[stillsut]

Certain elite grad program dept's might have best-in-world knowledge in a particular niche e.g. ETH Zurich has these acrobatic indoor drones better than even NASA / US Military / Boeing right now. If I were doing a make or break indoor drone startup, it might be worth it to pay a fresh grad to clone his research environment in my company; an aqui-hire of sorts. This escalates when two mega corps, like say Alphabet and Apple fund competing indoor drone companies at the same time.

I think self-driving tech has matured past this phase where a only few key university dept's have most of the intellectual capital, but I still here mid-200k figures for freshly minted PhD's from the right school.