American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

If we assume science still has new things to tell the world, who better for researchers to share their discoveries with than the next generation? That’s the argument, anyway. In practice, it’s a crapshoot. Many researchers are dreadful educators due to incentives, training, and disposition. Every now and then you’ll run across a researcher who is also a great educator, but there’s no institutional force that pushes them in the right direction.

That explains why you would want researchers to teach students, but not why students (who generally have little to no income to speak of and are already struggling with university costs in the US) should directly pay for research

There's no shortage of voc-techs and colleges for teaching skills & trades.

I personally think undergraduate at a big (research) university is bad for most students. But the prestige ain't nothing.

Right; a professor's tenure at many research universities depends on the professor's publication and grant-raising success, with less of an emphasis on a professor's teaching performance.

That's one of the things I like about teaching at a community college; whether or not I get tenure is based largely on my teaching performance, with service to the college and community making up the remainder of my evaluation. While I don't have upper-division undergrads, grad students, or postdocs, I have no research pressures whatsoever, which, interestingly enough, is the ultimate form of research freedom. I don't have a lot of time during the school year since I teach a 4-4 load, but I'm officially off duty during my one-month winter break and my 2.5-month summer break, which means I could do whatever I want during my breaks, including research (I'm actually in Japan right now as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university).

There are some teaching-oriented universities that have different balances regarding the importance of teaching and research in making tenure/promotion decisions, ranging from comprehensive masters-focused universities like those in the California State University system to private liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore.

Perhaps I was unclear. The argument is that being educated by a groundbreaking researcher is better than being educated by someone who merely knows things, and so it’s worth a tuition premium. Like I said, I think that position is full of holes, but it’s not incoherent.