[OldGuyInTheClub]

Universities exist to educate young people and set them on the path to lifelong growth. This shift to being a cheaper place for industrial research is a nauseating aberration. There is nothing wrong with applied research, having practical goals in mind, or spinning off research findings. When they become the objective, we get the reproducibility and integrity crises that reach and remain on the HN front page every damn day.

[inglor_cz]

As of now, American universities seem to exist chiefly to support an enormously bloated, parasitic administration at the cost of young peoples' heavy debt and precarious working arrangements of junior faculty.

That is a nauseating aberration to me.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

The generations before mine paid taxes so that I could attend a superb public University for very little money. But, about the time I entered that University, tax cut fever took root. A few years later, the costs started to climb through the roof and the incentives changed. My generation didn't fight hard enough or if we did, we lost the battle. Public anything is now poison in the US and I don't think it will improve in my lifetime. It will probably get even worse.

[nickd2001]

And an irony is, if you do indeed keep the focus on learning, some lucrative spin-off buinesses seem inevitable. So, paradoxically, if you want the most lucrative benefits/ boost to the economy, you have to avoid doing anything to seek that and focus on learning instead. Only when you completely abandon the goal of making money off of any of it, do you then actually have more chance to start making money off of it. ;)

[noobermin]

It's simple, there are two currents on this aspect on HN, one are those who find it an issue and others who think see universities as cheap labour and thus are the target of rags like the economist here. I'm not sure how the latter find the incessant postings of articles about academic problems, they probably tune it out perhaps or don't make the connection.

[simne]

You hit. Exists just two views on high education (middle education considered just mandatory).

First view, that high education must be right (now some countries already formalized guaranteed free high education), and second view, that high education is just another service, which should be regulated by free market (sure, as free as possible).

And this is competition of views. Will see who win.

BTW, I live in Ukraine, country at big war, and we have claimed free high education (yes, it is already partially paid, but still exists possibilities to attend free courses and got free diploma).

And what I see, Ukrainian almost free education is total disaster, few years ago few East countries cancelled practice of automatic acceptance of Ukrainian diploma, because of low quality.

Second issue, we learned from teachers, that Universities will develop new technologies and especially new defenses for country (in exchange for financing them from public resources), but at the moment (two years of war, all science workers have privileges), see nothing, just zero.

[y45y45]

Is it the industrial research where the reproducibility crisis is actually manifesting though? Most evaluations I've seen of it suggest that while it's a universal phenomena it tends to be concentrated in the social/activist sciences. In most areas of industrial or applied focus it seems like much less of an issue because ultimately the science of boats has to be at least coherent enough to stand the trial of putting them in the water.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Consider medical and pharmaceutical research being conducted at Universities. Stanford's President had to resign because the work done under his name was both very lucrative and very suspect. Theranos came out of Stanford as well.

A USC neuroscientist is now under suspicion of manipulating clinical trial data for a drug his company is developing. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neurosc...

A food scientist at Cornell got canned for p-hacking. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/co...

And so on.

[noobermin]

What the hell is an "activist" science?

[Projectiboga]

Akin to an Art or Music Critic mixed with investigative journalism. They dig around deeper if their b$ detector goes off while looking at an abstract or paper.

[paulspl]

Probably what we usually call "soft science" so political science and similar