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Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic c

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change. I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge. I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division! [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...

matheweis 11y ago
Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).
- ISL 11y ago
  Leaving to do something interesting in industry is a time-honored tradition, particularly at the fancier schools. Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.
- gone35 11y ago
  It's so common it's a whole genre in of itself nowadays: "quit lit". [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academics-fed-higher-ed-mark-resurgence-quit-lit https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
  - webnrrd2k 11y ago
    Thanks -- good essay -- I just lost an hour or so reading it and following links.
- cossatot 11y ago
  It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs? A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers. This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal. I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week. I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
- omnisci 11y ago
  Every time I explain my experience in academia to VCs or those in business, they don't believe me. "It can't be that bad!" It is. I've worked at 3 of the top schools in the world and it's a total mess as the OP mentioned. It's also a mess that hurts everyone, so I'm happy to see this type of initiative.
- noelsusman 11y ago
  I'm in a similar situation and I don't know a single person who doesn't think academia is horribly broken. Internet rants from people leaving academia are practically a monthly occurrence these days, and nobody ever disagrees with them.
- hugh4 11y ago
  In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals. The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly. It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed. edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...
  - amelius 11y ago
    > Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.
    - grkvlt 11y ago
      Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable. In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit. This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Many fields of work don't pay much, but tell you you've got a Mission. Many fields of work make you work very long hours. Many fields of work require extensive training and skills. Academia doesn't pay very much, makes you work very long hours, and requires extensive training and skills, justifies it all by reference to Mission, and then inevitably fires you and tells you getting fired was your fault for not being in the top 8% of the entire profession.
- biswaroop 11y ago
  Top research universities have more money, and smarter/harder working students. Neither of those are necessarily solutions to the problem of university research. Don't get me wrong: our lab makes awe-inspiring machines that can see individual atoms held in vacuum by lattices of laser light. Our research leads to incredible discoveries, but we're held back by inefficiencies. It's a rusty system, but to any mechanic, rusty = broken. Also, leaving to build a startup is rather uncommon at MIT physics, and most students (including me) absolutely love research. The academic career is just not attractive enough to spend another 4-12 years in a lab becoming increasingly good at doing exactly one thing. Peter Thiel's lecture in sama's Startup Class is relevant: http://bit.ly/1ZdOwHQ http://bit.ly/1ZdOwHQ
- wfo 11y ago
  Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight over it) but it's really not all doom and gloom like some people make it out to be. Graduate students tend to love to complain as much as possible about things that aren't that bad (I know I was one) and people leaving something idealistic often have a compelling need to try and put it down in any way they can to justify their decision to give up on the idealistic goals and try to make some money -- which is why you see so many "goodbye academia, you are broken" posts and blog entries. And some people have genuinely bad experiences like at any job -- bad manager, particularly low funding, bad co-workers, you're going to have a bad time. That being said YC research sounds amazing. Basic research was funded by charity from the superwealthy (or only carried out by the independently wealthy) for most of human history, the model works. Researchers tend not to look into areas or find results which are bad for their backers. It's good to have some public and some private sector; we need to balance out the conflict of interest a bit.
  - biswaroop 11y ago
    Graduate school was one of my best experiences, and I wouldn't trade my years here for anything. My co-workers were fantastic, and my advisor is golden. My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
  - luckydude 11y ago
    I think there is a big disconnect between industry and academy. When I was a grad student (got a masters in CS) there was a huge lack of problems to solve at school. I went to Sun and after about a year I had 9 fantastic PhD problems. Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.
emanuelev 11y ago
Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.
rcthompson 11y ago
I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.
- fsloth 11y ago
  I would claim it's culture is just polluted by scientific management. Too much haste.
noobermin 11y ago
I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn't believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.
biswaroop 11y ago
Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn't stopped working. YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.

matheweis 11y ago

Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).

ISL 11y ago
Leaving to do something interesting in industry is a time-honored tradition, particularly at the fancier schools. Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.
gone35 11y ago
It's so common it's a whole genre in of itself nowadays: "quit lit". [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academics-fed-higher-ed-mark-resurgence-quit-lit https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
- webnrrd2k 11y ago
  Thanks -- good essay -- I just lost an hour or so reading it and following links.
cossatot 11y ago
It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs? A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers. This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal. I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week. I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
omnisci 11y ago
Every time I explain my experience in academia to VCs or those in business, they don't believe me. "It can't be that bad!" It is. I've worked at 3 of the top schools in the world and it's a total mess as the OP mentioned. It's also a mess that hurts everyone, so I'm happy to see this type of initiative.
noelsusman 11y ago
I'm in a similar situation and I don't know a single person who doesn't think academia is horribly broken. Internet rants from people leaving academia are practically a monthly occurrence these days, and nobody ever disagrees with them.
hugh4 11y ago
In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals. The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly. It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed. edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...
- amelius 11y ago
  > Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable. In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit. This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Many fields of work don't pay much, but tell you you've got a Mission. Many fields of work make you work very long hours. Many fields of work require extensive training and skills. Academia doesn't pay very much, makes you work very long hours, and requires extensive training and skills, justifies it all by reference to Mission, and then inevitably fires you and tells you getting fired was your fault for not being in the top 8% of the entire profession.
biswaroop 11y ago
Top research universities have more money, and smarter/harder working students. Neither of those are necessarily solutions to the problem of university research. Don't get me wrong: our lab makes awe-inspiring machines that can see individual atoms held in vacuum by lattices of laser light. Our research leads to incredible discoveries, but we're held back by inefficiencies. It's a rusty system, but to any mechanic, rusty = broken. Also, leaving to build a startup is rather uncommon at MIT physics, and most students (including me) absolutely love research. The academic career is just not attractive enough to spend another 4-12 years in a lab becoming increasingly good at doing exactly one thing. Peter Thiel's lecture in sama's Startup Class is relevant: http://bit.ly/1ZdOwHQ http://bit.ly/1ZdOwHQ
wfo 11y ago
Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight over it) but it's really not all doom and gloom like some people make it out to be. Graduate students tend to love to complain as much as possible about things that aren't that bad (I know I was one) and people leaving something idealistic often have a compelling need to try and put it down in any way they can to justify their decision to give up on the idealistic goals and try to make some money -- which is why you see so many "goodbye academia, you are broken" posts and blog entries. And some people have genuinely bad experiences like at any job -- bad manager, particularly low funding, bad co-workers, you're going to have a bad time. That being said YC research sounds amazing. Basic research was funded by charity from the superwealthy (or only carried out by the independently wealthy) for most of human history, the model works. Researchers tend not to look into areas or find results which are bad for their backers. It's good to have some public and some private sector; we need to balance out the conflict of interest a bit.
- biswaroop 11y ago
  Graduate school was one of my best experiences, and I wouldn't trade my years here for anything. My co-workers were fantastic, and my advisor is golden. My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
- luckydude 11y ago
  I think there is a big disconnect between industry and academy. When I was a grad student (got a masters in CS) there was a huge lack of problems to solve at school. I went to Sun and after about a year I had 9 fantastic PhD problems. Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.

emanuelev 11y ago

Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.

rcthompson 11y ago

I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.

fsloth 11y ago
I would claim it's culture is just polluted by scientific management. Too much haste.

noobermin 11y ago

I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn't believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.

biswaroop 11y ago

Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn't stopped working. YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.