As an adversarial opinion on this, I don't think that good science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of the "best and brightest" in academia, and it should do more to funnel them to other, more directly practical, endeavors.
Interesting point; thanks for providing the opposite opinion. It's not that no one is applying to grad school, it's that brilliant, creative people with good job prospects are being "pre-diverted" away from the sciences.
For everyone who complains about the quality of the scientific literature, the replication crisis, the golden quarter, I think part of it ultimately stems from the way the funnel is set up.
Those problems are real, but they aren't caused by a lack of the best and brightest in the sciences. The problems are structural due to misaligned incentives. Intelligence isn't particularly correlated with ethics or conscientiousness.
All issues are definitely influenced by systemic incentive issues for sure.
But is not graduate school in some broad sense competing with the likes of startup accelerators et al.? Don't get me wrong, I think that's a good thing in the abstract. But 5 years of minimum wage while working for someone who likely has paltry managerial skills, with the prospects of an increasingly shaky academic job market. My point is that it's too bad for society that the competition is so drastically one sided.
> I don't think that good science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of the "best and brightest" in academia
As an adversarial opinion on _that_, what seems to have happened is that the "best and brightest" filter in academia is further filtered to "those who also have the well-off family background to support that". See also the Victorian "gentleman scientist".
Sure, this filter does serve to cut down on the numbers, but I can see problems with using this filter, e.g. the effect on those excluded, and the biases that it will introduce. I would not call it a good thing on the whole.
It's also worth mentioning that many in the academic pipeline leave for Tech or Finance. My point is that the grad students are the ones who go on to become the professors who direct the research our society relies on.
