Universities are failing to boost economic growth
economist.com
economist.com
A USC neuroscientist is now under suspicion of manipulating clinical trial data for a drug his company is developing. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neurosc...
A food scientist at Cornell got canned for p-hacking. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/co...
And so on.
First view, that high education must be right (now some countries already formalized guaranteed free high education), and second view, that high education is just another service, which should be regulated by free market (sure, as free as possible).
And this is competition of views. Will see who win.
BTW, I live in Ukraine, country at big war, and we have claimed free high education (yes, it is already partially paid, but still exists possibilities to attend free courses and got free diploma).
And what I see, Ukrainian almost free education is total disaster, few years ago few East countries cancelled practice of automatic acceptance of Ukrainian diploma, because of low quality.
Second issue, we learned from teachers, that Universities will develop new technologies and especially new defenses for country (in exchange for financing them from public resources), but at the moment (two years of war, all science workers have privileges), see nothing, just zero.
That is a nauseating aberration to me.
Anecdotally, the problem was that the university pretty much stopped developing the IP long before anyone was really interested in monetizing it. Either the university needed to do a lot more legwork to reduce the risk to the person taking the IP or companies/entrepreneurs would need to be willing to take far more risk than they currently do.
The business types had come into the program expecting a business problem and left the presentation with a technical problem and the program chose people before problems, so you had people with no specific background in those things as the technicals.
> In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone.
With that experience in mind, this explanation makes the most sense. I have academic friends. I read all sorts of wacky research online. Off the top of my head, most in the sciences have plausible areas of application. But who does the in between stuff?
Whoever slips through the cracks.
>The golden age of the corporate lab then came to an end when competition policy loosened in the 1970s and 1980s.
Even more significant was the way the dollar quickly lost half its value during fewer years than the full decade.
Nobody could afford anything near what they needed to carry on without devastating cutbacks, and research across-the-board was set back decades from which it still might not recover.
Universities were where you were supposed to become professional researchers, if you had the natural inclination and could be admitted, and prove your abilities during academic projects. In the 1960's Gatorade was recognized as an anomaly by being invented at Florida, when people in general still expected things like that to be developed by consumer product companies.
This was traditionally most young professionals' last time to seriously pursue research without having a practical application, once they got into industry the commercialization possibilities and aspects formed a completely different foundation to build a creative career on, compared to what little could be expected from a few years of formal education in a purely academic environment.
You were supposed to graduate up to the "real world" where companies were much better funded than universities and the majority of a research career was spent under the umbrella of a profitable corporation, which naturally contributes to an economy like it is supposed to do.
Too bad companies couldn't afford that any more, it was decimated so quickly and regretfully that the only realistic widespread attitude was telling themselves it was "only temporary", and they'll pick up where they left off when "things get back to normal".
But prices never came back down and the value of the dollar never recovered, just a few bubbles burst. But it was essential for financial interests to make it easier for most of the lighter-than-air delicate things like that to stay afloat longer or there would have been an even worse collapse.
Barely afloat for so long is not the kind of thing where very many people or companies are going to be able to afford research ever again.
The Nixon Recession was brutal, and the Reagan Recession just put the nails in the coffin economically for many tens of millions more whose continued hard work would have otherwise built generational wealth orders of magnitude more than it turned out. For those that recovered at all.
But you knew that part.
Right now tens of millions have rapidly been set back decades just from the inflation of the last few years, and that's not even "runaway" inflation.
Companies were folding left and right, others laying off thousands and jettisoning anything just to stay afloat.
After Gatorade, more and more universities did try and come up with marketable things, and really do have more than 50 years of dramatically more numerous commercial items emerging from the firm academic foundation. But nothing compared to what industrial researchers accomplished economically during 50 years in the 20th century.
And this is one of the reasons.
Researcher or not, you can work your butt off for decades but can't really contribute much to the economy if the dollar isn't worth that much any more.
It took years of pressure from other teams before Gatorade was finally available to them and the public, nobody thought it was going to fly off the shelf.
It exceeded everyone's expectations from the athletes and scientists to the salesmen and marketers. That is something that can come straight out of the university?
When you plan to make lots of bucks, it's already spent before you make it, whether you make it or not.
But if you just come up with something(s) that is outstanding for its intended purpose, and it gains fair recognition, you can end up with more money than you dreamed possible.
Dr. Cade was not trying to contribute to the economy in the original effort.
When Ukraine is different, but we have very same troubles - we learned that Universities should make us new technologies, and why I said about war - new defensive technologies (or offensive if you wish), but they not do what they should, and we are defenseless because of this.
But we have not tough anti-monopoly laws any time. But we seen few successful commercial scientific entities, and near nothing from Universities, except propaganda, very similar to aggressive religious.
I think, answer is easy (at least for Ukraine) - our Universities become shelters of what they named "pure science". And scientists think themselves as monks of these sanctuaries, and totally avoid to work.
As a 3rd party you are basically browsing the leftovers.
Dijkstra never missed.
Because that seems to be the most vibrant sector of the academic world nowadays: ever more administrators.
This assumption is truly horrible. Capitalism has absorbed one of the last bastions of educational development and repurpose it for its unlimited growth hunger.
Reminds me of the popular idea of schools focused more on developing factory worker traits than good humans.
The average time to graduate is longer. More people drop out with higher debt loads and higher rates of interest on those debts.
Tons and tons of opportunity costs lost because we make a kid pay 4000$ to take a single class in a language he won’t learn and if he did won’t use.
It is a scam and has been since about 2000 when the converted to this entrepreneur nonsense for professors. Mostly just made everyone into a bullshitter.