> If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who hav

> If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. Government research grants already fund maths PhDs and this process (a corpus of people who decide who gets funding) is how NSF, DARPA, IARPA, etc hand out grant money. One problem is that the university takes a 60% cut off the the top of government grant awards. What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators. It certainly isn't to pay for researcher (professor and postdoc) salaries, they are paid from other grants, again, from the government. It isn't to help with the grant award process, professors (and their students) write all their own grants. The Academic tradition is alive, but the University has become a bloated beast siphoning life from the researchers and the government. What was a support infrastructure has a life of its own. It needs to be stopped.