[bshanks]

I propose one simple reform. The grant-giving institutions are currently (in the aggregate) spending $X of money per year to pay the salary of various people. Some of these people are employed as tenured professors, some as non-yet-tenured tenure track professors, some as postdocs, some as students. The salary of the postdocs and students (if any) is coming entirely from the $X, the salary of the professors is coming partly from interest on the schools' endowments. The number of postdocs and students is (almost) directly proportional to $X.

The proposal: the grant-giving institution instead earmark Z% of $X for endowing new tenured professor chairs at the schools.

This reduces the ratio of (postdocs + students) per professor. In the extreme case, if all institutions set Z=100%, there would be only professors and no students or postdocs; the number of professors would be less than the number of professors+postdocs+students is today, but this number would be growing at a substantially faster rate (there will be some critical value of Z, large but <100%, such that the the number of students funded is roughly equal to or slightly greater than the replacement rate of retiring professors). Note that this is not all-or-nothing; you can incrementally convince one grant-giving institution at a time to implement this reform, with Z set at various levels, and see incremental benefits.