<p>I will argue heartily that academic freedom is far higher in academia than in industry, but it is admittedly complicated. Nonetheless, I know of very very few in industry who have the kind of academic freedoms available to academics.</p>
<p>Funding - academics have to get their own funding, but can get it from anywhere. Those of us in industry have more limited choices depending on where we work. If you are starting your own company you have almost as much freedom as an academic, provided there is some profit in it - not so hot if you want to research upper-atmospheric sodium concentrations, or the way bacteria find food. If you work for a company, the vast majority of time you will be researching other people’s ideas, and can work on your own if and only if your one (1) funding source agrees its a good bet (and profitable). There is competition for the funding regardless, whether its that new prof at the state U or that new guy in the other corporate division, but in academia at least you have a wider and more accepting pool to draw from.</p>
<p>Status Quo - I have seen very mixed results on this one. If you want to stand up and say “famous researchers Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie were all wrong… I’m right” you’re going to catch some flack regardless. If you do this in industry, you will NOT get funded and will rpobably get fired as an idiot. If you do this in academia, you may be shunned but will at least keep your job and have more opportunities to make your case. Plus, how much funding do you think industry will give you this way? I speak from experience here - one of my programs had some good evidence that a “validated” theory in our field was at least partially incorrect, and our funding source shut as down 2 seconds after we said that.</p>
<p>Also consider that as a scientific researcher in academia, you basically become a world expert in the research you do. This is very useful when you’re doing something vital that everyone else, present and future, will depend on. I think in that regard, one would feel more valued in academia. That’s not to say that there aren’t mundane things that need to be done in academia as well… but we leave those to the experimentalists.</p>
<p>Industry also makes it much easier to feel… ‘anonymous’ somewhat. You’re just a cog in the wheel, whereas even if you’re a scientist working on some discrete stuff, there are still people that will see you do good research (if you do infact do good research, which you must if you call yourself a scientist anyway) and in my opinion that would be more fulfilling to do this. If you’re going to comment on those special corporate R&D groups who basically have unlimited money and whose bosses trust them with every decision (until it starts costing them, of course)… well they’re incredibly rare exceptions. The likeliness of getting one of those jobs is a smaller percentage than getting tenured in academia.</p>
<p>One reason why I like academia over industry (and this can be applied to physics/math versus engineering, which is also a reason why I chose the former over hte latter) is economics. Irrational consumers can destroy a brilliant engineer’s hopes for getting his brilliant idea out onto the market. The company doesn’t want to take risk, quality assurance sucks, raw materials aren’t cheap enough, society hasn’t grown to accept such a product yet, etc. In the realm of pure research, you take a chance on an idea you believe in, you put time and hard work into it, and when you discover something there is no human emotion in it. It’s always valued as contribution to science, regardless of what people think of it.</p>
<p>This leads me to another point I should have made. After you publish a little bit and get your name out there, finding funding, even for your craziest ideas, becomes much easier. When your name and credentials are strong in academia, the people with money are much more willing to take a chance on your crazy idea. By the time you are tenured, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.</p>
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<p>Haha, I bet I could go easily join the pipefitters’ union after all the crap I have done with piping while working on wind tunnels.</p>
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<p>And if you are lucky, you may even get a non-dimensional number named after you: Ha, the Hadsed Number.</p>
<p>My dad has been a professor and researcher since 1965. He has become a world-renowned expert in polymer concrete. If you Google it, you’ll figure out who he is. He has had the opportunity to travel to almost every part of the world to lecture on the subject. It’s been a wonderful career for him! He’s an extroverted, friendly guy who has had great success in getting funding for his master’s and PhD students.</p>
<p>He also conducts research on aggregates. He just got back from California, where a company is collecting CO2 from the emissions of cement plants and using it to produce a partial substitue for cement! So the carbon footprint of the plant is NEGATIVE! They can also dry some of the emissions to make aggregate, and they are asking him to research its properties and usefulness. I think it’s so cool that at the age of 73, he gets to work on something that can benefit society.</p>
<p>True, but market forces punish inefficiency and minimizes the politics that interferes with efficiency. No such forces exist in the academic world, or if they do they are severely blunted.</p>
<p>True, and engineering research done at universities is often worthless and only done because tax-payer money is covering it. There’s a ton of make-work research that goes on.</p>
<p>What I get from this paragraph is that engineers and scientists don’t want to actually produce something that the rest of society wants, but rather what they themselves want. Reminds me of a snotty teenager who doesn’t understand why his dad makes him work at Burger King. I’m just sayin…</p>
<p>Not really. This is just an instance of you not fully understanding the utility of something if you feel this way. I have never seen research in engineering that is worthless. There is a difference between profitability and worth. Even then there are arguments to be made. The incredibly fundamental stuff that doesn’t seem marketable almost always later gets used to make something practical or to prove that something isn’t practical. I bet people thought quantum mechanics was pretty useless when it was first postulated, but look at it now. Just because it can’t be immediately translated into a product doesn’t make it worthless.</p>
<p>Yes, fundamental research is something academia does very well and I am very glad there are still individuals and organizations researching topics that currently have no applicability (e.g. CERN). </p>
<p>If I was running things, I would budget $100 billion just for basic scientific research. Any applied scientific research done in academia would be mostly limited to life sciences. Industry can research its own applied scientific research aimed for commercial purposes (or pay academia a premium for applied research performed in academia). </p>
<p>I think society would benefit hugely if we provided more funding for fields such as theoretical physics, astrophysics, marine biology, etc.</p>
<p>Never worthless according to you, the person whose money isn’t being spent.</p>
<p>I once made some pretty nifty art on a wall with torn up post-it notes. I found it to be worthwhile. Nobody else did.</p>
<p>When I say there is a lot of worthless, make-work research going on, this is absolutely true.</p>
<p>I respect pure research. What I don’t respect is people using tax-payer money merely to make a paycheck for themselves. “Of COURSE I need $100,000 to design a slightly-different solar panel!”</p>
<p>When somebody is spending their own money to fund research, either a philanthropist, or alumni, or a business, THEN that research has value. It means somebody values the research being done enough to make a choice about their own money, that they value the research more than the money.</p>
<p>Unfortunately government has virtually nationalized the research biz, or a large chunk of it. Which means politicians and bureaucrats are making decisions about how to spend money that isn’t theirs, which means they are spending it on things <em>they</em> want to spend it on (pet projects, trendy science, universities and special interests in their congressional district, etc.).</p>
<p>This is why I say a lot of worthless research is being done, it’s the inevitable result. Resources are being put into research that is of no value except to the person who wants to publish. Money is being spent for the benefit of special interests rather than science or society. Not all of it, certainly, and indeed a lot of research is going on that is worthwhile, either now or in the future. But this is research that, had the government not been involved in the research biz, would have been funded anyway, by somebody.</p>
<p>How would you make sure that this money wouldn’t just go to special interests, or research outfits with political connections, or trendy projects of questionable merit, or be spent well by the people who receive it?</p>
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<p>Really? I think science and society would be better off if there was no tax-payer funding of sciences (beyond research that pertains directly to government, like technology for law enforcement or whatnot).</p>
<p>I think that researchers should have to appeal directly to those who they are asking for money (i.e. private donors, business, etc.), rather than waiting for their government grant rations to be doled out. Why? Firstly, when the money is being spent by the people who actually earned it in the first place, it is spent more carefully, which forces researchers to demonstrate that they are actually productive and working on something worthwhile, and that they will be efficient with the money. Politicians and bureaucrats spend money much more carelessly, because it isn’t theirs. They’re more interested in telling voters that they are funding science than they are in actually advancing science, because to most voters it’s the same thing and a lot easier to do.</p>
It’s regrettable that you haven’t gone deeper in your argument, you would have realized that you’re not making any real point. Everyone does what they want. Doctors ‘help people’ because they either don’t mind medicine and like money, or they like helping people (which makes them feel good). Investment bankers just like money. Scientists and engineers just happen to like what they do, and luckily for them they are one of the few who can argue their worth and their work’s worth effectively. I want a cheeseburger, and for some ridiculous reason the global economy would crash because of this. Do I have justification for this ‘want’? What if, for some equally ridiculous reason, the economy flourished because I got my cheeseburger? Does it even matter why I wanted it if I can justify it being good for everyone?</p>
<p>Really, everyone is that snotty teenager you think. Humans are self-centric, it’s just that some people have to force themselves to go to work and some… don’t. Blame genetics… and the million other things that affect your personality.</p>
And what research would that be? I do government contracting. My company (and therefore indirectly the taxpayers) is funding my PhD. When I asked my boss (a PhD) about limitations on my thesis he said I could study anything at all. The reason? So much of modern advancements come from seemingly unrelated develoments in other fields. Our most recent project at work included research done at Johns Hopkins, MIT, and the University of Florida, one of them not even from an engineering discipline.</p>
<p>For that matter, the vast majority of research and hard sciences has an application. The only real issue is whether or not it works, but that is a chance you always have in any kind of research.</p>
<p>Oh, and the reason we need public financing for fundamental science is not because it has no use, but because truly fundamental science takes 20 or more years to generate a profit, a time span unpalatable to most companies. If we eliminate public funding all that will happen is that our technological growth will stagnate for a few decades until either private industries take up the slack (doubtful) or we start public funding again - plus a few more decades of stagnation while we train up a new generation of researchers to replace the ones we de-financed out of jobs.</p>
<p>He is referring to academia in general… that includes being a professor. Sure when you are getting your PhD, your choice of research is limited by your choice of advisor. Once you are a professor, your choice of research is limited only by what you can convince people to fund you for.</p>
<p>I don’t see any evidence of that. Science used to be largely privately funded, and it made great leaps and bounds.</p>
<p>There’s no point in arguing about the merits of pure research. The merits are beyond dispute. What’s debatable is how it should be paid for. And in spite of many government-funded research projects that have yielded good fruit, I maintain that a great deal of that money (perhaps most) has been wasted, and that under a largely private funding model, that same worthwhile research would have happened anyway without the waste.</p>
<p>This becomes more and more true as education becomes more and more expensive for no good reason other than to make colleges administratively-top heavy and provide a living for underwater basket-weaving professors. It makes scientific research that much more expensive, and means that much more money is being wasted. When the sum total of a scientist’s education cost a hundred thousand when, if the education system were functioning properly, would only have cost twenty thousand or less, then that’s eighty thousand dollars of waste, which must then be paid for by a salary which is that much higher than it would have been had his education not cost so much (and hence led to a larger supply and lower cost of research staff, all other things being equal).</p>
<p>Academia and industry are probably quite closely related in this regard. However, companies wants quick return on investment while the government/research granters wants slower ROI so academic researchers pursue open problems that likely take long to solve and perhaps whose practical applications are many years away. </p>
<p>Also, in academia one must teach around 40-60% of the time and can do whatever research they want (given they have the funding). In industry, I believe if you have a research position, ideally you work 50% of the time on work that is directly useful for the company and 50% of time on work that is more basic-science-y in nature. Industry non-research positions are mostly product development and testing and do not involve very deep research or investigation.</p>
<p>Personally, I would opt for a research position in industry given the choice. I am not a huge fan of the two-tiered tenure-track/adjunct system or the two-tiered unfunded/funded system. Academia has its plus since there is more freedom as others hav pointed. Also, academia is extremely brand-conscious. In the highest tiers, there is hardly any chance of making it without a degree for MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford Ph.D’s. I feel that this is not completely the case in industry.</p>
<p>Eh. Not really. In industry, you are limited by what your company is willing to fund, which is something you have little say over. As a professor, your limits are directly a function of how good you are at writing grants that convince someone that your newest idea is worthwhile. You have to put in that extra work to convince someone with a fat wallet that your stuff is worthwhile, but your hands are only tied by what you can realistically convince someone to pay for. In industry, it all depends on what the company is looking for at the time, and since you only have that one source of funding, if they say no, it’s over.</p>
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<p>This is a dangerous overgeneralization. There are some teachers that do a lot more teaching than that and some that do a lot less. Most of the time, it is less. Usually professors teach 0 to 2 classes per semester depending on seniority and the need for people to teach their subjects.</p>
<p>On the other side of things, if you have a research position in industry, you are going to spend your time researching or in meetings. That is how industry works. Your research WILL be directly useful to the company, and it will be “basic science-y” to a certain extent most of the time. Anyone who has been in industry (or worked closely with industry) before knows that you will also spend a lot of times in meetings that seem rather pointless. You may have other secondary or tertiary job functions, but the lion’s share of your time will be spend researching.</p>
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<p>That is only partially true. School name does have more weight in academia than it does for undergraduate stuff and for industry, but it is still not the end all. What it really comes to is your advisor. If your advisor is a big name in the field, that can go a long way towards offsetting the fact that you go to a lower ranked school. What tops schools really want in order to hire you as a professor is a proven history of world-class research, publications, and the ability to bring money in. The best way to prove that is to work with a well-known advisor and publish a lot of papers. You just see more people coming from the extremely well-known schools because a lot of the top advisors tend to congregate there.</p>