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This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own career. So
by Tomminn 10y ago
This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own career. So, while your personal motives may be beyond repute, there will be many academics who think "This is the main reason senior people have a lot of students- they produce a lot of papers." Which is one of the dynamics that is troublesome. The marginal value of another PhD student to a senior professor is almost always fairly positive. Which means senior professors have an incentive to maximize the number of PhD students. This has two problems:
1) The value of the senior professor's mentorship to each PhD student diminishes (maybe almost linearly) with each PhD student added.
2) If each senior professor hires on average X PhD students per generation, approximately (1/X) of the those PhD students can become senior professors if the rate that academia grows is negligible compared to growing X times as large per generation. (And right now, X must be at least 20.)
- robotresearcher 10y agoDon't forget that a prof has to raise the money in ferocious competition to fund every student. Only successful profs can get enough money for a lot of students.
- hueving 10y agoNot if they make the students teach.
- Tomminn 10y agoSuccess defined how? By publication record. Which leads to the rich get richer dynamic I think is troublesome. The more students you have, the easier it is to get funding for more students.
- robotresearcher 10y agoRich-get-richer sounds unfair, but if you controlled studio time, would you give it to Radiohead or Vanilla Ice? Some people have proven themselves to be really good at things, and it makes sense to give them the resources to do it well. Most countries also have special funding contests only for young researchers to bootstrap themselves into the main contests.