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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Academia simply does not have the funding to pay wages driven up. Tech pockets are deep comparatively. Is that good or bad? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think it's more a call for private industry to run the equivalent of Bell Labs/Xerox PARC as a substitute for academia.

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It seems like private industry will win in anything that makes money or if it wants to fund something. For everything else, there's academia...until it becomes successful and then private industry wins again. I think that's okay too as hurdles exist on both sides. I did my first government grant recently and was blown away by the time and effort it takes. It's not a super efficient system.

I agree that both the government and academia are for the things private industry won't pay for.

Shrug, it’s a market. Try offering 4 day work week or 10 weeks PTO then.

I think you underestimate how rigid government is. Nearly everything is fixed. hours, location, salary raises, retirement plans, etc. They are very safe but rarely the most compensated in anything except intrinsic benefits (There are a lot of veteran programs, for instance) and job security.

The main story here isn't so much the headline as it is acedemia asking for more funding.

University football and basketball coaches are also government employees. They have no problem receiving millions of dollars in compensation.

Some of these institutions are extremely rich, especially the type of academic institutions companies like OpenAI are most eager to recruit from.

That doesn't really matter. Nobody wants to pay more simply because they are rich. They may want to pay more if they stand to gain something from the investment. AI research is a poor investment for a university, because it's expensive and highly competitive. The university will likely gain more prestige by investing the money in other fields.

Interesting viewpoint since a university should be spending money on the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not profit.

The whole notion that universities should be profiting in some personal form from research conducted at and for the institution is a rot on modern academia.

An investment is an investment, regardless of whether it is expected to yield money, prestige, or knowledge. If a dollar spent on biological research produces more knowledge than a dollar spent on AI research, it makes more sense to spend that dollar on biological research.

It is, but unfortunately, pure knowledge, shared freely, isn’t going to be able to pay the bills. Academia is a world separate from the rest of society sometimes, but it still exists in a world that runs on money. Food, power bills, taxes, rent; they all need to get paid. Even that big institutions like Harvard with unfathomably large endowments still have bills to pay and that’s the mindset that people still operate under. If they were able to make a new society, free of money then they could avoid the need to profit. But we tried that and human nature got in the way. so we’re left with the unfortunate reality that universities do see a need to profit. I don’t disagree that it’s a rot but I don’t see how it could be any other way.

Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta each individually have more cash & equivalents on hand than the richest school Harvard has in its entire endowment ~50B [2] (most of which is not liquid)

[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

And yet universities can afford to pay millions of dollars to football and basketball coaches.

because those programs directly generate high eight to 9 figures a year in revenue, and also drive alumni donations & new admissions.

They have more cash than most countries

>Academia simply does not have the funding to pay wages driven up.

This isn't true at all. I know people in academia who have to be convinced by their unions to not teach for free during disputes. Past about the 150k mark, The only thing left to optimize is how much you like to do your job. You couldn't pay me more than that do do something I like less.

Private sector comp can easily top $500k-$1M/year. That’s a challenge for academia.

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