from Hacker News

Universities are failing to boost economic growth

by marcelsalathe on 2/6/24, 8:15 PM with 30 comments

  • by OldGuyInTheClub on 2/7/24, 5:10 AM

    Universities exist to educate young people and set them on the path to lifelong growth. This shift to being a cheaper place for industrial research is a nauseating aberration. There is nothing wrong with applied research, having practical goals in mind, or spinning off research findings. When they become the objective, we get the reproducibility and integrity crises that reach and remain on the HN front page every damn day.

  • by throwawaysleep on 2/6/24, 8:41 PM

    I spent time as part of an entrepreneurship accelerator in university and one of the cohort options was monetizing some IP owned by the university.

    Anecdotally, the problem was that the university pretty much stopped developing the IP long before anyone was really interested in monetizing it. Either the university needed to do a lot more legwork to reduce the risk to the person taking the IP or companies/entrepreneurs would need to be willing to take far more risk than they currently do.

    The business types had come into the program expecting a business problem and left the presentation with a technical problem and the program chose people before problems, so you had people with no specific background in those things as the technicals.

    > In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone.

    With that experience in mind, this explanation makes the most sense. I have academic friends. I read all sorts of wacky research online. Off the top of my head, most in the sciences have plausible areas of application. But who does the in between stuff?

  • by simne on 2/8/24, 1:28 AM

    Greetings from Ukraine! Country at war, after decided to move from Soviet world to West.

    When Ukraine is different, but we have very same troubles - we learned that Universities should make us new technologies, and why I said about war - new defensive technologies (or offensive if you wish), but they not do what they should, and we are defenseless because of this.

    But we have not tough anti-monopoly laws any time. But we seen few successful commercial scientific entities, and near nothing from Universities, except propaganda, very similar to aggressive religious.

    I think, answer is easy (at least for Ukraine) - our Universities become shelters of what they named "pure science". And scientists think themselves as monks of these sanctuaries, and totally avoid to work.

  • by cjbenedikt on 2/7/24, 12:52 AM

    We licensed IP from a Uni. It was so basic that we had to do all the development work losing our investors in the process.

  • by marcelsalathe on 2/6/24, 8:16 PM

  • by kwere on 2/7/24, 10:09 AM

    universities for working class folks need to be a place to learn employable meta-skills. College enviroment being a space for personal growth, leisure, socialization is more of elitist legacy of a begone era where companies would train you from zero and most of students didnt really need to sell their labour to make a living (why unpaid interships exist).

  • by linksnapzz on 2/7/24, 5:26 PM

    “The point of a University is to give a civilization what it needs; not what businessmen want.”

    Dijkstra never missed.

  • by Gooblebrai on 2/7/24, 8:58 AM

    > Universities are supposed to produce intellectual and scientific breakthroughs that can be employed by businesses, the government and regular folk. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth

    This assumption is truly horrible. Capitalism has absorbed one of the last bastions of educational development and repurpose it for its unlimited growth hunger.

    Reminds me of the popular idea of schools focused more on developing factory worker traits than good humans.

  • by oglop on 2/8/24, 8:21 AM

    Yeah no shit. Have you seen the cost and length of programs? The length of the curriculums have just gotten longer, rarely do they subtract. God look at the joke which is the math curriculum to see that.

    The average time to graduate is longer. More people drop out with higher debt loads and higher rates of interest on those debts.

    Tons and tons of opportunity costs lost because we make a kid pay 4000$ to take a single class in a language he won’t learn and if he did won’t use.

    It is a scam and has been since about 2000 when the converted to this entrepreneur nonsense for professors. Mostly just made everyone into a bullshitter.

  • by iratei on 2/7/24, 10:49 AM

    We should recycle them into firewood and long-life rations for winter