[AmericanBlarney]

While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).

[jltsiren]

Bringing value to the university does not really make sense as a concept.

A university is fundamentally a community of scholars. The services the wider society expects from the community vary from generation to generation, but some things remain constant. The university as an organization does not have any goals apart from survival and prestige. It's the least important part of the university. The assumption is that the scholars deal with such highly specialized matters that generalist administrators have no competence in setting the actual goals.

Universities educate a lot of people these days, because the society believes that learning specialized topics from scholars and researchers is more prestigious than learning them from teachers or industry professionals. The society also gives plenty of research funding to the scholars, even though it's questionable whether the results actually benefit the society providing the funds, especially in smaller countries. It's just that you need research to have a community of scholars these days, and such communities tend to generate a lot of activity around them, with clear cultural and economic benefits in the long term.

Whether a person is underpaid or whether their salary is competitive does not depend on the job they do but on the other jobs they could do. If you want to hire a person who could make $500k somewhere else, the competitive salary is $500k. If you can't pay that (maybe the job only creates $300k of value), you have to offer something else if you want to hire them. Universities have traditionally offered stable positions in a community of independent professionals.

[willis936]

It depends on the grant. Most grants do not let you take ownership of the research. Nearly all publicly funded research contracts require the results to be public domain.

[dekhn]

researchers do not retain commercial rights to their work, the university does. Sometimes the university allows the researcher a pittance of the license royalties, or make it easier for the researcher to start a company that licenses the technology.