This doesn't make sense to me. Research should be done by smart people. Smart people coalesce in places of higher learning. Therefore research should be done i

This doesn't make sense to me. Research should be done by smart people. Smart people coalesce in places of higher learning. Therefore research should be done in places of higher learning. And, just as an additional aside, universities benefit from being separate from the profit motive of PARC and Bell, which allows much longer range research (e.g. everything happening in biology). Its not like those other labs dont exist -- the whole premise of the article (assuming you got past the subtitle) is that all of those researchers end up in private industry and that makes america ridiculously wealthy. I think you could make the case that education is somehow worse off because of this dichotomy, but I don't believe it. The undergrad education system is more or less untouched by federal research (which is where the 'weekend binge' angle would actually be relevant -- unless youre saying 'weekend binge' is relevant for phd work???). And the PhD system is where the research happens, so its a good thing that they are learning how to do research by researching. Publish-or-perish is bad but an independent thing, created by bad incentives in how grants are doled out and not related to education at all.