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<p>Actually, I think your posts ironically only seem to illustrate the point further. Out of the entire football team - which is the sport of discussion - the final article could find only one Cal engineer? Just one? That’s it? (Actually, I suspect there may be more than 1 engineer on the football team, but that nevertheless hardly distracts from the main point that football-playing engineers seem to be few and far between). </p>
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<p>Yeah, well, at the end of the day, who’s the highest paid employee at Cal, by far? It’s not any of the Nobel Laureates on the faculty, nor it is Robert Birgeneau. No, it’s football coach Jeff Tedford. In fact, he makes more money than all of Berkeley’s Nobel Laureates combined. </p>
<p>Now, the counterargument is that while Tedford may be paid a bundle, he also draws substantial revenue for the school, such that his employment represents a net profit for Cal. (I’m not saying that I agree, I’m just acknowledging the counterargument). After all, the Cal football team can draw 70k fans to Mem Stadium for every home game, along with substantial TV revenue. How many Nobel Laureates can say the same? Whether we like it or not, the football team, in terms of TV viewership, is the most publicized feature of the university. Surely more people watch the Cal football team on TV than watch anything else that happens at Cal. {Heck, how many Cal non-sports activities are ever televised at all?} </p>
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<p>I agree, but the problem is that once social institutions are entrenched, they are nearly impossible to uproot, and individual actors are then entirely rational to conform to the incentives of those institutions, however deleterious they may be for the rest of society. At the end of the day, the NFL pays its stars - and even plenty of non-stars - stratospheric salaries, and at a young age when the money can be invested for maximum lifetime benefit. Sam Bradford not only made enough money in his very first season in the NFL that only does he never have to work a day in his life ever again, neither likely (with prudent investing) do his great-grandchildren, he made far more money in that single year than did Tom Brady in his first five years in the NFL, which happened to include 3 Superbowl championships. Highly talented high school football players are therefore well advised to rationally prioritize football over academics if they can’t have both, because football offers the alluring financial incentives that academics, sadly, doesn’t. </p>
<p>The real way to change the system is to match the incentives that the current system provides. What if the best science graduates were paid millions in guaranteed contracts right out of college? What if science fair competitions were nationally televised, with entire TV channels serving as counterparts to the NFL Network that broadcast science fair commentary and footage every moment of the day? What if the final annual competition round was the biggest media event in the world with the best advertising firms paying millions and saving their best work to be broadcast during that competition? What if Kardashian sisters and other groupies were dating leading science fair competitors, with their travails plastered all over TMZ and PerezHilton? You better believe that kids would be coming out of the woodwork to learn science. </p>
<p>But that’s sadly never going to happen. As long as the best science graduates continue to be toil in obscurity for unremarkable salaries, then students will continue to not really want to study science. </p>
<p>Let me give you an example. Who here has ever heard of Terence Tao? Probably nobody. Yet he’s a Fields-Medal-winning math professor at UCLA and who undoubtedly is one of the most brilliant mathematicians alive today. But the truth of the matter is, society doesn’t really care about him, compared to how much we care about athletes, movie/TV stars, and singers, even if untalented. Snooki alone is surely more famous than all of the world’s mathematicians put together. The social incentives are crystal clear: rather than being a star mathematician, you should be Snooki.</p>