but relevant? Maybe not relevant towards gadgets, but relative to expensive medical cures?)
There are a number of challenges with the "prize" system. Who judges whether or not an invention qualifies for the prize? Things aren't black and white in biotech. If you're drug cures a disease but has bad side effects, does that deserve a prize? What if you don't cure the disease, but you massively reduce the burden of the disease. Do you deserve a prize?
Second, the prizes would have to be much larger than $1B. Gilead (who sells the hepatitis C cure Sovaldi and Harvoni) sold $5B worth of the drugs in Q2 of this year. Their margins are likely >50%. Even relatively small drug have NPVs of several billion.
The other issue with the prize system is it makes the 2nd to market impossible. It's a disincentive to competition. Under the old system you could have two, similar drugs sold and they battle it out for market share. Even if you split the market it can be profitable. Under the prize system, if you're 2nd to market, well, tough, you get absolutely nothing. A lot of drug development is incremental. Lipitor was the 5th statin to market (and the best out of all of them). With the prize system you'd get one drug and that's it.
That's characterizing industry as the more advanced form of academia (NFL/NBA are more advanced than NCAA). But that's not really true. Even at the companies with the most well-funded research teams, the actual kinds of research being done in industry are often different from the sorts of research those same individuals would be doing in academia.
And while it doesn't make the headlines as often (for obvious reasons), it's hardly unusual for people in industry to return to research in academic institutions.
We don't need to think of academia and industry as zero-sum, no, but we also don't need to think of academia as merely a stepping stone to industry, even if that's how it is used by some people.
It's not a perfect analogy, but I think he was mostly trying to hit on the amateur/professional split.
Right, and I'm saying that it's inaccurate to claim that either academia or industry research is 'amateur'. They're both professional, just with different funding sources and different goals.
Not by Silicon Valley standards, but they did receive actual money. These were faculty and employees, not students.
Ph.D. students don't get "poached", they "graduate or drop out" and then "get jobs". The people being poahced are professors and scientists in permanent positions.
I think people tend to under-estimate a full professor's salary at a top CS deapartment.
The average salary of an associate professor at CMU is $138,000, full professor $194,000. Before consulting, money from research spinoff startups, etc.
Even not adjusting for cost of living, I'm not sure how that's "not by Silicon Valley standards".
And adjusted for cost of living, Pittsburgh is in one of the cheapest cities in the US (e.g., it's not uncommon for CMU grad students to buy houses in reasonable areas of the city on their $30-40k/yr PhD stipends).
I'm not sure about non-faculty research scientists and so on, but I would imagine the $50-$100 range is about right. Which, again, adjusted for cost of living, is right there with SV.
Edit: E.g., according to the obviously-take-with-a-grain-of-salt CNN COL calculator, the average CMU professor would have to make $324,000 to have a comparable salary in SF. So I guess "not by SV standards" is probably actually accurate, just probably not in the way you meant
Even so, there's a PhD student in my program who bought a house last year, and I thought seriously about it myself in my second year. Housing truly is cheap in Pittsburgh.
24 sounds like you're excluding the summer months?
I know in Math and other fields it's pretty common for "no guaranteed summer funding" to be actually meaningful words. But Most CS PhD students at top schools have no problem pulling a summer stipend, making 30 common. I never knew anyone in grad school who had trouble getting summer funding if they wanted it.
And usually CS grad students opt for at least a couple internships; even low-paying CS grad student internships can have 2x+ compensation compared with the phd stipend.
In any case, if a CS grad student at CMU/Stanford/MIT/Berkely is making less than 30k, it's purely by choice or really bad planning/luck.
That would be crazy money in Pittsburgh. Are you sure that figure is accurate?
1. I don't have first-hand information about CMU, I got the data from here:
http://www.american-school-search.com/faculty/carnegie-mello...
Other data indicate that the six figure range is definitely accurate for CS associate and full professorships at research universities:
https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey...
And it's not insane to assume that the top schools pay 30-50k more.
2. It is an average. Lots of compounding factors: Was the person running the program a Full Professor? (Most professors are not full professors, and a lot of faculty aren't professors. Note the 50k+ discrepancy between assistant and full professors.) Did he have a research lab and how does CMU factor grants into compensation? Etc. I don't know the specific details about that particular person (or even CMU), but I also don't have any reason to doubt the numbers given above.
They don't say anything about how they get their data, which is a little odd.
Yeah, the numbers on the second page seem more realistic to me. They give more like $95k for a full professor -- which, after Silicon Valley adjustment and the extra $30-$50k you mention is more like $130k-$175k for a full professor. That's much closer to what I've seen than $195k.
So I think the first site is just wrong in how they're estimating, at least for CMU.
Those numbers are FOR CMU, and they are the only numbers we have for CMU. So I'm not really sure how this gets resolved.
> They give more like $95k for a full professor
No, they don't. They say $111,262 (see CS, not overall). Average. (And that's just salary -- a CS professor at a top school has plenty of built-in options for making money on the side.) So you're are assuming that one of the top CS schools in the country pays 15k below national avage.