[whathappenedto]

I guess this is one aspect of academia that seems to be more humane than corporations. Faculty advisers and universities have interests that are aligned with their graduate students. When the students do great research and win awards, the adviser and university gets credit. While there are of course horror stories when they don't get along, academia at least still believes in investing in people, and not just using them for the product of their work.

A corporation would never take a new grad, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of 1:1 time to teach and mentor them, put that person's name front and center on all the products they've worked on, and celebrate when that person moves up to another company.

[jamez1]

Academia relies on students to exist, the students are the customer not the workers - so the power is a lot more in favor of the grad student, not that academia itself is any more noble or humane.

I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.

[whathappenedto]

I'm not sure how you're making the distinction between customer and workers. I'm talking about graduate students here, particularly research-producing Ph.D. students.

I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.

My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.