Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports and administrative roles to their researchers, for

Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports and administrative roles to their researchers, for starters. For instance, the public US university I attended for grad school has an endowment of about $1B, and spent ~$150M on athletics in the past year. A post doc salary there is about $40k a year. Why would anyone take this over $200k a year (with lots of sweet perks) at eg Google? Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage. Talking about level playing fields here seems disingenuous.