Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).
In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals.
The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.
The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly.
It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed.
edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...
>As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently.
I wouldn't call throwing out your trained experts and starting with fresh trainees in a five-to-seven year cycle all that efficient.
> Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.
In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.
Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable.
In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit.
This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?
> and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank
The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.
Honestly, funding a research team to develop a science ranking engine that was both being continually developed to thwart gaming and effectively independent of university and science-funding politics would be a truly excellent use of YCombinator's money.
Indeed. Simple link counting based search algorithms got gamed a lot in the past, by regular website operators and most heavily by spammers. That's partially why the current search algorithms are much more clever and secret than just using the Page rank. Human raters and machine learning off the data they generate are used as well. This helps to make the rules more uncertain and nasty SEO tricks much harder to discover and use.
Compare this to the situation in rating of academic research, where the papers are rated by the community of authors itself and the ranking is essentially a weighted counting of references. Of course it leads to lots of self-serving spam.
If the idea of independent raters (and possibly machine learning on top of it) could be implemented for academic papers as well, that would be a big improvement, I think. Academia has got a lot to learn from search engines.
The problem is not that it is gameable or not. Even if it is, most researchers won't try to game it. The problem is that they will focus on optimizing these counters by necessity (they have no choices, it is that or goodbye), rather than doing what they want to do: great research.
I wouldn't call prioritizing quantity over quality gaming the ranking system, it is merely playing by its rules. I would call gaming it if there was some cheat (like you cite me and I cite you even if really we shouldn't), which may happen but I believe is rare.
It seems you have reduced my argument to the last part only. Google's system is pretty good even if you don't focus on gaming. By the way, even when it comes to websites, most users (admins) don't try to game the system.
Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight over it) but it's really not all doom and gloom like some people make it out to be.
Graduate students tend to love to complain as much as possible about things that aren't that bad (I know I was one) and people leaving something idealistic often have a compelling need to try and put it down in any way they can to justify their decision to give up on the idealistic goals and try to make some money -- which is why you see so many "goodbye academia, you are broken" posts and blog entries. And some people have genuinely bad experiences like at any job -- bad manager, particularly low funding, bad co-workers, you're going to have a bad time.
That being said YC research sounds amazing. Basic research was funded by charity from the superwealthy (or only carried out by the independently wealthy) for most of human history, the model works. Researchers tend not to look into areas or find results which are bad for their backers. It's good to have some public and some private sector; we need to balance out the conflict of interest a bit.
Graduate school was one of my best experiences, and I wouldn't trade my years here for anything. My co-workers were fantastic, and my advisor is golden.
My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
I think there is a big disconnect between industry and academy. When I was a grad student (got a masters in CS) there was a huge lack of problems to solve at school. I went to Sun and after about a year I had 9 fantastic PhD problems.
Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.
Many fields of work don't pay much, but tell you you've got a Mission. Many fields of work make you work very long hours. Many fields of work require extensive training and skills.
Academia doesn't pay very much, makes you work very long hours, and requires extensive training and skills, justifies it all by reference to Mission, and then inevitably fires you and tells you getting fired was your fault for not being in the top 8% of the entire profession.
Top research universities have more money, and smarter/harder working students. Neither of those are necessarily solutions to the problem of university research.
Don't get me wrong: our lab makes awe-inspiring machines that can see individual atoms held in vacuum by lattices of laser light. Our research leads to incredible discoveries, but we're held back by inefficiencies. It's a rusty system, but to any mechanic, rusty = broken.
Also, leaving to build a startup is rather uncommon at MIT physics, and most students (including me) absolutely love research. The academic career is just not attractive enough to spend another 4-12 years in a lab becoming increasingly good at doing exactly one thing.
Every time I explain my experience in academia to VCs or those in business, they don't believe me. "It can't be that bad!" It is. I've worked at 3 of the top schools in the world and it's a total mess as the OP mentioned. It's also a mess that hurts everyone, so I'm happy to see this type of initiative.
It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs?
A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers.
This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal.
I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week.
I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
When I was in grad school I think most people were aware of how tough it is to get a tenure track faculty position. Many students had no aspiration of going into academia and planned to go directly to industry. This was in mechanical engineering, an inherently practical subject, so maybe the field makes a difference.
Kudos on trying to make it as an independent researcher though. That's a really cool idea. How has it been applying for grants without a university affiliation? What's the breakdown of your time spent on funded research, unfunded research, and consulting?
I've registered with SAM (System of Award Management) so I can get grants directly. I still collaborate sometimes with academics, writing papers and grants, and minor consulting for them. I'm also still an affiliate of my post-doc school so I have an email address and journal access, but I think you can basically buy library access from a school for a decent price.
I spend about half my time or a little less on consulting, but it's been very research-oriented consulting so far, with few restrictions on publishing results. There are and will be ups and downs (most of my consulting is in energy) but I bill a lot more than I pay myself so that smooths it out a bit.
So far most of the non-consulting research has been unpaid but I try as much as is practical to get funding for it at some point--make a minimum viable product to write a grant upon and if it doesn't work out then make it publishable and iterate or move on. I like strategy, it combines well with dreaming. I have some moonshot ideas too, but most things can be broken down into units digestible for peer /grant review.
I'm finding that there are a lot of theoretical problems that are also practical problems. I also feel like I am doing research all the time, but a lot of time is spent building tools and skills to do new things, and less of my time is spent actually learning new things about the earth than I would like. But I guess that's research...
You've said it better: it's not completely non-functioning, but just far from optimum. I've learnt so much from grad school: I wouldn't exchange my years here for anything.
I'm in a similar situation and I don't know a single person who doesn't think academia is horribly broken. Internet rants from people leaving academia are practically a monthly occurrence these days, and nobody ever disagrees with them.
