[godelski]

The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them.

But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.

I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.

I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...

[0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.

[analog31]

>>> The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them.

Teaching graduate students. Most undergraduate teaching is done by "adjuncts" who do not do research.

Salaries are a mixed bag. Scientists who want to continue doing research in the private sector also give up much larger paychecks. Many work in facilities that are barely nicer than sweatshops.

Disclosure: Adjunct for one semester, 30 years ago.

[gorgonical]

Regarding the teaching workload: This is not generalizable; during my undergraduate studies a significant fraction (maybe the majority? too long ago to be sure) of my classes were taught by graduate students, especially the math and computer science classes. At the graduate level, your statement was true for me at my second university. In fact, I'm not sure if a graduate student would be allowed even to teach a graduate-level class, considering their credentials.

My experience around universities (as an academic) is that, generally, the number of adjuncts scales linearly with overall funding/skill at grantsmanship in the department. That is, the smaller universities I know saddled professors and their graduate students with substantially more non-research work, including teaching and administration.

[godelski]

At both the universities I went to most classes were taught by the professors. I say most because when I was the TA for my advisor (during my PhD) I taught his class. That said, the students were happier when he didn't show up to class and it was only me.

It definitely depends on the size of the university and the size of classes. As I was graduating a few grad students started becoming the official instructor. These were only the lower level courses though (freshman and sophomore). My partner's department had grad students teaching some classes for longer and they had a similar pattern.

My undergrad was at a small university with essentially no grad students. As far as coursework, I'm confident I got a better education than my peers that went to top schools like Stanford and Berkeley (I did physics). But they got more internships, connection to labs, and connection to research projects. YMMV