Pay the professor more money. Top Universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars of endowments, and are willing to pay football and basketball coaches millions of dollars. They are not insulated from market pricing.
In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they make tenure.
Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors.
I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.
Consider the plight of the medical student though. Worse than that of a CS grad student, that's for sure. Made to practice medicine on people while sleep deprived as a form of industry-approved hazing, a practice that doubtlessly has a substantial death toll associated with it.
The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. Making it worse, the professor isn't being stolen by a competitor (another university) where students might spend their money instead.
In short, if you're asking for the free market to solve this problem, it has- from the professors' perspective.
Edit: put another way, these professors can earn the private industry far more money than they can the university. Often a lot more. Salary competition between such pairs of actors will always result in the same thing.
While we are at it, pay the grad student more as well. Otherwise, don't be surprised that your good students end up all being foreign-born, motivated by immigration benefits, and local ones would [often wisely] be totally disinterested in the grind.
Can't agree more. I was initially interested in academia and went pretty far down the graduate track but ultimately felt like the academic world just hangs professors out to dry when it comes to compensation (tenure is a poor substitute).
getting university professors into an arms race with the salaries of the private markets would entirely shift the character of public education.
If universities had to play by the cutthroat logic of the market as a consequence research or teaching that is not profit oriented would have to die out, or tuitions rise to levels that put immense pressure on individuals and the public purse.
This is a dystopian scenario where academic freedom, basic research, and the non-commercial nature of research is completely lost. This is not something we should be going for, instead we should appeal to highly trained researchers to maybe think about the public good that is at stake here. People like Bengio show that it is possible. A future where essential AI research is commodified is a nightmare scenario.
Yes, this exactly. I'm an assistant professor who's fine with my salary and position, but I can see firsthand how difficult it is to recruit and retain excellent colleagues.
Probably can't pay the professors more money -- they're delivering that much value. But they can woo the professors back with flexible teaching arrangements that allow them to continue to teach while working.
All the money is used to line the pockets of ever growing ranks of 'Administrators and Executive assistant' who are busy creating silly rules and pointless systems ;)
To be fair, football and basketball coaches bring in more money to the school. Paying a teacher more doesn't necessarily equate to more money in the school's pocket.
The blog post "You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation"[1] from prominent AI researchers Ben Recht, David A. Forsyth, and Alexei Efros also highlights the challenges of co-employment by big tech companies. Well worth a read.
Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself and gets you those high paid side gigs.
That’s pretty incredible - #100 of the top 100 best paid still makes $652,640.
However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over $200k. That’s pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely choosing to leave.
I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the-barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income difference from University to Industry.
I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay.
We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).
I can’t even get software developers to think I’m terms of teamwork (Mostly I can filter by ones that are sympathetic). Imagine trying to get academics to do so.
All this reminds me of the late 1990s, when 50% of academics who knew HTML ran to a dot-com. It didn't last, and a few years later an awful lot of former professors begged for their jobs back. Some of them got it, but most didn't.
I've noticed a trend of basically any PhD who knows Python getting hired to join any of the many growing "data science" teams in large companies. Despite having PhDs (usually in non-related fields like biology or even education) most of these people know very little about engineering, statistics, CS and surprisingly science. All they know how to do is stitch together a bunch of keras code and try to get some arbitrary cost function drop.
I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era, where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and solving interesting problems.
I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.
> Tech companies disagree with the notion that they are plundering academia. A [typical large dotcom] spokesman, for example, said the company was an enthusiastic supporter of academic research.
On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from those dotcoms.
Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships, and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting dates when they returned.
> Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships
Even with an understanding of ethics, undergrads, new grads, professionals and startup founders _usually_ pick the "unethical" option.
- Facebook knows this (in 2019) and thus offers more money to offset it. Several of my grad school friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley chose to work at Facebook because "they gave $300K-$400K total yearly compensation."
- US-based start-ups routinely sell products, give up equity control, or sell directly to the Chinese government or investors. Many times precluding them from selling to US customers/government. My startup recently closed a $20M computer vision deal with a Chinese customer related to person re-identification. Unethical? Probably to someone, yes.
The reason for all of this? Because "everyone has a price." If you believe your ethics can't be compromised, well then you haven't been offered enough money.
I (soon to be non-undergrad) got the impression around 2016 that the admiration was wearing off of our classmates who did co-op terms at FAANG. One of our peers had done a term at a Cambridge Analytica subsidiary in town, AggregateIQ, so when the news came out, it was especially prominent in (at least) my mind. I can't comment on whether any romantic efforts were impeded or not.
I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it.
This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students.
I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings.
I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.
What’s the study’s control group? If we compare the number of companies founded by students over different time periods it doesn’t say much about the effects of the “brain drain”.
First we should abolish the 5-7 year PhD program and make it three years. Second universities should use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink Their approach to entrepreneurism. Third this actually creates opportunities for students to become professors. In most fields good luck!
Reducing the length of PhD programs (in the U.S. -- PhDs in Europe tend to be shorter) would have the side-effect of having even more PhD grads (of lower quality) that can't find a job.
Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.
PhD programmes are 3 years in Europe because the education beforehand is much more focused. You've pretty much chosen what you want to do at at 16 and from 18 years old onwards you only study one subject. To be admitted to a PhD programme usually requires either a masters degree or a lot of reserach experience. Then the actual PhD programmes themselves are just research, no classes or teaching.
This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences and medicine as well.
It isn’t just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even if it could match the pay.
[+] [-] arcanus|6 years ago|reply
In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and less job security until they make tenure.
Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors.
I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.
[+] [-] liability|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|6 years ago|reply
The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. Making it worse, the professor isn't being stolen by a competitor (another university) where students might spend their money instead.
In short, if you're asking for the free market to solve this problem, it has- from the professors' perspective.
Edit: put another way, these professors can earn the private industry far more money than they can the university. Often a lot more. Salary competition between such pairs of actors will always result in the same thing.
[+] [-] mehrdada|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmcknight|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banachtarski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|6 years ago|reply
It's about actual capacity to make an impact.
At a major company as an "AI" practitioner, you have immense amounts of data to play with, a huge budget and (relatively) little oversight.
As a researcher, you have to teach classes to undergrads, write grant proposals and scrounge around for data and project funding.
Which do you think you'd rather do if you care about making functional progress in your field?
[+] [-] Barrin92|6 years ago|reply
If universities had to play by the cutthroat logic of the market as a consequence research or teaching that is not profit oriented would have to die out, or tuitions rise to levels that put immense pressure on individuals and the public purse.
This is a dystopian scenario where academic freedom, basic research, and the non-commercial nature of research is completely lost. This is not something we should be going for, instead we should appeal to highly trained researchers to maybe think about the public good that is at stake here. People like Bengio show that it is possible. A future where essential AI research is commodified is a nightmare scenario.
[+] [-] acbart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantheman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noipv4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphaoverlord|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] um_ya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjstein|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/
[+] [-] samfisher83|6 years ago|reply
https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/
Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself and gets you those high paid side gigs.
[+] [-] sologoub|6 years ago|reply
However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over $200k. That’s pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely choosing to leave.
[+] [-] phren0logy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CryoLogic|6 years ago|reply
I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay.
We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
The problem should be approached as "how can we attract and retain the best" not thinking of them as property and their competitors as thieves.
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhbadger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|6 years ago|reply
I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era, where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and solving interesting problems.
I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from those dotcoms.
Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for internships, and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting dates when they returned.
[+] [-] chronic73829|6 years ago|reply
Even with an understanding of ethics, undergrads, new grads, professionals and startup founders _usually_ pick the "unethical" option.
- Facebook knows this (in 2019) and thus offers more money to offset it. Several of my grad school friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley chose to work at Facebook because "they gave $300K-$400K total yearly compensation."
- US-based start-ups routinely sell products, give up equity control, or sell directly to the Chinese government or investors. Many times precluding them from selling to US customers/government. My startup recently closed a $20M computer vision deal with a Chinese customer related to person re-identification. Unethical? Probably to someone, yes.
The reason for all of this? Because "everyone has a price." If you believe your ethics can't be compromised, well then you haven't been offered enough money.
[+] [-] lainga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chronic839|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wolfgke|6 years ago|reply
It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that universities can offer.
[+] [-] NickM|6 years ago|reply
At Carnegie Mellon, 17 professors, all of them tenured, have moved into industry
Not sure about other universities, but it doesn’t sound like tenure made much difference at CMU.
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students.
I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings.
I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.
[+] [-] babakd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdlecler1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protastus|6 years ago|reply
Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.
[+] [-] _Wintermute|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|6 years ago|reply
It isn’t just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even if it could match the pay.
[+] [-] esoterica|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcnews|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfgke|6 years ago|reply
> http://archive.is/2qktN
[+] [-] chubot|6 years ago|reply
I really wish Google wouldn’t surface paywalled links (coming from a print NYT subscriber for over a decade)
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamyarg|6 years ago|reply