> funding an army of startups and small research-oriented firms, both with much lower overhead costs than academia The big advantage in academia is access to p

> funding an army of startups and small research-oriented firms, both with much lower overhead costs than academia The big advantage in academia is access to prohibitively expensive equipment. What option was there for Google back then, other than using "free" university computers and bandwidth? No way they could've afforded it at 90s prices. Even though prices have fallen now for that, there's always something too pricey for a startup. What if your research involves a particle accelerator or something else you can't rent hourly from Amazon? Students can get access to resources they simply couldn't otherwise, especially in the hard sciences. Nobody's going to rent $100k of equipment to a student with a $500 limit Mastercard. Not to mention, a week's rental would probably equal your tuition, so forget about having access to something for an entire semester. Software startups are an anomaly. If consumer electronics didn't conveniently happen to make inroads for you (as it did with computers and video equipment), the barrier to entry for MOST technical disciplines tends to be as high as ever.