many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia So, I stopped reading, but did the OP support this with statistics? Becaus

many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia So, I stopped reading, but did the OP support this with statistics? Because in my world -- the one in which I myself have gone back and forth a couple of times between academia and industry -- there's plenty of people who try to go into academia, but they don't find work because there aren't enough jobs, and those that exist have low pay, because there's high demand but a rather short supply... Meanwhile, the thousands of highly-educated people who can't get into academia try to go into industry. Except that many industries aren't hiring much. Perhaps because their productivity keeps increasing and they don't really need armies of new Ph.Ds to keep cranking out widgets at the rate the market demands. I have a lot of friends with Ph.Ds, and not all of them are happily employed. [1] And that's not even getting into the fact that drawing the line between "academia" and "industry" is increasingly difficult. Every professor has a startup on the side, every major university has a staff of lawyers to manage their intellectual property, and half the grants are industrially funded... or are funded by government grants that are aimed directly at industrially-relevant product development, e.g. drugs. Many industries don't want to do cutting-edge pure research anymore, but instead try to outsource that to academia. In the semiconductor field, a lot of the cutting-edge research gets done in academic labs. E.g. I knew some of the folks who did early OLED research, the product of which now sits inside various Android phones. They were academics, but they are innovating, and their innovations are promptly adopted by industry here and abroad. Similarly, a lot of drugs come out of academic labs and are then pushed through development, testing, and production by industry. --- [1] Though most are, in fact, employed. Don't get me wrong. These days almost any job is a happy job compared to the alternative.