[hammock]

>There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options.

Good for the PhDs; bad for the schools, who must now find more funding to retain the same level of talent, thus making future academic research (e.g. the next gen of robots) more challenging to accomplish

[meatysnapper]

Maybe they can divert money from their athletic departments to pay their PhDs $20k more per year?

[relaxatorium]

This is not an argument that applies much to, say, the mighty Carnegie Mellon Tartans.

[rsfern]

Even at schools with actual athletics programs and budgets, most PhD students are paid with grant money won by their advisors, or through government fellowships. Not by the university. (I'm a PhD student at CMU paid with NSF grant money.)

Also of note, CMU just introduced a new presidential fellowship to fund undergraduate and graduate students in all fields [1].

1: http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/pres...

[plonh]

You are assuming that there is a talent shortage and that universities know how to rank the talent. Not really true, considering how many PhD seats there are and how few faculty seats there are.