[glass3]

>Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty.

It's strange that the most intelligent people don't overcome that limit. There are billions of people on earth who could benefit from education to become more productive. A share of that gain could pay for many more 'tenure-tracks', they just wouldn't be called like that.

[pclmulqdq]

It's just purely about the numbers. A professor, in a 50-year career, can produce 100 PhDs from a large research group. At steady state, those 100 PhDs are competing for one professorship slot. Even "unproductive" professors can produce 20 PhDs.

[wongarsu]

I know this heavily depends on the location, but at our university most professors weren't there to teach students. Giving lectures was more like the price of entry, something that has to be done to keep the machine alive. Their actual job and passion was doing research, publishing highly-cited papers, going to conferences, and furthering their and by extension their university's reputation.

It might be different if being a grad student was about giving awesome lectures, but usually it's about doing awesome research; and those that are best at doing and publishing research then get tenure-track.

[martopix]

Being a professor is much, much more about research than about education. You don't normally become a professor because you're good at teaching, nor because you love teaching (or maybe you do, but not only that). This is a bit sad actually, as I am an odd case of an academic that thinks teaching is much more important and even interesting than research. It's changing a bit in that positions that are research-only or teaching-only are starting to appear.