That analogy breaks down a little - one of the reasons to lament this is because public universities publish their research for others to consume and build upon. Research within private companies stays inside those companies.
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.
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.
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.