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.<p>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 <i>less</i> job security until they make tenure.<p>Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors.<p>I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/" rel="nofollow">http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/</a>
Pretty much all of the highest paid state employees are medical professors.<p><a href="https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/" rel="nofollow">https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/</a><p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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).
"Plundering" and "poaching" are inherently wrongheaded notions of gross entitlement from employers expecting unilateral loyalty.<p>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.
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>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.</i><p>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.<p>Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry <i>before they applied for internships</i>, 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.
Perhaps those academic institutions should simply offer tenure much faster if they want to keep these professors.<p>It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that universities <i>can</i> offer.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences and medicine as well.<p>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.