> Do you imply the universities will magically get more money somehow?
They appear to gain billions upon billions of guaranteed cashflow from the government from all of state, local, and federal in many forms every year. Further, the vast majority of US universities/companies raked in huge amounts of cash over the last few decades, exceeding quite a bit of other industries. I'm sure that's as magical as it gets.
> > Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way.
> Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't.
Sucks for them, pay up, they've been able to afford it for decades.
> Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists.
Yes, its to entice their pool of 11,000 [1] and 16,000 [2] graduate students to fight over ~1500 [3] faculty positions across the US. And, the half that do go through to the PhD track will never finish, at best coming out with a MA/MS/MSE or whatever bullshit version of what is colloquially known as a "masters degree" they have invented at their company.
> > After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities.
> Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded.
What do you mean? If by number of topics an single institution can have, then sure, that's a given (lets see the psychology department reproduce their results though). If by the individual topic, then I would beg to differ quite heavily. Lets talk about all the national labs, and while given that some national labs are also owned by universities, these labs are still private, LANL as an example for A&M since we're on that topic. Their scope far exceeds any department A&M has, depth as well, much, much more.
> > And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers.
> ...most of which are given by tenure.
I don't think graduate students are quite that dumb, I'm sure plenty of them can figure out that tenure is not very likely, even if they first author 30 papers all of which get accepted into all of the top journals in their field. Unless they plan on getting rid of the competition somehow,
AKA the existing faculty as well as other students and post-docs. I'd love to see that brawl. I'd pay a few thousand for a Ann Arbor grad to fight an OSU grad to the death. Maybe Berkeley, AA, and Harvard could start giving a few classes on how the Unabomber did what he did.
[1] https://www.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-figures
[2] https://www.tamu.edu/about/at-a-glance.html
[3] https://jobs.chronicle.com/jobs/faculty-positions/tenured-te...