[maxander]

If universities have simply become huge, bureaucratic, grant-obsessed sweatshops exploiting grad students whose churned-out PhDs don't promise them decent careers... why don't people hire some of those poor excess PhDs/PhD-dropouts and put together a grant-obsessed research startup?

Beat research universities at their own game, and perhaps they'll go back to being true universities.

[VLM]

Belief in credentialism doesn't magically result in talent.

Thought experiment. 1K have talent, another 1K are promising, and another 1K are basically non-productive.

If you have a 3K student body and chop away 1K, you'd like to think that that 1K leaving are those with the least talent, so they'll never be able to compete with the superior upper 2/3.

Also if you assume a constant income of R+D money, all separation really means is spending a larger fraction of that limited money on fixed costs (great, now we need two $10M/yr CEOs and two $5M/yr CFOs and two labs and two HR depts and two... etc etc) Much like a divorce usually doesn't in total result in an aggregate higher standard of living once the same total income now has to support two households instead of one.

[xerophtye]

Yes why cant research be done in start-ups? Well... maybe its the money. Research doesn't exactly bring in money. So wouldn't that be a failed start-up?

But i do like the idea of telling these senior supervisors to f-off and taking away the talent to do some real work for which they get credit