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American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

(bigthink.com)
133 points yowzadave | 1 comments | 02 Jul 25 22:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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givemeethekeys ◴[02 Jul 25 23:58 UTC] No.44450138[source]▶
Are institutions elsewhere massively increasing funding and positions?

Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?

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the_snooze ◴[03 Jul 25 00:07 UTC] No.44450186[source]▶
I don't know where that money is going, but from my own experience, research at universities really isn't supported by tuition money. At least in STEM, PhD students are paid for by grants and contracts that their advisors secured from sources like NSF, DARPA, NIH, NSA, etc. Those are the people actually execute the research.

You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.

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ribosometronome ◴[03 Jul 25 00:11 UTC] No.44450216[source]▶
Why would we want tuition to support research?
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sevensor ◴[03 Jul 25 00:36 UTC] No.44450372[source]▶
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.
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1. linguae ◴[03 Jul 25 01:39 UTC] No.44450778[source]▶
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.