13 ms·

When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says

91 points by Osiris30 7y ago

arcanus 7y ago
Pay the professor more money. Top Universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars of endowments, and are willing to pay football and basketball coaches millions of dollars. They are not insulated from market pricing. In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they make tenure. Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors. I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  getting university professors into an arms race with the salaries of the private markets would entirely shift the character of public education. If universities had to play by the cutthroat logic of the market as a consequence research or teaching that is not profit oriented would have to die out, or tuitions rise to levels that put immense pressure on individuals and the public purse. This is a dystopian scenario where academic freedom, basic research, and the non-commercial nature of research is completely lost. This is not something we should be going for, instead we should appeal to highly trained researchers to maybe think about the public good that is at stake here. People like Bengio show that it is possible. A future where essential AI research is commodified is a nightmare scenario.
  - nostrebored 7y ago
    How is this a nightmare scenario? Why is teaching being profit oriented a bad thing? There is no necessary loss of academic freedom. Paying a competitive salary doesn't make research commercial -- the university is trying to retain researchers not turn a profit on the research.
    - mkl 7y ago
      > the university is trying to retain researchers not turn a profit on the research. Depends on the university. Most claim ownership of researchers' inventions and have ambitions of profiting from them (many stumble at the commercialisation/monetisation step). For example, Stanford has reportedly made hundreds of millions off Google's PageRank algorithm, because Stanford owned the patent, not Larry Page. That's a good incentive not to work as a university researcher.
      - creato 7y ago
        I think Larry Page did okay in the end. It's not like Stanford takes hundreds of millions from every rinky dink idea thought up by it's students. Another way to look at it is researchers are getting somewhat angelic investments from schools.
    - ldoughty 7y ago
      The money to pay people comes from loans, which are thousands of people hoping they make more money in the future to pay salaries today. If salaries were higher, tuition would be even more difficult and raise the loans even more. Really universities need to find ways to capitalize on their knowledge base to help pay salaries. They also need to reduce overhead... Many schools have several disjoined IT and sometimes HR departments.
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    Or we could cut out a few University Vice Provosts of Telling Professors to be Game-Changers who make $400k/year.
  - Hello71 7y ago
    this is a straw man, no better than the argument that the NCAA and other sports organizations use to excuse paying so-called "amateur players" absolutely nothing, for, and I quote, "considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they [go pro]". parent never argued that professors need to be paid as much as private, merely that the salaries need to be comparable rather than several times lower.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    They're in that race already because private enterprise exists. Either they lose or they adapt. Losing is having advanced research and tech be siloed inside massive corporations. Adapting is out-competing the massive corporations for the best, then being able to capitalize on the research.
- acbart 7y ago
  Yes, this exactly. I'm an assistant professor who's fine with my salary and position, but I can see firsthand how difficult it is to recruit and retain excellent colleagues.
- mabbo 7y ago
  But why would the university bother? The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. Making it worse, the professor isn't being stolen by a competitor (another university) where students might spend their money instead. In short, if you're asking for the free market to solve this problem, it has- from the professors' perspective. Edit: put another way, these professors can earn the private industry far more money than they can the university. Often a lot more. Salary competition between such pairs of actors will always result in the same thing.
  - bradleyjg 7y ago
    If universities are profit maximizing entities why do they get preferential tax treatment?
    - ldoughty 7y ago
      Paying employees more is not profit-centric... I'm not sure about your argument here .. University athletics is certainly a profit center, but research and general operations is devoid of cash, even at R1 institutions. I struggle to find money for salary and most private industries will offer 20% more for any employee I hire
      - bradleyjg 7y ago
        Quoting the grandparent post: The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. If that’s how a university makes decisions then I don’t think it ought to get tax advantages.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    The top schools aren't the ones who need to worry, and it's not the famous professors who need to be retained. It's the mid and low ranked schools who are facing competitive pressures from alternative options.
- mattmcknight 7y ago
  The trouble is that the market rate for professors in other subjects is not as high, and they get mad if the differential is too great.
  - ryan93 7y ago
    Is there evidence for this?
  - MegaButts 7y ago
    You should look up salaries for professors/lecturers that teach business, law, and medicine. They pay a lot more than salaries for professors/lecturers for history, math, and literature.
    - throwawayjava 7y ago
      Med is different for a lot of reasons. But, yeah, the delta between econ/law and CS faculty salaries is why I turned down TT offers and went to industry. They can pay. They're choosing not to.
      - wolfgke 7y ago
        Just a consideration: Do these differences in salaries for professors of the different subjects also show up in tuition fees for students of the respective subject?
        mattmcknight 7y ago
        Yes. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/06/01/why-universities-charge-extra-for-engineering-business-and-nursing-degrees https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
        throwawayjava 7y ago
        Not at the types of institutions I would be working at (or most institutions, for that matter).
- liability 7y ago
  Consider the plight of the medical student though. Worse than that of a CS grad student, that's for sure. Made to practice medicine on people while sleep deprived as a form of industry-approved hazing, a practice that doubtlessly has a substantial death toll associated with it.
  - munherty 7y ago
    Never understood why this doesnt get any press. Its absurd
    - blueboo 7y ago
      Gets lots of press. Google doctor interns lack of sleep for a litany of deeply-researched news articles. Hospitals are being privatised and private universities dominate medical education. Where’s the political pressure point?
    - throwaway1777 7y ago
      It gets press but only so many ways to report the same story for years on end.
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      It gets press, but it also a legitimate training technique in many fields. There is something to be said for living and breathing nothing but your job for a period of time. Stress and the ability to perform despite stress is also something that must be learned through experience. Doctors, attorneys, the entire military ... the juniors are run through a few years of long hours and horrible conditions. The downsides have to be weighed against the training value.
      - watwut 7y ago
        The military is trying to mold you the same to make you replaceable and obeisant. Doctors don't need to be all the same.
        7y ago
- mehrdada 7y ago
  While we are at it, pay the grad student more as well. Otherwise, don't be surprised that your good students end up all being foreign-born, motivated by immigration benefits, and local ones would [often wisely] be totally disinterested in the grind.
  - ldoughty 7y ago
    It shocked me when Republicans wanted to tax grad students... Seriously, 18-25k take home pay is poverty level
    - sjg007 7y ago
      Grad students are taxed.
      - mehrdada 7y ago
        I believe the debate was around taxing the "tuition waiver" component of grad students, which grad students never see and is basically moving money from one pocket to another at the university.
- banachtarski 7y ago
  Can't agree more. I was initially interested in academia and went pretty far down the graduate track but ultimately felt like the academic world just hangs professors out to dry when it comes to compensation (tenure is a poor substitute).
- um_ya 7y ago
  To be fair, football and basketball coaches bring in more money to the school. Paying a teacher more doesn't necessarily equate to more money in the school's pocket.
  - smt88 7y ago
    Football and basketball coaches likely help the school lose money. Almost zero US college sports programs are profitable[1]. Also, since when does a university have to justify its teaching quality by its profitability? That's the reason the school exists and why it has non-profit status... 1. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      *directly. Sports programs help with recruiting and alumni fundraising. Both of which are profit centers.
      - smt88 7y ago
        How do you study that exactly? How can you know that your losses on sports are covered by your gains in recruiting and fundraising? All the wealthiest schools are known for their academics, not their sports.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        Schools recruit and fundraise betterin years with/after more successful football seasons. If you know how you fundraise at 6-6 vs 11-2, you can quantify the value of a coach who brings you 3 extra wins each season.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    Cool, and they wouldn't be doing anything without the school, so the money should go to the school's general fund.
- a3n 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be cheaper to hand out more tenure, or at least eliminate adjunct and ensure that everyone has at least health insurance? As a start?
- alphaoverlord 7y ago
  Medical doctors at universities and medical schools generally make 50% of salaries for private practice.
- noipv4 7y ago
  All the money is used to line the pockets of ever growing ranks of 'Administrators and Executive assistant' who are busy creating silly rules and pointless systems ;)
- dantheman 7y ago
  Probably can't pay the professors more money -- they're delivering that much value. But they can woo the professors back with flexible teaching arrangements that allow them to continue to teach while working.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  It's mostly not about money - though it's certainly a piece. It's about actual capacity to make an impact. At a major company as an "AI" practitioner, you have immense amounts of data to play with, a huge budget and (relatively) little oversight. As a researcher, you have to teach classes to undergrads, write grant proposals and scrounge around for data and project funding. Which do you think you'd rather do if you care about making functional progress in your field?
babakd 7y ago
What’s the study’s control group? If we compare the number of companies founded by students over different time periods it doesn’t say much about the effects of the “brain drain”.
jhbadger 7y ago
All this reminds me of the late 1990s, when 50% of academics who knew HTML ran to a dot-com. It didn't last, and a few years later an awful lot of former professors begged for their jobs back. Some of them got it, but most didn't.
- baron_harkonnen 7y ago
  I've noticed a trend of basically any PhD who knows Python getting hired to join any of the many growing "data science" teams in large companies. Despite having PhDs (usually in non-related fields like biology or even education) most of these people know very little about engineering, statistics, CS and surprisingly science. All they know how to do is stitch together a bunch of keras code and try to get some arbitrary cost function drop. I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era, where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and solving interesting problems. I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.
hcnews 7y ago
Is there a way to access nytimes without signing in?
- wolfgke 7y ago
  Use archive.is, e.g. > http://archive.is/2qktN http://archive.is/2qktN
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- kamyarg 7y ago
  clear cookies whenever you see the paywall. works for most news websites in my experience
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Disable JS.
- chubot 7y ago
  Hit the stop button on your browser at the right time. After HTML loads and before JS. Really! It’s not hard to time it, just did it on my iPad. I really wish Google wouldn’t surface paywalled links (coming from a print NYT subscriber for over a decade)
neilv 7y ago
I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it. This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students. I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings. I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.
CryoLogic 7y ago
I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the-barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income difference from University to Industry. I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay. We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).
neilv 7y ago
> Tech companies disagree with the notion that they are plundering academia. A [typical large dotcom] spokesman, for example, said the company was an enthusiastic supporter of academic research. On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from those dotcoms. Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships, and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting dates when they returned.
- lainga 7y ago
  I (soon to be non-undergrad) got the impression around 2016 that the admiration was wearing off of our classmates who did co-op terms at FAANG. One of our peers had done a term at a Cambridge Analytica subsidiary in town, AggregateIQ, so when the news came out, it was especially prominent in (at least) my mind. I can't comment on whether any romantic efforts were impeded or not.
- chronic839 7y ago
  > Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships Given ethics is a fuzzy line, I'll loosely define it as, what the majority would do, or deem acceptable, _given the option_ to choose between two actions. Note that many times, people don't actually have the option to choose and are simply talking from their armchair. Now, coming to internships, those undergrads receive offers from both Facebook et al. and second tier companies like Capital One, P&G, or IBM. Nearly all of them choose Facebook and the higher pay. Hell, even Facebook knows their reputation is declining and hence offers more total compensation for to offset it, and it works! Plenty of my friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley grad school chose Facebook upon graduating "because they paid 300K-400K TC." And yes, this is in 2019. Same thing with working professionals. I have the option to sell my computer vision person re-identification technology to a Chinese customer or a European one. Due to the deal terms, we could only pick one. Guess what, we sold to the Chinese (and presumably government controlled) company. Unethical? Yeah probably. But who gives a shit? It's a lot of money. I'll gladly put my ethics aside and do _anything_ as long as it's legal. And I took 3 useless-ass ethics classes in undergrad. There's a saying: "Everyone has a price." And it's true as ever.
gjstein 7y ago
The blog post "You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation"[1] from prominent AI researchers Ben Recht, David A. Forsyth, and Alexei Efros also highlights the challenges of co-employment by big tech companies. Well worth a read. [1] http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/ http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/
wolfgke 7y ago
Perhaps those academic institutions should simply offer tenure much faster if they want to keep these professors. It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that universities can offer.
- NickM 7y ago
  From the article: At Carnegie Mellon, 17 professors, all of them tenured, have moved into industry Not sure about other universities, but it doesn’t sound like tenure made much difference at CMU.
Nasrudith 7y ago
"Plundering" and "poaching" are inherently wrongheaded notions of gross entitlement from employers expecting unilateral loyalty. The problem should be approached as "how can we attract and retain the best" not thinking of them as property and their competitors as thieves.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I can’t even get software developers to think I’m terms of teamwork (Mostly I can filter by ones that are sympathetic). Imagine trying to get academics to do so.
Gatsky 7y ago
This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences and medicine as well. It isn’t just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even if it could match the pay.
- esoterica 7y ago
  Tenured professors have vastly better job security than anywhere in the private sector.
samfisher83 7y ago
Pretty much all of the highest paid state employees are medical professors. https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/ https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/ Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself and gets you those high paid side gigs.
- sologoub 7y ago
  That’s pretty incredible - #100 of the top 100 best paid still makes $652,640. However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over $200k. That’s pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely choosing to leave.
- phren0logy 7y ago
  Medical professors usually make their money by also working as doctors providing medical care at university hospitals. The university takes a cut.
- paxys 7y ago
  A combination of surgeons and football coaches. What a weird dataset.
rdlecler1 7y ago
First we should abolish the 5-7 year PhD program and make it three years. Second universities should use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink Their approach to entrepreneurism. Third this actually creates opportunities for students to become professors. In most fields good luck!
- protastus 7y ago
  Reducing the length of PhD programs (in the U.S. -- PhDs in Europe tend to be shorter) would have the side-effect of having even more PhD grads (of lower quality) that can't find a job. Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.
  - rdlecler1 7y ago
    So keep them out of the workforce longer?
- _Wintermute 7y ago
  PhD programmes are 3 years in Europe because the education beforehand is much more focused. You've pretty much chosen what you want to do at at 16 and from 18 years old onwards you only study one subject. To be admitted to a PhD programme usually requires either a masters degree or a lot of reserach experience. Then the actual PhD programmes themselves are just research, no classes or teaching.

91 points by Osiris30 7y ago

Pay the professor more money. Top Universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars of endowments, and are willing to pay football and basketball coaches millions of dollars. They are not insulated from market pricing. In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they make tenure. Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors. I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.

Barrin92 7y ago
getting university professors into an arms race with the salaries of the private markets would entirely shift the character of public education. If universities had to play by the cutthroat logic of the market as a consequence research or teaching that is not profit oriented would have to die out, or tuitions rise to levels that put immense pressure on individuals and the public purse. This is a dystopian scenario where academic freedom, basic research, and the non-commercial nature of research is completely lost. This is not something we should be going for, instead we should appeal to highly trained researchers to maybe think about the public good that is at stake here. People like Bengio show that it is possible. A future where essential AI research is commodified is a nightmare scenario.
- nostrebored 7y ago
  How is this a nightmare scenario? Why is teaching being profit oriented a bad thing? There is no necessary loss of academic freedom. Paying a competitive salary doesn't make research commercial -- the university is trying to retain researchers not turn a profit on the research.
  - mkl 7y ago
    > the university is trying to retain researchers not turn a profit on the research. Depends on the university. Most claim ownership of researchers' inventions and have ambitions of profiting from them (many stumble at the commercialisation/monetisation step). For example, Stanford has reportedly made hundreds of millions off Google's PageRank algorithm, because Stanford owned the patent, not Larry Page. That's a good incentive not to work as a university researcher.
    - creato 7y ago
      I think Larry Page did okay in the end. It's not like Stanford takes hundreds of millions from every rinky dink idea thought up by it's students. Another way to look at it is researchers are getting somewhat angelic investments from schools.
  - ldoughty 7y ago
    The money to pay people comes from loans, which are thousands of people hoping they make more money in the future to pay salaries today. If salaries were higher, tuition would be even more difficult and raise the loans even more. Really universities need to find ways to capitalize on their knowledge base to help pay salaries. They also need to reduce overhead... Many schools have several disjoined IT and sometimes HR departments.
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  Or we could cut out a few University Vice Provosts of Telling Professors to be Game-Changers who make $400k/year.
- Hello71 7y ago
  this is a straw man, no better than the argument that the NCAA and other sports organizations use to excuse paying so-called "amateur players" absolutely nothing, for, and I quote, "considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they [go pro]". parent never argued that professors need to be paid as much as private, merely that the salaries need to be comparable rather than several times lower.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  They're in that race already because private enterprise exists. Either they lose or they adapt. Losing is having advanced research and tech be siloed inside massive corporations. Adapting is out-competing the massive corporations for the best, then being able to capitalize on the research.
acbart 7y ago
Yes, this exactly. I'm an assistant professor who's fine with my salary and position, but I can see firsthand how difficult it is to recruit and retain excellent colleagues.
mabbo 7y ago
But why would the university bother? The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. Making it worse, the professor isn't being stolen by a competitor (another university) where students might spend their money instead. In short, if you're asking for the free market to solve this problem, it has- from the professors' perspective. Edit: put another way, these professors can earn the private industry far more money than they can the university. Often a lot more. Salary competition between such pairs of actors will always result in the same thing.
- bradleyjg 7y ago
  If universities are profit maximizing entities why do they get preferential tax treatment?
  - ldoughty 7y ago
    Paying employees more is not profit-centric... I'm not sure about your argument here .. University athletics is certainly a profit center, but research and general operations is devoid of cash, even at R1 institutions. I struggle to find money for salary and most private industries will offer 20% more for any employee I hire
    - bradleyjg 7y ago
      Quoting the grandparent post: The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. If that’s how a university makes decisions then I don’t think it ought to get tax advantages.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  The top schools aren't the ones who need to worry, and it's not the famous professors who need to be retained. It's the mid and low ranked schools who are facing competitive pressures from alternative options.
mattmcknight 7y ago
The trouble is that the market rate for professors in other subjects is not as high, and they get mad if the differential is too great.
- ryan93 7y ago
  Is there evidence for this?
- MegaButts 7y ago
  You should look up salaries for professors/lecturers that teach business, law, and medicine. They pay a lot more than salaries for professors/lecturers for history, math, and literature.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    Med is different for a lot of reasons. But, yeah, the delta between econ/law and CS faculty salaries is why I turned down TT offers and went to industry. They can pay. They're choosing not to.
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      Just a consideration: Do these differences in salaries for professors of the different subjects also show up in tuition fees for students of the respective subject?
      - mattmcknight 7y ago
        Yes. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/06/01/why-universities-charge-extra-for-engineering-business-and-nursing-degrees https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
      - throwawayjava 7y ago
        Not at the types of institutions I would be working at (or most institutions, for that matter).
liability 7y ago
Consider the plight of the medical student though. Worse than that of a CS grad student, that's for sure. Made to practice medicine on people while sleep deprived as a form of industry-approved hazing, a practice that doubtlessly has a substantial death toll associated with it.
- munherty 7y ago
  Never understood why this doesnt get any press. Its absurd
  - blueboo 7y ago
    Gets lots of press. Google doctor interns lack of sleep for a litany of deeply-researched news articles. Hospitals are being privatised and private universities dominate medical education. Where’s the political pressure point?
  - throwaway1777 7y ago
    It gets press but only so many ways to report the same story for years on end.
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    It gets press, but it also a legitimate training technique in many fields. There is something to be said for living and breathing nothing but your job for a period of time. Stress and the ability to perform despite stress is also something that must be learned through experience. Doctors, attorneys, the entire military ... the juniors are run through a few years of long hours and horrible conditions. The downsides have to be weighed against the training value.
    - watwut 7y ago
      The military is trying to mold you the same to make you replaceable and obeisant. Doctors don't need to be all the same.
      - 7y ago
mehrdada 7y ago
While we are at it, pay the grad student more as well. Otherwise, don't be surprised that your good students end up all being foreign-born, motivated by immigration benefits, and local ones would [often wisely] be totally disinterested in the grind.
- ldoughty 7y ago
  It shocked me when Republicans wanted to tax grad students... Seriously, 18-25k take home pay is poverty level
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Grad students are taxed.
    - mehrdada 7y ago
      I believe the debate was around taxing the "tuition waiver" component of grad students, which grad students never see and is basically moving money from one pocket to another at the university.
banachtarski 7y ago
Can't agree more. I was initially interested in academia and went pretty far down the graduate track but ultimately felt like the academic world just hangs professors out to dry when it comes to compensation (tenure is a poor substitute).
um_ya 7y ago
To be fair, football and basketball coaches bring in more money to the school. Paying a teacher more doesn't necessarily equate to more money in the school's pocket.
- smt88 7y ago
  Football and basketball coaches likely help the school lose money. Almost zero US college sports programs are profitable[1]. Also, since when does a university have to justify its teaching quality by its profitability? That's the reason the school exists and why it has non-profit status... 1. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    *directly. Sports programs help with recruiting and alumni fundraising. Both of which are profit centers.
    - smt88 7y ago
      How do you study that exactly? How can you know that your losses on sports are covered by your gains in recruiting and fundraising? All the wealthiest schools are known for their academics, not their sports.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        Schools recruit and fundraise betterin years with/after more successful football seasons. If you know how you fundraise at 6-6 vs 11-2, you can quantify the value of a coach who brings you 3 extra wins each season.
- rhizome 7y ago
  Cool, and they wouldn't be doing anything without the school, so the money should go to the school's general fund.
a3n 7y ago
Wouldn't it be cheaper to hand out more tenure, or at least eliminate adjunct and ensure that everyone has at least health insurance? As a start?
alphaoverlord 7y ago
Medical doctors at universities and medical schools generally make 50% of salaries for private practice.
noipv4 7y ago
All the money is used to line the pockets of ever growing ranks of 'Administrators and Executive assistant' who are busy creating silly rules and pointless systems ;)
dantheman 7y ago
Probably can't pay the professors more money -- they're delivering that much value. But they can woo the professors back with flexible teaching arrangements that allow them to continue to teach while working.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
It's mostly not about money - though it's certainly a piece. It's about actual capacity to make an impact. At a major company as an "AI" practitioner, you have immense amounts of data to play with, a huge budget and (relatively) little oversight. As a researcher, you have to teach classes to undergrads, write grant proposals and scrounge around for data and project funding. Which do you think you'd rather do if you care about making functional progress in your field?

babakd 7y ago

What’s the study’s control group? If we compare the number of companies founded by students over different time periods it doesn’t say much about the effects of the “brain drain”.

jhbadger 7y ago

All this reminds me of the late 1990s, when 50% of academics who knew HTML ran to a dot-com. It didn't last, and a few years later an awful lot of former professors begged for their jobs back. Some of them got it, but most didn't.

baron_harkonnen 7y ago
I've noticed a trend of basically any PhD who knows Python getting hired to join any of the many growing "data science" teams in large companies. Despite having PhDs (usually in non-related fields like biology or even education) most of these people know very little about engineering, statistics, CS and surprisingly science. All they know how to do is stitch together a bunch of keras code and try to get some arbitrary cost function drop. I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era, where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and solving interesting problems. I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.

hcnews 7y ago

Is there a way to access nytimes without signing in?

wolfgke 7y ago
Use archive.is, e.g. > http://archive.is/2qktN http://archive.is/2qktN
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kamyarg 7y ago
clear cookies whenever you see the paywall. works for most news websites in my experience
dredmorbius 7y ago
Disable JS.
chubot 7y ago
Hit the stop button on your browser at the right time. After HTML loads and before JS. Really! It’s not hard to time it, just did it on my iPad. I really wish Google wouldn’t surface paywalled links (coming from a print NYT subscriber for over a decade)

neilv 7y ago

I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it. This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students. I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings. I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.

CryoLogic 7y ago

I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the-barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income difference from University to Industry. I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay. We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).

neilv 7y ago

> Tech companies disagree with the notion that they are plundering academia. A [typical large dotcom] spokesman, for example, said the company was an enthusiastic supporter of academic research. On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from those dotcoms. Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships, and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting dates when they returned.

lainga 7y ago
I (soon to be non-undergrad) got the impression around 2016 that the admiration was wearing off of our classmates who did co-op terms at FAANG. One of our peers had done a term at a Cambridge Analytica subsidiary in town, AggregateIQ, so when the news came out, it was especially prominent in (at least) my mind. I can't comment on whether any romantic efforts were impeded or not.
chronic839 7y ago
> Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships Given ethics is a fuzzy line, I'll loosely define it as, what the majority would do, or deem acceptable, _given the option_ to choose between two actions. Note that many times, people don't actually have the option to choose and are simply talking from their armchair. Now, coming to internships, those undergrads receive offers from both Facebook et al. and second tier companies like Capital One, P&G, or IBM. Nearly all of them choose Facebook and the higher pay. Hell, even Facebook knows their reputation is declining and hence offers more total compensation for to offset it, and it works! Plenty of my friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley grad school chose Facebook upon graduating "because they paid 300K-400K TC." And yes, this is in 2019. Same thing with working professionals. I have the option to sell my computer vision person re-identification technology to a Chinese customer or a European one. Due to the deal terms, we could only pick one. Guess what, we sold to the Chinese (and presumably government controlled) company. Unethical? Yeah probably. But who gives a shit? It's a lot of money. I'll gladly put my ethics aside and do _anything_ as long as it's legal. And I took 3 useless-ass ethics classes in undergrad. There's a saying: "Everyone has a price." And it's true as ever.

gjstein 7y ago

The blog post "You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation"[1] from prominent AI researchers Ben Recht, David A. Forsyth, and Alexei Efros also highlights the challenges of co-employment by big tech companies. Well worth a read. [1] http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/ http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/

wolfgke 7y ago

Perhaps those academic institutions should simply offer tenure much faster if they want to keep these professors. It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that universities can offer.

NickM 7y ago
From the article: At Carnegie Mellon, 17 professors, all of them tenured, have moved into industry Not sure about other universities, but it doesn’t sound like tenure made much difference at CMU.

Nasrudith 7y ago

"Plundering" and "poaching" are inherently wrongheaded notions of gross entitlement from employers expecting unilateral loyalty. The problem should be approached as "how can we attract and retain the best" not thinking of them as property and their competitors as thieves.

hinkley 7y ago
I can’t even get software developers to think I’m terms of teamwork (Mostly I can filter by ones that are sympathetic). Imagine trying to get academics to do so.

Gatsky 7y ago

This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences and medicine as well. It isn’t just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even if it could match the pay.

esoterica 7y ago
Tenured professors have vastly better job security than anywhere in the private sector.

samfisher83 7y ago

Pretty much all of the highest paid state employees are medical professors. https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/ https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/ Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself and gets you those high paid side gigs.

sologoub 7y ago
That’s pretty incredible - #100 of the top 100 best paid still makes $652,640. However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over $200k. That’s pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely choosing to leave.
phren0logy 7y ago
Medical professors usually make their money by also working as doctors providing medical care at university hospitals. The university takes a cut.
paxys 7y ago
A combination of surgeons and football coaches. What a weird dataset.

rdlecler1 7y ago

First we should abolish the 5-7 year PhD program and make it three years. Second universities should use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink Their approach to entrepreneurism. Third this actually creates opportunities for students to become professors. In most fields good luck!

protastus 7y ago
Reducing the length of PhD programs (in the U.S. -- PhDs in Europe tend to be shorter) would have the side-effect of having even more PhD grads (of lower quality) that can't find a job. Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.
- rdlecler1 7y ago
  So keep them out of the workforce longer?
_Wintermute 7y ago
PhD programmes are 3 years in Europe because the education beforehand is much more focused. You've pretty much chosen what you want to do at at 16 and from 18 years old onwards you only study one subject. To be admitted to a PhD programme usually requires either a masters degree or a lot of reserach experience. Then the actual PhD programmes themselves are just research, no classes or teaching.