I do think there is a tinge of elitism for sure, but what I mean more practically speaking is that a lot of research is getting churned out that is not incentiv

I do think there is a tinge of elitism for sure, but what I mean more practically speaking is that a lot of research is getting churned out that is not incentivized by actually wanting to do good research. I fundamentally believe you always get what you incentivize, and the incentivizes for research lean too far towards building careers and resumes outside of research, to deleterious effects. The elitism you are picking up is my sense that academia is losing its value by becoming a bureaucracy machine with low standards, rather than a way to produce novel insights. It doesn’t make sense to build a road to nowhere just because it’s funded, looks good on a resume, and makes it look like you know how to build roads. Can a meta-analysis be valuable? Sure. Should 1 million people be submitting meta-analyses to journals? No, because almost none of them will be read, and they are unlikely to be of high quality. My proposal is simply to make a scientist track that is not indexed on novelty but instead on conducting good research, a focus on the scientific method and applying it to a field, etc. This should satisfy the desire to produce PhDs for basic governmental and educational jobs that for whatever reason (even if artificial scarcity) need some kind of barrier to advancement or knowledge of how to conduct research. Most people going from academia to elsewhere will not be working on the exact niches they studied anyway. And it would at least keep the treadmill of people chasing the “highest degree” or random publications for their resumes at bay by removing the requirement for novelty.