alt Hacker NewsAcademia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
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As someone who has worked in academia for more than 20 years, in four countries, (and now is a professor in a top 3 world institution) I can tell you that it very much depends on where you work. Working conditions depend on the larger and smaller culture. It is a mistake to assume that everyone is living the same experience.
> I'm not sure what the solution is.
Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).
In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.
Yet, the ideas that have thrown incredible amounts of money against them on the open market all have been developed in academia. The current AI craze, the internet, the physics required for chip production, encryption, etc.
more experts would be a good thing, if there was money for them. no point in producing phds if they don't get the resources to do research (including a respectable salary)... as it stands now academia is almost a scam (phd+ level)
I think maybe it suffers from the same problem of the video game industry, that being that there's a never ending supply of people trying to get into the industry that has only the slightest relationship to the demand for such roles.
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.