6 ms·

Universities are failing to boost economic growth

40 points by marcelsalathe 3y ago

marcelsalathe 3y ago
https://archive.ph/FEppe https://archive.ph/FEppe
throwawaysleep 3y ago
I spent time as part of an entrepreneurship accelerator in university and one of the cohort options was monetizing some IP owned by the university. Anecdotally, the problem was that the university pretty much stopped developing the IP long before anyone was really interested in monetizing it. Either the university needed to do a lot more legwork to reduce the risk to the person taking the IP or companies/entrepreneurs would need to be willing to take far more risk than they currently do. The business types had come into the program expecting a business problem and left the presentation with a technical problem and the program chose people before problems, so you had people with no specific background in those things as the technicals. > In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. With that experience in mind, this explanation makes the most sense. I have academic friends. I read all sorts of wacky research online. Off the top of my head, most in the sciences have plausible areas of application. But who does the in between stuff?
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  >But who does the in between stuff? Whoever slips through the cracks. >The golden age of the corporate lab then came to an end when competition policy loosened in the 1970s and 1980s. Even more significant was the way the dollar quickly lost half its value during fewer years than the full decade. Nobody could afford anything near what they needed to carry on without devastating cutbacks, and research across-the-board was set back decades from which it still might not recover. Universities were where you were supposed to become professional researchers, if you had the natural inclination and could be admitted, and prove your abilities during academic projects. In the 1960's Gatorade was recognized as an anomaly by being invented at Florida, when people in general still expected things like that to be developed by consumer product companies. This was traditionally most young professionals' last time to seriously pursue research without having a practical application, once they got into industry the commercialization possibilities and aspects formed a completely different foundation to build a creative career on, compared to what little could be expected from a few years of formal education in a purely academic environment. You were supposed to graduate up to the "real world" where companies were much better funded than universities and the majority of a research career was spent under the umbrella of a profitable corporation, which naturally contributes to an economy like it is supposed to do. Too bad companies couldn't afford that any more, it was decimated so quickly and regretfully that the only realistic widespread attitude was telling themselves it was "only temporary", and they'll pick up where they left off when "things get back to normal". But prices never came back down and the value of the dollar never recovered, just a few bubbles burst. But it was essential for financial interests to make it easier for most of the lighter-than-air delicate things like that to stay afloat longer or there would have been an even worse collapse. Barely afloat for so long is not the kind of thing where very many people or companies are going to be able to afford research ever again. The Nixon Recession was brutal, and the Reagan Recession just put the nails in the coffin economically for many tens of millions more whose continued hard work would have otherwise built generational wealth orders of magnitude more than it turned out. For those that recovered at all. But you knew that part. Right now tens of millions have rapidly been set back decades just from the inflation of the last few years, and that's not even "runaway" inflation. Companies were folding left and right, others laying off thousands and jettisoning anything just to stay afloat. After Gatorade, more and more universities did try and come up with marketable things, and really do have more than 50 years of dramatically more numerous commercial items emerging from the firm academic foundation. But nothing compared to what industrial researchers accomplished economically during 50 years in the 20th century. And this is one of the reasons. Researcher or not, you can work your butt off for decades but can't really contribute much to the economy if the dollar isn't worth that much any more.
  - jmalicki 3y ago
    Gatorade wasn't pure research - it was scientists directly trying to solve a problem for their football team, so they already had customers before they finished their science - the customer problem prompted the research, vs. the other-way-around in most university research. It was very much not pure research.
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      Paying customers are a whole new class of customer, compared to dozens of athletes acting as test subjects, and when you put that on the scale of a mass-market, the rest is history. It took years of pressure from other teams before Gatorade was finally available to them and the public, nobody thought it was going to fly off the shelf. It exceeded everyone's expectations from the athletes and scientists to the salesmen and marketers. That is something that can come straight out of the university? When you plan to make lots of bucks, it's already spent before you make it, whether you make it or not. But if you just come up with something(s) that is outstanding for its intended purpose, and it gains fair recognition, you can end up with more money than you dreamed possible. Dr. Cade was not trying to contribute to the economy in the original effort.
cjbenedikt 3y ago
We licensed IP from a Uni. It was so basic that we had to do all the development work losing our investors in the process.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  That's kind of expected! A relevant perspective from looking at this is the Technological Readiness Level concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level) - you'd expect university research to bring new ideas up to TRL4 or perhaps TRL5, but going from that to TRL8-9 so that it's ready for buyers is the development-heavy part of R&D that should be done in the industry (or perhaps in academia if funded by industry, as research grants wouldn't/shouldn't), that's what "commercializing research" means.
  - cjbenedikt 3y ago
    Yes and no. Most universities are not equipped/funded to go from TRL2 to TRL 4 or 5. Many great ideas end up in drawers because of that. That's when startups step in but they need to be funded as well. However, at least they aim for commercialization - academia not so much.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Most things realy worth persuing would already have been cherry picked and poached by spin-offs created by the faculty involved. As a 3rd party you are basically browsing the leftovers.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Universities exist to educate young people and set them on the path to lifelong growth. This shift to being a cheaper place for industrial research is a nauseating aberration. There is nothing wrong with applied research, having practical goals in mind, or spinning off research findings. When they become the objective, we get the reproducibility and integrity crises that reach and remain on the HN front page every damn day.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- y45y45 3y ago
  Is it the industrial research where the reproducibility crisis is actually manifesting though? Most evaluations I've seen of it suggest that while it's a universal phenomena it tends to be concentrated in the social/activist sciences. In most areas of industrial or applied focus it seems like much less of an issue because ultimately the science of boats has to be at least coherent enough to stand the trial of putting them in the water.
  - OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
    Consider medical and pharmaceutical research being conducted at Universities. Stanford's President had to resign because the work done under his name was both very lucrative and very suspect. Theranos came out of Stanford as well. A USC neuroscientist is now under suspicion of manipulating clinical trial data for a drug his company is developing. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neuroscientist-faces-scrutiny-after-data-allegations https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neurosc... A food scientist at Cornell got canned for p-hacking. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/co... And so on.
  - noobermin 3y ago
    What the hell is an "activist" science?
Gooblebrai 3y ago
> Universities are supposed to produce intellectual and scientific breakthroughs that can be employed by businesses, the government and regular folk. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth This assumption is truly horrible. Capitalism has absorbed one of the last bastions of educational development and repurpose it for its unlimited growth hunger. Reminds me of the popular idea of schools focused more on developing factory worker traits than good humans.
kwere 3y ago
universities for working class folks need to be a place to learn employable meta-skills. College enviroment being a space for personal growth, leisure, socialization is more of elitist legacy of a begone era where companies would train you from zero and most of students didnt really need to sell their labour to make a living (why unpaid interships exist).
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If employable skills and meta-skills need to be learned (as they do), it seems like apprenticeships and the like are a far more efficient and effective way to pass those along.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Yes and no - the final skills can be acquired well in apprenticeships but for the basic knowledge it is more effective (or at least more efficient) to teach as universities do; if we look at the major professions where universities have taught employable skills since the first universities were founded, namely, medicine and law, and where the various approaches of learning these employable skills have been tried&tested for centuries, they both definitely make a solid use of apprenticeship but that apprenticeship is started only after years of studying the fundamental knowledge that is needed for the practical skills.
iratei 3y ago
We should recycle them into firewood and long-life rations for winter
linksnapzz 3y ago
“The point of a University is to give a civilization what it needs; not what businessmen want.” Dijkstra never missed.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Does civilization need an ever expanding crowd of viceprobosts for campus inclusivity et al.? Because that seems to be the most vibrant sector of the academic world nowadays: ever more administrators.
- monsecchris 3y ago
  No business I worked for values what modern universities are producing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
simne 3y ago
Greetings from Ukraine! Country at war, after decided to move from Soviet world to West. When Ukraine is different, but we have very same troubles - we learned that Universities should make us new technologies, and why I said about war - new defensive technologies (or offensive if you wish), but they not do what they should, and we are defenseless because of this. But we have not tough anti-monopoly laws any time. But we seen few successful commercial scientific entities, and near nothing from Universities, except propaganda, very similar to aggressive religious. I think, answer is easy (at least for Ukraine) - our Universities become shelters of what they named "pure science". And scientists think themselves as monks of these sanctuaries, and totally avoid to work.
oglop 3y ago
Yeah no shit. Have you seen the cost and length of programs? The length of the curriculums have just gotten longer, rarely do they subtract. God look at the joke which is the math curriculum to see that. The average time to graduate is longer. More people drop out with higher debt loads and higher rates of interest on those debts. Tons and tons of opportunity costs lost because we make a kid pay 4000$ to take a single class in a language he won’t learn and if he did won’t use. It is a scam and has been since about 2000 when the converted to this entrepreneur nonsense for professors. Mostly just made everyone into a bullshitter.

40 points by marcelsalathe 3y ago

https://archive.ph/FEppe https://archive.ph/FEppe

I spent time as part of an entrepreneurship accelerator in university and one of the cohort options was monetizing some IP owned by the university. Anecdotally, the problem was that the university pretty much stopped developing the IP long before anyone was really interested in monetizing it. Either the university needed to do a lot more legwork to reduce the risk to the person taking the IP or companies/entrepreneurs would need to be willing to take far more risk than they currently do. The business types had come into the program expecting a business problem and left the presentation with a technical problem and the program chose people before problems, so you had people with no specific background in those things as the technicals. > In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. With that experience in mind, this explanation makes the most sense. I have academic friends. I read all sorts of wacky research online. Off the top of my head, most in the sciences have plausible areas of application. But who does the in between stuff?

fuzzfactor 3y ago
>But who does the in between stuff? Whoever slips through the cracks. >The golden age of the corporate lab then came to an end when competition policy loosened in the 1970s and 1980s. Even more significant was the way the dollar quickly lost half its value during fewer years than the full decade. Nobody could afford anything near what they needed to carry on without devastating cutbacks, and research across-the-board was set back decades from which it still might not recover. Universities were where you were supposed to become professional researchers, if you had the natural inclination and could be admitted, and prove your abilities during academic projects. In the 1960's Gatorade was recognized as an anomaly by being invented at Florida, when people in general still expected things like that to be developed by consumer product companies. This was traditionally most young professionals' last time to seriously pursue research without having a practical application, once they got into industry the commercialization possibilities and aspects formed a completely different foundation to build a creative career on, compared to what little could be expected from a few years of formal education in a purely academic environment. You were supposed to graduate up to the "real world" where companies were much better funded than universities and the majority of a research career was spent under the umbrella of a profitable corporation, which naturally contributes to an economy like it is supposed to do. Too bad companies couldn't afford that any more, it was decimated so quickly and regretfully that the only realistic widespread attitude was telling themselves it was "only temporary", and they'll pick up where they left off when "things get back to normal". But prices never came back down and the value of the dollar never recovered, just a few bubbles burst. But it was essential for financial interests to make it easier for most of the lighter-than-air delicate things like that to stay afloat longer or there would have been an even worse collapse. Barely afloat for so long is not the kind of thing where very many people or companies are going to be able to afford research ever again. The Nixon Recession was brutal, and the Reagan Recession just put the nails in the coffin economically for many tens of millions more whose continued hard work would have otherwise built generational wealth orders of magnitude more than it turned out. For those that recovered at all. But you knew that part. Right now tens of millions have rapidly been set back decades just from the inflation of the last few years, and that's not even "runaway" inflation. Companies were folding left and right, others laying off thousands and jettisoning anything just to stay afloat. After Gatorade, more and more universities did try and come up with marketable things, and really do have more than 50 years of dramatically more numerous commercial items emerging from the firm academic foundation. But nothing compared to what industrial researchers accomplished economically during 50 years in the 20th century. And this is one of the reasons. Researcher or not, you can work your butt off for decades but can't really contribute much to the economy if the dollar isn't worth that much any more.
- jmalicki 3y ago
  Gatorade wasn't pure research - it was scientists directly trying to solve a problem for their football team, so they already had customers before they finished their science - the customer problem prompted the research, vs. the other-way-around in most university research. It was very much not pure research.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    Paying customers are a whole new class of customer, compared to dozens of athletes acting as test subjects, and when you put that on the scale of a mass-market, the rest is history. It took years of pressure from other teams before Gatorade was finally available to them and the public, nobody thought it was going to fly off the shelf. It exceeded everyone's expectations from the athletes and scientists to the salesmen and marketers. That is something that can come straight out of the university? When you plan to make lots of bucks, it's already spent before you make it, whether you make it or not. But if you just come up with something(s) that is outstanding for its intended purpose, and it gains fair recognition, you can end up with more money than you dreamed possible. Dr. Cade was not trying to contribute to the economy in the original effort.

cjbenedikt 3y ago

We licensed IP from a Uni. It was so basic that we had to do all the development work losing our investors in the process.

PeterisP 3y ago
That's kind of expected! A relevant perspective from looking at this is the Technological Readiness Level concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level) - you'd expect university research to bring new ideas up to TRL4 or perhaps TRL5, but going from that to TRL8-9 so that it's ready for buyers is the development-heavy part of R&D that should be done in the industry (or perhaps in academia if funded by industry, as research grants wouldn't/shouldn't), that's what "commercializing research" means.
- cjbenedikt 3y ago
  Yes and no. Most universities are not equipped/funded to go from TRL2 to TRL 4 or 5. Many great ideas end up in drawers because of that. That's when startups step in but they need to be funded as well. However, at least they aim for commercialization - academia not so much.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Most things realy worth persuing would already have been cherry picked and poached by spin-offs created by the faculty involved. As a 3rd party you are basically browsing the leftovers.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

Universities exist to educate young people and set them on the path to lifelong growth. This shift to being a cheaper place for industrial research is a nauseating aberration. There is nothing wrong with applied research, having practical goals in mind, or spinning off research findings. When they become the objective, we get the reproducibility and integrity crises that reach and remain on the HN front page every damn day.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
y45y45 3y ago
Is it the industrial research where the reproducibility crisis is actually manifesting though? Most evaluations I've seen of it suggest that while it's a universal phenomena it tends to be concentrated in the social/activist sciences. In most areas of industrial or applied focus it seems like much less of an issue because ultimately the science of boats has to be at least coherent enough to stand the trial of putting them in the water.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  Consider medical and pharmaceutical research being conducted at Universities. Stanford's President had to resign because the work done under his name was both very lucrative and very suspect. Theranos came out of Stanford as well. A USC neuroscientist is now under suspicion of manipulating clinical trial data for a drug his company is developing. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neuroscientist-faces-scrutiny-after-data-allegations https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-11-24/usc-neurosc... A food scientist at Cornell got canned for p-hacking. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/co... And so on.
- noobermin 3y ago
  What the hell is an "activist" science?

Gooblebrai 3y ago

> Universities are supposed to produce intellectual and scientific breakthroughs that can be employed by businesses, the government and regular folk. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth This assumption is truly horrible. Capitalism has absorbed one of the last bastions of educational development and repurpose it for its unlimited growth hunger. Reminds me of the popular idea of schools focused more on developing factory worker traits than good humans.

kwere 3y ago

universities for working class folks need to be a place to learn employable meta-skills. College enviroment being a space for personal growth, leisure, socialization is more of elitist legacy of a begone era where companies would train you from zero and most of students didnt really need to sell their labour to make a living (why unpaid interships exist).

sokoloff 3y ago
If employable skills and meta-skills need to be learned (as they do), it seems like apprenticeships and the like are a far more efficient and effective way to pass those along.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Yes and no - the final skills can be acquired well in apprenticeships but for the basic knowledge it is more effective (or at least more efficient) to teach as universities do; if we look at the major professions where universities have taught employable skills since the first universities were founded, namely, medicine and law, and where the various approaches of learning these employable skills have been tried&tested for centuries, they both definitely make a solid use of apprenticeship but that apprenticeship is started only after years of studying the fundamental knowledge that is needed for the practical skills.

iratei 3y ago

We should recycle them into firewood and long-life rations for winter

linksnapzz 3y ago

“The point of a University is to give a civilization what it needs; not what businessmen want.” Dijkstra never missed.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Does civilization need an ever expanding crowd of viceprobosts for campus inclusivity et al.? Because that seems to be the most vibrant sector of the academic world nowadays: ever more administrators.
monsecchris 3y ago
No business I worked for values what modern universities are producing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

simne 3y ago

Greetings from Ukraine! Country at war, after decided to move from Soviet world to West. When Ukraine is different, but we have very same troubles - we learned that Universities should make us new technologies, and why I said about war - new defensive technologies (or offensive if you wish), but they not do what they should, and we are defenseless because of this. But we have not tough anti-monopoly laws any time. But we seen few successful commercial scientific entities, and near nothing from Universities, except propaganda, very similar to aggressive religious. I think, answer is easy (at least for Ukraine) - our Universities become shelters of what they named "pure science". And scientists think themselves as monks of these sanctuaries, and totally avoid to work.

oglop 3y ago

Yeah no shit. Have you seen the cost and length of programs? The length of the curriculums have just gotten longer, rarely do they subtract. God look at the joke which is the math curriculum to see that. The average time to graduate is longer. More people drop out with higher debt loads and higher rates of interest on those debts. Tons and tons of opportunity costs lost because we make a kid pay 4000$ to take a single class in a language he won’t learn and if he did won’t use. It is a scam and has been since about 2000 when the converted to this entrepreneur nonsense for professors. Mostly just made everyone into a bullshitter.