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Let me see if I can summarize the response: HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME. Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their

Let me see if I can summarize the response: HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME. Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their slaves to those who make slaves lives better. Schools want to retain talent? Pay it more money. It is that simple. Can't afford it? Maybe you should spend less money on salaries of professors ( who need those slaves to actually do the work ), administrators, fancy buildings, marketing, sports programs, etc. None of the professors would take 4/5s pay cut and stay, why should those who do the work? Everything else is secondary.

sevensor 9y ago
As a former grad student, I strogly sympathize with the urge to get the hell out of there and make real money. But on the flip side, I'm pretty dubious about the idea of abandoning your program just because the grass is greener in industry. The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops?
- notyourday 9y ago
  Same as for anyone else 2-5 years of experience in real company, doing real stuff, making real money. That train ended? Migrate to a slightly different field.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    What if you're really interested in your subject? To be fair, if you're not then there's little reason to start a PhD and it makes perfect sense to drop out of it and go do something else... Btw, it's also perfectly possible to start a PhD after a few years of work in the industry. Not everyone goes on to have more studies right after graduating.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      > What if you're really interested in your subject? Pardon my french, but it is a stupid reason for someone who can barely has any money to support himself or herself. We have empirical evidence these grad students are not stupid because when Google or Apple or Facebook offers them $150k/year they move.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        >> Pardon my french, but it is a stupid reason for someone who can barely has any money to support himself or herself. I don't think there's any better reason to do research than to be interested in your research subject. Actually, my guess is that this is the real difference between academia and the industry: if you're motivated by money, you'll optimise for making lots of money; if you're interested in generating new knowledge, you'll optimise for that.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  So your argument is they should stay and work for pennies, hoping to get an "interesting" job in the future, instead of getting an interesting and highly paid job right now? It's also not obvious at all it's a bubble. AI field is already much more complex than the regular CS field, which already suffers from talent shortages. AI is the future, and the demand is here to stay.
  - Retric 9y ago
    AI is currently less complex than many CS fields that pay far less. This is basicly the boom times when most companies want a website but don't have one. Once the obvious applications are built these bubbles tend to burst as matence pays far less.
    - nopinsight 9y ago
      Plain vanilla convnets are not very complex. If you look at recent papers on Deep Reinforcement Learning with extra modules or Generative Adversarial Networks from DeepMind and the likes, the complexity is much higher than much of CS used in industry and it is increasing rapidly. More importantly, the performance of many AI implementations could be improved with the increased sophistication, so the demand for such complexity is there for businesses in competitive sectors. Any examples of topics in other fields of CS in practical use that are more complex than recent AI advances with potential practical applications?
      - Retric 9y ago
        I would argue a modern Graphics pipeline is significantly more complex. But, you run into issues of what the borders of a topic is. Lighting for example is a huge topic for research, but it does not mean much on it's own.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    If universities believe that AI is here to stay, offer tenured positions now to your AI scientists. Universities cannot compete on pay (and I don't think this is bad), but they can compete perfectly well on job security. So play this trump card (no pun intended).
- Retric 9y ago
  > when it pops Get a PHD.
- criddell 9y ago
  > The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road That's how universities can compete -- let you work on the things that interest you. There doesn't have to be a commercial application.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    Exactly. Most people without Ph.D.s have to do jobs made up by other people. The Ph.D. obligates you to cut your own path. It's not for everyone, but if it's the kind of thing you want to do, it's liberating.
- notyourday 9y ago
  > The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. What's the starting point? 0.01%? Because 100x improvement in that case is just 1%.
- dogruck 9y ago
  Opportunity Cost is one factor that’s overlooked by nearly every student. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost It’s true that a PhD is valuable for your career. Also, grad school is a special, and hopefully enjoyable period of your life (and therefore valulable). On the other hand, you are not only forfeighting the earnings that you could be making —- you are also sacrificing the difference in growth of those earnings. For example: Option Grad School: $0, $0, $0, $0, $200, $210, $220, $230 = $860 Option Worker Bee: $100, $110, $120, $130, $140, $150, $160, $170 = $1080. Tweak the numbers however you want. In particular, many good non-PhDs soon prove themselves and earn just as much as PhDs each year.
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    Don't forget about time value of money! That $230 you'll earn 8 years from now is worth less than $200 today if you account for 2% inflation. (And in reality, you tend to get much better returns)
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      And the value of time with money. Not wasting your 20s being poor, eating microwave noodles and doing someone else's research is worth something.
      - dogruck 9y ago
        I see your point, but I don’t think that’s as clear as the time value of money. For many people, grad school is where you form some of your best life-long relationships, in an environment where you’re surrounded by like-minded people. Many people would tolerate ramen noodles and free pizza for that trade.
        notyourday 9y ago
        That's because they don't know that they have any alternative. The situation that professors and schools would love to continue indefinitely.
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  > Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. What? I don't understand. What stops you from going back to grad school when the bubble pops? You can happily work for free then and still come out way ahead.
- trisimix 9y ago
  I think the plan might be get your 'asters with thousands of dollars and 3 years experience in the field
- deleted 9y ago
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- rndmwlk 9y ago
  >Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops? I don't understand your argument. Wouldn't someone with 2-5 years of work experience, networking, and a much higher salary leave them better off than staying in academia? Either way you're still in the field you think is "an obvious bubble."
- netheril96 9y ago
  People cry "bubbles" every time hot money flows into a new field, much like those doomsday prophecies. The whole CS field has been declared as a bubble year after year on Hacker News, yet these companies are doing better and better. Even if it eventually pops, remember, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Besides, if a bubble exists and it will pop in two or five years, staying in school is worse than getting into industry now. When the bubble pops, no one will hire any new grads any more, but existing workers may survive the chopping block, and are far more likely to reenter the field when it recovers, simply because they have work experience.
- bobdole1234 9y ago
  Or you know, maybe the world runs on computers these days?
levesque 9y ago
Professors are actually getting lower pay than a lot of AI specialists in the industry. Universities really can't afford to compete.
- dekhn 9y ago
  Maybe they really can? They set the salaries, and determine the overheads.
- mathattack 9y ago
  They compete on other dimensions. (Job security, etc) I have no sympathy for academic labs that underpay. For 99% of academic fields there is a gross oversupply of workers.
- autokad 9y ago
  When I taught a small class to master students (~30), it only took 2 students to bring in more than what they paid me. I also worked full time, where just the projects that couldn't have been done without me being there would have paid for my salary for 30 years. who knows where that money goes, but they can definitely pay a lot more for the people who actually do things. the university i mentioned has a 12 billion $ endowment. they would actually make more if they stopped having such high turn-over. salary caps on tech workers like the article suggests is a horrendous idea. pay caps will only create more shortages. The universities just need to pay their workers market rates instead of paying near slave wages and complaining about turn over. edit: mathattack comments about job security is incorrect. many of the positions are grant funded, you can loose your job at any time, sometimes whole labs go in a blink of an eye.
  - shostack 9y ago
    Endowments often have quite a few strings attached that significantly limit the flexibility of the University to allocate those funds wherever they want. It is not as simple as looking at a large total endowment and jumping to the conclusion that they should spend it on staff.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
I completely agree - People have a right to demand payment (salary, benefits, and - in the context of universities - an oft-overvalued investment in their future like academic certification) commensurate with their ability to generate value. Grad students are not getting that. But I think you're overestimating how much these professors are paid. Universities feeling a crunch between their income and the value of their employees on the outside may have chosen to screw over their expendable grad students first, but professors aren't that much farther up the totem pole. Part of the problem, though, is that Apple can use the scientist's skills to generate >>$1M/year in revenue. Private industry will happily pay them $250k/year, hire secretaries and managers to be crap-catchers and crap-umbrellas under and above them respectively so the scientist can be most effective, and otherwise take care of the goose that's laying golden eggs. But the university isn't cashing in on this revenue-generating potential. They're (ostensibly) using the professors and grad students to teach undergrads, and also using them to do research that doesn't generate revenue. The existence and function of the university does provide a valuable service to society, but they're not being appropriately compensated for that service if it's worth so much on the outside - and they're squandering a lot of that societal contribution by letting it be siphoned off to the firms providing the student loans and the administration of the university.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  To me this sounds like a misallocation of resources between private and public sectors of AI research. Most companies - outside MSR and DeepMind - largely fund applied AI research, usually towards better classifiers for vision tasks, better predictive regression for recommenders, self-driving cars, etc. Most universities keep academics on for basic research: things machines can't do yet that people can. The latter obviously leads to the former, but actually receives a great deal less funding. The former, after all, gets the deep pockets of multi-billion-dollar companies, while the latter relies on various national science agencies.
  - criddell 9y ago
    A university might be willing to fund basic research, but they have to compete with industry for the researcher.
adekok 9y ago
Even when I was in 25 years ago, universities were replacing full-time professors with sessional lecturers. And bloating the administration budget. It's only gotten worse since then. If universities are institutions of higher learning, then the people doing the teaching should have a larger say. Right now (as with many companies), the accountants are in charge. IIRC, that was the complaint at Digital. The company was doing well when run by engineers. And then the MBAs took over... soon the good engineers left, and the company started building crap.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
In academia you either leave to a more lucrative job or you become a adjunct professor forever making peanuts .
api 9y ago
It's doubly awful since universities are taking in record tuition and there may well be a tuition bubble. What's it all going to? Non-academic staff and buildings. Students are going into record debt to afford record tuition and academia is gutting academics. It's a scandal.
trisimix 9y ago
Now that you mention it Im hearing some striking resemblance to the unpaid athletes argument
robrenaud 9y ago
I think there is a legit problem here. High quality publically accessible research can provide huge gains to society as a whole, but it's effects are diffuse, many people get a small benefit. It's not the school that is the primary benefactor of great research. On the plus side, in machine learning, most of the big companies are doing a good job of publishing their cutting edge research.
ams6110 9y ago
Agree in principle. But the real culprit is not professor salaries (some are well paid, but those who are generally bring in much more in grant funding than they cost) or sports programs (most are self funding auxiliary operations, not part of the university budget per se). The real culprit is administrative staff bloat, and facilities spending. University administrative org charts have exploded in the past few decades, and so has spending on lavish new dormitories, administrative and academic buildings, monuments, etc. While some of the buildings are funded at least in part by donations, the rest has all been fueled by the easy money of student loans, and the premium tuition paid by international students.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisbennet 9y ago
  I agree except for the sport programs. Sport programs are a net loss for almost every university. "Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athlet... http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2016/03/how_much_fielding_sports_teams.html http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2016/03/how_m...
- shostack 9y ago
  I'd caution against lumping all "administrative" functions together as culprits of this bloat. There are quite a few departments in Universities that play key roles, have high visibility, and are thus underpaid for the work they do because there is high demand from the workforce for those roles and the skill sets don't necessarily have a super high bar set for them like a Masters. This is a problem at universities of all sizes and reputation.
- bobdole1234 9y ago
  The admin bloat is largely there to manage the absurd rulebook that changes constantly that control how they can spend their grant and donation money. Someone gives you a few million, but it always comes with a laundry list of conditions about how it can be spent, and usually an audit schedule and reporting requirements. This means you need a huge staff of people who largely shuffle money around between various groups to make sure group A who have millions in capital expenditure money can pay their janitors, that money comes from group C, who launders this through an agreement with group B to provide services in exchange for use on group A's equipment with group C's support staff.
pjc50 9y ago
The academics are hardly fat cats. But they are operating in a parallel universe from the commercial world where there is far less money and it's all grant-determined. As others have pointed out, they don't even pay the PhD students directly at all - because they're students and are paying the university! The UK government values neither research nor teaching very highly, and has additionally wrecked the economy of universities through Brexit.
- vixen99 9y ago
  'The UK government values neither research nor teaching very highly'. What is the basis for that conclusion? https://www.statista.com/statistics/298522/public-expenditure-science-and-technology-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298522/public-expenditur...
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    There isn't one - he's just bitter about Brexit and so threw in a political non-sequitur at the end. Academics are generally very pro-EU because they get from the EU easy money that is immune to the wishes of voters. Post Brexit their funding will once again be in direct competition with healthcare, schools, police etc.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      Why do "voters" (you mean taxpayers?) need to decide about grant money? If such decisions were put to the vote, AI would have never got where it is now- it never used to be a popular field, until very recently. Not even computer science would have gotten very far- it's another niche subject that took a long time to get any traction to the mainstream. Anyway in the UK the public distrusts "boffins" and is likely to put serious impediments in their research, if, again, such matters were put to the vote.
      - peoplewindow 9y ago
        Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. If that means trading off academic research against healthcare, why should they not be able to make that choice? You seem to be for taxation without representation, despite how badly that has worked out in the past. AI is a remarkably poor choice for making this argument by the way, as very little research was being done into AI by academia in the last 20 years. The renaissance of neural net research was primarily driven by Google's Jeff Dean taking an interest in Geoff Hinton's research, and then showing that it could be combined with large datasets to achieve impressive new results. The EU in particular has essentially nothing to do with this: the EU's presence in the AI field is essentially via DeepMind (which will soon be ex-EU). But I suspect if grant money were reined in it'd be primarily in the non-STEM fields. There are a lot of EU grants awarded for things that I doubt anyone would miss much: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/EUs-secret-400m-for-crazy-projects.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/... Researchers have unearthed a series of grants issued to schemes deemed “confidential” that have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Taxpayers’ money spent on the projects, many of which have been described as “crazy”, has increased since the onset of recession. The schemes include £145,000 to print 736 postcards that “reflect the current problems in Europe that generate social exclusion” and £166,000 on a street circus project whose aim is to “strengthen international understanding”. Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card. Whilst these aren't academic grants specifically, they are indicative of the level of quality control that occurs in systems where tax money is spent without accountability to taxpayers.
jknz 9y ago
The salaries of US Professors at public universities is public. For instance, the database of salaries at UC universities can be queried here [1]. This data will be updated and more precise than glassdoor. This does not include salaries at private institutions though, and those salaries may be higher than at public universities. I do not want to pinpoint any specific names, but salaries for tenure-track assistant professors that started after the AI boom seem to be on par with salaries in the private sector for positions right after the PhD (100k-150k range). Also, professor salary usually includes an extra summer salary that comes from grants, I don't know whether this summer salary is included in the database [1]. Also, AI academic positions are spread throughout the US, as opposed to tech AI positions that are concentrated in the bay area. This, as well as the almost complete freedom that academics enjoy, may appeal to some talented PhDs. [1]: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
- goialoq 9y ago
  100k-150k is new-undergrad-degree salary in private sector, not PhD and certainly not PhD+ salary.
new299 9y ago
Hmmm... this story is about a PhD student. There's an argument that you should be paid a salary to receive an education. However I think it would also apply to undergraduate degrees (and indeed in the UK students used to receive grants). PhDs in the UK are often funded, the student receives a stipend to cover their living costs. But it's mostly assumed that the work you do is a form of education/training in how to do original research and that your education is the compensation.
velobro 9y ago
UC Merced's chancellor's pay doubled over a 2-3 year span from 200k per year to 400k. They don't have a problem getting the money to retain talent, they just don't think paying faculty well is worth it
namlem 9y ago
One of my old professors was tenured and highly regarded, but she still left to work for Google when offered a position at X. I don't blame her, I would have probably done the same.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their slaves to those who make slaves lives better. It's kind of strange to hear academics described as "fat cats", especially if they're being compared to, say, managers in Google or Facebook. Also, I'm not sure where your experience comes from but in the UK PhD students are anything but slaves. Maybe you're thinking of grad students in the US? I hear the situation is a bit different there. From my understanding, US grad students are forced to do a lot of unpaid work? This is not the case in the UK, as far as I can tell (I'm just starting a PhD).

sevensor 9y ago

As a former grad student, I strogly sympathize with the urge to get the hell out of there and make real money. But on the flip side, I'm pretty dubious about the idea of abandoning your program just because the grass is greener in industry. The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops?

notyourday 9y ago
Same as for anyone else 2-5 years of experience in real company, doing real stuff, making real money. That train ended? Migrate to a slightly different field.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  What if you're really interested in your subject? To be fair, if you're not then there's little reason to start a PhD and it makes perfect sense to drop out of it and go do something else... Btw, it's also perfectly possible to start a PhD after a few years of work in the industry. Not everyone goes on to have more studies right after graduating.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > What if you're really interested in your subject? Pardon my french, but it is a stupid reason for someone who can barely has any money to support himself or herself. We have empirical evidence these grad students are not stupid because when Google or Apple or Facebook offers them $150k/year they move.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      >> Pardon my french, but it is a stupid reason for someone who can barely has any money to support himself or herself. I don't think there's any better reason to do research than to be interested in your research subject. Actually, my guess is that this is the real difference between academia and the industry: if you're motivated by money, you'll optimise for making lots of money; if you're interested in generating new knowledge, you'll optimise for that.
olegkikin 9y ago
So your argument is they should stay and work for pennies, hoping to get an "interesting" job in the future, instead of getting an interesting and highly paid job right now? It's also not obvious at all it's a bubble. AI field is already much more complex than the regular CS field, which already suffers from talent shortages. AI is the future, and the demand is here to stay.
- Retric 9y ago
  AI is currently less complex than many CS fields that pay far less. This is basicly the boom times when most companies want a website but don't have one. Once the obvious applications are built these bubbles tend to burst as matence pays far less.
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    Plain vanilla convnets are not very complex. If you look at recent papers on Deep Reinforcement Learning with extra modules or Generative Adversarial Networks from DeepMind and the likes, the complexity is much higher than much of CS used in industry and it is increasing rapidly. More importantly, the performance of many AI implementations could be improved with the increased sophistication, so the demand for such complexity is there for businesses in competitive sectors. Any examples of topics in other fields of CS in practical use that are more complex than recent AI advances with potential practical applications?
    - Retric 9y ago
      I would argue a modern Graphics pipeline is significantly more complex. But, you run into issues of what the borders of a topic is. Lighting for example is a huge topic for research, but it does not mean much on it's own.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  If universities believe that AI is here to stay, offer tenured positions now to your AI scientists. Universities cannot compete on pay (and I don't think this is bad), but they can compete perfectly well on job security. So play this trump card (no pun intended).
Retric 9y ago
> when it pops Get a PHD.
criddell 9y ago
> The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road That's how universities can compete -- let you work on the things that interest you. There doesn't have to be a commercial application.
- sevensor 9y ago
  Exactly. Most people without Ph.D.s have to do jobs made up by other people. The Ph.D. obligates you to cut your own path. It's not for everyone, but if it's the kind of thing you want to do, it's liberating.
notyourday 9y ago
> The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. What's the starting point? 0.01%? Because 100x improvement in that case is just 1%.
dogruck 9y ago
Opportunity Cost is one factor that’s overlooked by nearly every student. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost It’s true that a PhD is valuable for your career. Also, grad school is a special, and hopefully enjoyable period of your life (and therefore valulable). On the other hand, you are not only forfeighting the earnings that you could be making —- you are also sacrificing the difference in growth of those earnings. For example: Option Grad School: $0, $0, $0, $0, $200, $210, $220, $230 = $860 Option Worker Bee: $100, $110, $120, $130, $140, $150, $160, $170 = $1080. Tweak the numbers however you want. In particular, many good non-PhDs soon prove themselves and earn just as much as PhDs each year.
- CamelCaseName 9y ago
  Don't forget about time value of money! That $230 you'll earn 8 years from now is worth less than $200 today if you account for 2% inflation. (And in reality, you tend to get much better returns)
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    And the value of time with money. Not wasting your 20s being poor, eating microwave noodles and doing someone else's research is worth something.
    - dogruck 9y ago
      I see your point, but I don’t think that’s as clear as the time value of money. For many people, grad school is where you form some of your best life-long relationships, in an environment where you’re surrounded by like-minded people. Many people would tolerate ramen noodles and free pizza for that trade.
      - notyourday 9y ago
        That's because they don't know that they have any alternative. The situation that professors and schools would love to continue indefinitely.
sheepmullet 9y ago
> Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. What? I don't understand. What stops you from going back to grad school when the bubble pops? You can happily work for free then and still come out way ahead.
trisimix 9y ago
I think the plan might be get your 'asters with thousands of dollars and 3 years experience in the field
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rndmwlk 9y ago
>Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops? I don't understand your argument. Wouldn't someone with 2-5 years of work experience, networking, and a much higher salary leave them better off than staying in academia? Either way you're still in the field you think is "an obvious bubble."
netheril96 9y ago
People cry "bubbles" every time hot money flows into a new field, much like those doomsday prophecies. The whole CS field has been declared as a bubble year after year on Hacker News, yet these companies are doing better and better. Even if it eventually pops, remember, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Besides, if a bubble exists and it will pop in two or five years, staying in school is worse than getting into industry now. When the bubble pops, no one will hire any new grads any more, but existing workers may survive the chopping block, and are far more likely to reenter the field when it recovers, simply because they have work experience.
bobdole1234 9y ago
Or you know, maybe the world runs on computers these days?

levesque 9y ago

Professors are actually getting lower pay than a lot of AI specialists in the industry. Universities really can't afford to compete.

dekhn 9y ago
Maybe they really can? They set the salaries, and determine the overheads.
mathattack 9y ago
They compete on other dimensions. (Job security, etc) I have no sympathy for academic labs that underpay. For 99% of academic fields there is a gross oversupply of workers.
autokad 9y ago
When I taught a small class to master students (~30), it only took 2 students to bring in more than what they paid me. I also worked full time, where just the projects that couldn't have been done without me being there would have paid for my salary for 30 years. who knows where that money goes, but they can definitely pay a lot more for the people who actually do things. the university i mentioned has a 12 billion $ endowment. they would actually make more if they stopped having such high turn-over. salary caps on tech workers like the article suggests is a horrendous idea. pay caps will only create more shortages. The universities just need to pay their workers market rates instead of paying near slave wages and complaining about turn over. edit: mathattack comments about job security is incorrect. many of the positions are grant funded, you can loose your job at any time, sometimes whole labs go in a blink of an eye.
- shostack 9y ago
  Endowments often have quite a few strings attached that significantly limit the flexibility of the University to allocate those funds wherever they want. It is not as simple as looking at a large total endowment and jumping to the conclusion that they should spend it on staff.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

I completely agree - People have a right to demand payment (salary, benefits, and - in the context of universities - an oft-overvalued investment in their future like academic certification) commensurate with their ability to generate value. Grad students are not getting that. But I think you're overestimating how much these professors are paid. Universities feeling a crunch between their income and the value of their employees on the outside may have chosen to screw over their expendable grad students first, but professors aren't that much farther up the totem pole. Part of the problem, though, is that Apple can use the scientist's skills to generate >>$1M/year in revenue. Private industry will happily pay them $250k/year, hire secretaries and managers to be crap-catchers and crap-umbrellas under and above them respectively so the scientist can be most effective, and otherwise take care of the goose that's laying golden eggs. But the university isn't cashing in on this revenue-generating potential. They're (ostensibly) using the professors and grad students to teach undergrads, and also using them to do research that doesn't generate revenue. The existence and function of the university does provide a valuable service to society, but they're not being appropriately compensated for that service if it's worth so much on the outside - and they're squandering a lot of that societal contribution by letting it be siphoned off to the firms providing the student loans and the administration of the university.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
To me this sounds like a misallocation of resources between private and public sectors of AI research. Most companies - outside MSR and DeepMind - largely fund applied AI research, usually towards better classifiers for vision tasks, better predictive regression for recommenders, self-driving cars, etc. Most universities keep academics on for basic research: things machines can't do yet that people can. The latter obviously leads to the former, but actually receives a great deal less funding. The former, after all, gets the deep pockets of multi-billion-dollar companies, while the latter relies on various national science agencies.
- criddell 9y ago
  A university might be willing to fund basic research, but they have to compete with industry for the researcher.

adekok 9y ago

Even when I was in 25 years ago, universities were replacing full-time professors with sessional lecturers. And bloating the administration budget. It's only gotten worse since then. If universities are institutions of higher learning, then the people doing the teaching should have a larger say. Right now (as with many companies), the accountants are in charge. IIRC, that was the complaint at Digital. The company was doing well when run by engineers. And then the MBAs took over... soon the good engineers left, and the company started building crap.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

In academia you either leave to a more lucrative job or you become a adjunct professor forever making peanuts .

api 9y ago

It's doubly awful since universities are taking in record tuition and there may well be a tuition bubble. What's it all going to? Non-academic staff and buildings. Students are going into record debt to afford record tuition and academia is gutting academics. It's a scandal.

trisimix 9y ago

Now that you mention it Im hearing some striking resemblance to the unpaid athletes argument

robrenaud 9y ago

I think there is a legit problem here. High quality publically accessible research can provide huge gains to society as a whole, but it's effects are diffuse, many people get a small benefit. It's not the school that is the primary benefactor of great research. On the plus side, in machine learning, most of the big companies are doing a good job of publishing their cutting edge research.

ams6110 9y ago

Agree in principle. But the real culprit is not professor salaries (some are well paid, but those who are generally bring in much more in grant funding than they cost) or sports programs (most are self funding auxiliary operations, not part of the university budget per se). The real culprit is administrative staff bloat, and facilities spending. University administrative org charts have exploded in the past few decades, and so has spending on lavish new dormitories, administrative and academic buildings, monuments, etc. While some of the buildings are funded at least in part by donations, the rest has all been fueled by the easy money of student loans, and the premium tuition paid by international students.

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chrisbennet 9y ago
I agree except for the sport programs. Sport programs are a net loss for almost every university. "Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athlet... http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2016/03/how_much_fielding_sports_teams.html http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2016/03/how_m...
shostack 9y ago
I'd caution against lumping all "administrative" functions together as culprits of this bloat. There are quite a few departments in Universities that play key roles, have high visibility, and are thus underpaid for the work they do because there is high demand from the workforce for those roles and the skill sets don't necessarily have a super high bar set for them like a Masters. This is a problem at universities of all sizes and reputation.
bobdole1234 9y ago
The admin bloat is largely there to manage the absurd rulebook that changes constantly that control how they can spend their grant and donation money. Someone gives you a few million, but it always comes with a laundry list of conditions about how it can be spent, and usually an audit schedule and reporting requirements. This means you need a huge staff of people who largely shuffle money around between various groups to make sure group A who have millions in capital expenditure money can pay their janitors, that money comes from group C, who launders this through an agreement with group B to provide services in exchange for use on group A's equipment with group C's support staff.

pjc50 9y ago

The academics are hardly fat cats. But they are operating in a parallel universe from the commercial world where there is far less money and it's all grant-determined. As others have pointed out, they don't even pay the PhD students directly at all - because they're students and are paying the university! The UK government values neither research nor teaching very highly, and has additionally wrecked the economy of universities through Brexit.

vixen99 9y ago
'The UK government values neither research nor teaching very highly'. What is the basis for that conclusion? https://www.statista.com/statistics/298522/public-expenditure-science-and-technology-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298522/public-expenditur...
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  There isn't one - he's just bitter about Brexit and so threw in a political non-sequitur at the end. Academics are generally very pro-EU because they get from the EU easy money that is immune to the wishes of voters. Post Brexit their funding will once again be in direct competition with healthcare, schools, police etc.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    Why do "voters" (you mean taxpayers?) need to decide about grant money? If such decisions were put to the vote, AI would have never got where it is now- it never used to be a popular field, until very recently. Not even computer science would have gotten very far- it's another niche subject that took a long time to get any traction to the mainstream. Anyway in the UK the public distrusts "boffins" and is likely to put serious impediments in their research, if, again, such matters were put to the vote.
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. If that means trading off academic research against healthcare, why should they not be able to make that choice? You seem to be for taxation without representation, despite how badly that has worked out in the past. AI is a remarkably poor choice for making this argument by the way, as very little research was being done into AI by academia in the last 20 years. The renaissance of neural net research was primarily driven by Google's Jeff Dean taking an interest in Geoff Hinton's research, and then showing that it could be combined with large datasets to achieve impressive new results. The EU in particular has essentially nothing to do with this: the EU's presence in the AI field is essentially via DeepMind (which will soon be ex-EU). But I suspect if grant money were reined in it'd be primarily in the non-STEM fields. There are a lot of EU grants awarded for things that I doubt anyone would miss much: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/EUs-secret-400m-for-crazy-projects.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/... Researchers have unearthed a series of grants issued to schemes deemed “confidential” that have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Taxpayers’ money spent on the projects, many of which have been described as “crazy”, has increased since the onset of recession. The schemes include £145,000 to print 736 postcards that “reflect the current problems in Europe that generate social exclusion” and £166,000 on a street circus project whose aim is to “strengthen international understanding”. Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card. Whilst these aren't academic grants specifically, they are indicative of the level of quality control that occurs in systems where tax money is spent without accountability to taxpayers.

jknz 9y ago

The salaries of US Professors at public universities is public. For instance, the database of salaries at UC universities can be queried here [1]. This data will be updated and more precise than glassdoor. This does not include salaries at private institutions though, and those salaries may be higher than at public universities. I do not want to pinpoint any specific names, but salaries for tenure-track assistant professors that started after the AI boom seem to be on par with salaries in the private sector for positions right after the PhD (100k-150k range). Also, professor salary usually includes an extra summer salary that comes from grants, I don't know whether this summer salary is included in the database [1]. Also, AI academic positions are spread throughout the US, as opposed to tech AI positions that are concentrated in the bay area. This, as well as the almost complete freedom that academics enjoy, may appeal to some talented PhDs. [1]: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

goialoq 9y ago
100k-150k is new-undergrad-degree salary in private sector, not PhD and certainly not PhD+ salary.

new299 9y ago

Hmmm... this story is about a PhD student. There's an argument that you should be paid a salary to receive an education. However I think it would also apply to undergraduate degrees (and indeed in the UK students used to receive grants). PhDs in the UK are often funded, the student receives a stipend to cover their living costs. But it's mostly assumed that the work you do is a form of education/training in how to do original research and that your education is the compensation.

velobro 9y ago

UC Merced's chancellor's pay doubled over a 2-3 year span from 200k per year to 400k. They don't have a problem getting the money to retain talent, they just don't think paying faculty well is worth it

namlem 9y ago

One of my old professors was tenured and highly regarded, but she still left to work for Google when offered a position at X. I don't blame her, I would have probably done the same.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their slaves to those who make slaves lives better. It's kind of strange to hear academics described as "fat cats", especially if they're being compared to, say, managers in Google or Facebook. Also, I'm not sure where your experience comes from but in the UK PhD students are anything but slaves. Maybe you're thinking of grad students in the US? I hear the situation is a bit different there. From my understanding, US grad students are forced to do a lot of unpaid work? This is not the case in the UK, as far as I can tell (I'm just starting a PhD).