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> “It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn...If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.” It i

> “It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn...If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.” It is interesting to note that in our free-market(ish) society, preparing the next generation of researchers is not as valued as working at a BigCo or a Unicorn. If AI professors are in high demand relative to the supple, basic economics dictate that their prices should spike up. Then why aren't these professors getting paid a lot more to continue teaching?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abenedic 8y ago
There is usually a cap on pay for professors. Maybe that is factoring in?
sterlind 8y ago
Alternatively, universities could act as startup incubators, a la SRI (Stanford Research Institute, who created the prototype for Siri.) Professors are being paid below market value for their skills. If tenure came with a replenishing bucket of venture capital, under stipulation of open source/patent sharing, it'd give them real money, autonomy and great internships for their students! Schools would make bank, too.
- davesque 8y ago
  Or, alternatively, schools could actually act like academic institutions and quit wasting exorbitant amounts of money on bullshit like sports and unnecessary construction projects which drive low-quality student enrollment.
  - arijun 8y ago
    You're making common mistakes that people make when talking about school finances. Schools pay for sports because they drive alumni interaction and therefore donation rates, and they therefore have a higher than 1-1 rate of return. They have the unnecessary construction projects because the funds are earmarked for said construction. If I give you, a school, $X million, on the condition that you build a new student hall with my name on it, will you turn that down?
    - mac01021 8y ago
      If I offer you $1200, on the condition that you spend that money on a 36 hour trip to Hong Kong and back, will you turn that down? I assume so. So there has to be some other force at play, unless the university admins are just maximizing revenue in a brain-dead fashion.
      - ajiang 8y ago
        The analogy isn't a good one, as you get no value out of the trip to Hong Kong in your scenario. A more relevant analogy is if I offered you $1,200 on the condition you spend that money on a home gym. Could you have other uses for the money? Sure. Could you have higher priorities than exercise? Sure. Are you going to turn that down? Probably not. An even more appropriate analogy is if I offered you $2,500, but $1,200 had to be spent on a home gym. The remainder has no conditions. That would be closer to what a lot of big donations are structured as.
        davesque 8y ago
        You're leaving out aspects of that analogy. You left out the part where you incur the added cost of electricity, or your current home isn't big enough so you need to move to a new area with higher property taxes and insurance costs. Or maybe you're renting the home to someone and force them to get a new gym in exchange for higher rent. The point is, who actually benefits from the donation; the fancy pants administrators and donators or the actual students who'd probably prefer lower tuition and better quality instruction? Somehow, big donations never seem to translate to the the obvious benefit of affordability and accomplishing the actual goal of providing a good education to people.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      If it is a taxpayer funded institution, then it should be turned down. Donations should be anonymous, otherwise I assume the donor is wanting and getting something in return (nepotism, brand name, hubris), and that doesn't belong in taxpayer funded arenas, even street names and parks and whatnot.
bsder 8y ago
> Then why aren't these professors getting paid a lot more to continue teaching? Because the majority of money that a professor controls mostly comes from grants. And you have to fight for grants from an ever shrinking base. Why fight for grants when you can get paid a dramatically higher salary and can focus on research instead of fundraising? Until academia figures out how to fix its funding model, this is the new normal--any hot tech area is going to result in a brain drain.
- chriskanan 8y ago
  Correct. Professors bring in money by teaching, for which they aren't paid any extra, and grants, which often they receive a small monetary incentive, i.e., summer salary of about $10-20K per year for a professor making $100K. It is hard to get much more than that because of caps on grants, so for professors to get paid more by grants the maximum size of a grant from NSF/DoD/etc. would need to be a lot bigger. A question I have is "Why aren't professors who teach larger and more popular classes paid more for taking on the additional students?" My deep learning classes fill up to the maximum size allowed (50). I could scale it even higher, although finding class space would be hard, but if I do that my university has no explicit mechanism to reward me for doing that. If you teach more people, you would think that you would make more money.
vonseel 8y ago
Too far removed from the day-to-day to be reflected that it is more important to keep teaching than go to big company. Likewise, research could never make it out of private companies and that is certainly a less favorable outcome for the public as a whole. The AI professors are probably paid much higher than peers in non-technical subjects but no university is going to be able to match Google or Facebook salaries, especially when these guys are in such demand that private industry is willing to pay $300-500k+ each for them (sometimes much more).
- chriskanan 8y ago
  In general, AI professors are not paid any better by universities. Maybe if you were a superstar and had threatened to leave, but even then your compensation would be relatively small in comparison.
mac01021 8y ago
> Then why aren't these professors getting paid a lot more to continue teaching? Paid with what money? Tuition is probably already set to the highest amount that is competitive with other schools.
- droidist2 8y ago
  So students pay insane tuitions and professors are relatively underpaid. Where does all the money go?
  - mac01021 8y ago
    At CMU, annual tuition is less than $24,000. There are less than 14,000 students enrolled, which means total tuition paid must be less than $336M. If all that money were equally divided between the 1400 faculty members, they'd each get a salary of at most $240k per year, which is really high in the grand scheme of things but kind of low for these specific facebook jobs that we're talking about. Now consider that much (most?) of that revenue must actually be spent on the 2,500 staff members supporting university operations, building maintenence, etc. I don't think there is any great mystery to solve here. Edit: see the replies to this post. It seems the tuition at CMU I'd double what I thought it was. I still don't think the revised numbers are any more mysterious, though.
    - cmuguythrow 8y ago
      Undergraduate tuition at CMU is $52,732 per year https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/tuition-and-fees.html https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/tuiti...
      - mac01021 8y ago
        Indeed you are right! The collegedata page that Google took me to must have been woefully out of date. Still, a mere doubling of the faculty salaries I was describing above is likely still not sufficient to compete with these tech giants when hiring someone like a deep learning expert.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

abenedic 8y ago

There is usually a cap on pay for professors. Maybe that is factoring in?

sterlind 8y ago

Alternatively, universities could act as startup incubators, a la SRI (Stanford Research Institute, who created the prototype for Siri.) Professors are being paid below market value for their skills. If tenure came with a replenishing bucket of venture capital, under stipulation of open source/patent sharing, it'd give them real money, autonomy and great internships for their students! Schools would make bank, too.

davesque 8y ago
Or, alternatively, schools could actually act like academic institutions and quit wasting exorbitant amounts of money on bullshit like sports and unnecessary construction projects which drive low-quality student enrollment.
- arijun 8y ago
  You're making common mistakes that people make when talking about school finances. Schools pay for sports because they drive alumni interaction and therefore donation rates, and they therefore have a higher than 1-1 rate of return. They have the unnecessary construction projects because the funds are earmarked for said construction. If I give you, a school, $X million, on the condition that you build a new student hall with my name on it, will you turn that down?
  - mac01021 8y ago
    If I offer you $1200, on the condition that you spend that money on a 36 hour trip to Hong Kong and back, will you turn that down? I assume so. So there has to be some other force at play, unless the university admins are just maximizing revenue in a brain-dead fashion.
    - ajiang 8y ago
      The analogy isn't a good one, as you get no value out of the trip to Hong Kong in your scenario. A more relevant analogy is if I offered you $1,200 on the condition you spend that money on a home gym. Could you have other uses for the money? Sure. Could you have higher priorities than exercise? Sure. Are you going to turn that down? Probably not. An even more appropriate analogy is if I offered you $2,500, but $1,200 had to be spent on a home gym. The remainder has no conditions. That would be closer to what a lot of big donations are structured as.
      - davesque 8y ago
        You're leaving out aspects of that analogy. You left out the part where you incur the added cost of electricity, or your current home isn't big enough so you need to move to a new area with higher property taxes and insurance costs. Or maybe you're renting the home to someone and force them to get a new gym in exchange for higher rent. The point is, who actually benefits from the donation; the fancy pants administrators and donators or the actual students who'd probably prefer lower tuition and better quality instruction? Somehow, big donations never seem to translate to the the obvious benefit of affordability and accomplishing the actual goal of providing a good education to people.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    If it is a taxpayer funded institution, then it should be turned down. Donations should be anonymous, otherwise I assume the donor is wanting and getting something in return (nepotism, brand name, hubris), and that doesn't belong in taxpayer funded arenas, even street names and parks and whatnot.

bsder 8y ago

> Then why aren't these professors getting paid a lot more to continue teaching? Because the majority of money that a professor controls mostly comes from grants. And you have to fight for grants from an ever shrinking base. Why fight for grants when you can get paid a dramatically higher salary and can focus on research instead of fundraising? Until academia figures out how to fix its funding model, this is the new normal--any hot tech area is going to result in a brain drain.

chriskanan 8y ago
Correct. Professors bring in money by teaching, for which they aren't paid any extra, and grants, which often they receive a small monetary incentive, i.e., summer salary of about $10-20K per year for a professor making $100K. It is hard to get much more than that because of caps on grants, so for professors to get paid more by grants the maximum size of a grant from NSF/DoD/etc. would need to be a lot bigger. A question I have is "Why aren't professors who teach larger and more popular classes paid more for taking on the additional students?" My deep learning classes fill up to the maximum size allowed (50). I could scale it even higher, although finding class space would be hard, but if I do that my university has no explicit mechanism to reward me for doing that. If you teach more people, you would think that you would make more money.

vonseel 8y ago

Too far removed from the day-to-day to be reflected that it is more important to keep teaching than go to big company. Likewise, research could never make it out of private companies and that is certainly a less favorable outcome for the public as a whole. The AI professors are probably paid much higher than peers in non-technical subjects but no university is going to be able to match Google or Facebook salaries, especially when these guys are in such demand that private industry is willing to pay $300-500k+ each for them (sometimes much more).

chriskanan 8y ago
In general, AI professors are not paid any better by universities. Maybe if you were a superstar and had threatened to leave, but even then your compensation would be relatively small in comparison.

mac01021 8y ago

> Then why aren't these professors getting paid a lot more to continue teaching? Paid with what money? Tuition is probably already set to the highest amount that is competitive with other schools.

droidist2 8y ago
So students pay insane tuitions and professors are relatively underpaid. Where does all the money go?
- mac01021 8y ago
  At CMU, annual tuition is less than $24,000. There are less than 14,000 students enrolled, which means total tuition paid must be less than $336M. If all that money were equally divided between the 1400 faculty members, they'd each get a salary of at most $240k per year, which is really high in the grand scheme of things but kind of low for these specific facebook jobs that we're talking about. Now consider that much (most?) of that revenue must actually be spent on the 2,500 staff members supporting university operations, building maintenence, etc. I don't think there is any great mystery to solve here. Edit: see the replies to this post. It seems the tuition at CMU I'd double what I thought it was. I still don't think the revised numbers are any more mysterious, though.
  - cmuguythrow 8y ago
    Undergraduate tuition at CMU is $52,732 per year https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/tuition-and-fees.html https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/tuiti...
    - mac01021 8y ago
      Indeed you are right! The collegedata page that Google took me to must have been woefully out of date. Still, a mere doubling of the faculty salaries I was describing above is likely still not sufficient to compete with these tech giants when hiring someone like a deep learning expert.