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The issue is modern education actively filters out eccentric scientists and rewards submissive diligent people (ivy league graduates). Creative geniuses dont th

The issue is modern education actively filters out eccentric scientists and rewards submissive diligent people (ivy league graduates). Creative geniuses dont thrive in modern school systems and thus dont end up with 4.0s. Higher level education (PhDs) is also seen as a great way to migrate to the USA by the Chinese and Indians (not saying they arent contributing to the fields), so you get people who arent passionately trying to push the field forwards but instead are just jumping through hoops and view it as a career. Other issues in science include people turning it in a competition for prestige. Its often the case that top programs prioritize the prestige of an undergraduate school instead of research ability. The same is true of academic journals and getting tenure. In some fields, more than half of the tenured professors at the top 100 schools in the USA completed their PhD from a top 5 PhD program in their field.

Balgair 7y ago
> In some fields, more than half of the tenured professors at the top 100 schools in the USA completed their PhD from a top 5 PhD program in their field. In a lot of Humanities fields, it's worse. Though I can't seem to find The Atlantic article right now, I can remember one from a few years ago that stated that in fields like French Literature, there has never been a tenured professor in the US that came form anything other than one of ten schools, going back many decades. That said, these professors still taught at a place other than those ten schools and had PhD students themselves. These students stood exactly zero chance at tenure achievement. These new PhDs could, of course, go on to live lives outside of the ivory tower. However, in the Humanities, it does smell strongly of disingeniousness on the part of the tenured faculty to take on students, charge them, and train them in fields that they know they cannot possibly be employed in to any 'real' effect. I cannot imagine the metal gymnastics that must go on in the Ethics fields these days.
- donaldknuth123 7y ago
  To be fair its quite bad in STEM as well e.g http://cs.brown.edu/people/apapouts/faculty_dataset.html http://cs.brown.edu/people/apapouts/faculty_dataset.html Not a real surprise that MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and CMU dominate CS faculty output.

Balgair 7y ago

> In some fields, more than half of the tenured professors at the top 100 schools in the USA completed their PhD from a top 5 PhD program in their field. In a lot of Humanities fields, it's worse. Though I can't seem to find The Atlantic article right now, I can remember one from a few years ago that stated that in fields like French Literature, there has never been a tenured professor in the US that came form anything other than one of ten schools, going back many decades. That said, these professors still taught at a place other than those ten schools and had PhD students themselves. These students stood exactly zero chance at tenure achievement. These new PhDs could, of course, go on to live lives outside of the ivory tower. However, in the Humanities, it does smell strongly of disingeniousness on the part of the tenured faculty to take on students, charge them, and train them in fields that they know they cannot possibly be employed in to any 'real' effect. I cannot imagine the metal gymnastics that must go on in the Ethics fields these days.

donaldknuth123 7y ago
To be fair its quite bad in STEM as well e.g http://cs.brown.edu/people/apapouts/faculty_dataset.html http://cs.brown.edu/people/apapouts/faculty_dataset.html Not a real surprise that MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and CMU dominate CS faculty output.