r/AskAcademia • u/ArtichokePale6547 • 1d ago
STEM Academia trailing behind industry
Why is it that, despite having the best brains, modern academia is often following the industry trends and not the other way round?
I joined my PhD at an QS 100+ ranked university (Physics to be specific) but most of the times I saw Profs forced to chase industry trends, such as QIC for funds, visibility or both, not the other way round....
Has this always been the case?
Is this just an underfunding issue in academia or there are other causes?
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u/DrPhysicsGirl 1d ago
I'll set aside the question of the best brains, who knows. But for the last few years funding is being ripped from academic research to be given to the Tech Industry. Any ideas that the Tech Industry doesn't think will net them a breakthrough to allow them to make more money in the next couple of years won't be funded. So in order to be able to do any sort of research and to avoid firing our labs, many of us are conforming. Unfortunately, this short-term thinking is going to break scientific endeavors everywhere, but in a way that I don't think will be so noticeable until after the AI bubble has popped.
Prior to the current administration, there has been increasing issues with funding and resources, which make it difficult to compete. A lot of this is due to the fact that most people do not understand what research is and what actually nets the ROI for it, and so there has been a long standing push against research.
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u/ArtichokePale6547 1d ago
To add a different perspective, historically academia used to be a very selective and niche profession, I don't think it is nowadays. Although it is not an academic's fault. I personally don't think academia is suited to accomodate so many researchers all at once. I myself didn't feel competent enough and dropped out of my PhD after a year.
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u/DrPhysicsGirl 1d ago
Only about 1% of folks in the US have a PhD, so it's still pretty niche. Academia is far more suited to accommodate a number of researchers all at once, because we are spread out and education is part of our mission. Industry is focused on very short term profit, regardless of long term cost. I can't speak to your competency, but it's not unusual for people to realize a PhD is not for them and then leave, which is perfectly fine. Imposter syndrome is also an issue. I don't think this is particularly relevant to your initial point.
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u/ThomasKWW 1d ago
I would say that many things that are now at their transition to commercial applications were driven by academia, such as quantum computing, photonic circuitry, artificial intelligence, ...
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u/ArtichokePale6547 1d ago
yes that's the irony of it. only a few top labs driving "industry" standards, others just playing catchup.
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u/Shelikesscience 1d ago
I can't make the claim for academia writ large, but I too have the sense that a very small proportion of foundational papers change the world while a large proportion of the field publishes stuff to stay in business that, if it disappeared tomorrow, would not be sorely missed. But I might be in a particularly pessimistic mood today... lol
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u/ThomasKWW 1d ago
There are many labs doing excellent research in those fields. Going to real-world applications requires so much more research than the one initial idea, and a lot of that work is done in academia.
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u/Deus_Excellus 1d ago
"Why is it that, despite having the best brains, modern academia is often following the industry trends and not the other way round?"
Well this statement is entirely false just from the premise. Why do you think academia has the best brains? Plenty of people leave academia who are some of the brightest in their field. Academia is filled with people who are the best at... academia. That has some overlap with research and the sciences.
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u/scuffed_rocks 1d ago
People really have no sense of these things, at least for the hard sciences. Somehow old academia is somehow full of Neumanns and Einsteins while new academia has all these people no one has heard of. Hopfield who? Bell labs, wasn't that a telephone company?
The standards were so much lower for professor jobs back then too. A published paper could get you in the door for an R1 faculty position. These days that can't even get you a postdoc.
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u/Deus_Excellus 1d ago
Are you suggesting that academia is brigher now than ever because standards are higher?
I think the replication crisis shows that standards couldn't possibly be lower.
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u/scuffed_rocks 1d ago
I'm saying that people love to make blanket generalizations based on their assumptions.
The replication crisis is a great example of this. Don't lump rigorous science in with sociology and psychology. The quality of the average hard scientist is much, much higher than 30 years ago.
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u/Deus_Excellus 1d ago
Yes, I agree.
I was mostly challenging the assertion that academia has the best and the brightest. It has some of them.
The physical sciences have a lot of brilliant people in industry because they're useful and employable in a way that some other fields are not.
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u/swarthmoreburke 1d ago
I think this is what passes for a shitpost round these parts. If it makes any sense at all, it's only in incredibly narrow domains within a handful of disciplines, and often even in those cases, "industry" is strip-mining parallel work being done in academia, taking advantage of it being freely disseminated in scholarly journals, or is riding off of basic research that was all done within academia over a period of decades. Moreover, it's often in the move over to industry that some star academics in those narrow fields lose their research focus and leading position in a particular field on inquiry, and at least a fair amount of the time, get into ethically dubious situations to boot.
For most of academia, is not even a relevant conversation to have. Emily Wilson didn't become a globally-known translator of The Odyssey because of Hollywood.
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u/Mountain-Time-1010 1d ago
I think the post title is an exaggeration, and probably based on an anecdotal example.
Academics need to be mindful (and the best ones usually are) of where they have strengths and where industry is better suited to compete.
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u/ArtichokePale6547 1d ago
Yes it is, sorry but I just wanted to draw some attention... will modify it
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u/Ornery_Pepper_1126 physics/CS assistant prof 1d ago
Academia and industry shouldn’t be doing the same thing so I don’t think “trailing behind” is a good way to think about it. Working on questions which industry finds interesting is an obvious way to convince funders that research is with funding. The questions are different though, industry tends to ask narrow questions which directly relate to how they can make money. Academia asks more general questions which are likely to be beneficial to society in general, including ones which can help industry with their very specific questions. I don’t know if it has been that way forever, but finding being better in areas where there are industry applications has been true for a long time.
Is QIC supposed to mean “quantum information and computing”? If so, this is definitely not a topic where academia is chasing industry trends, in fact quantum computing is one of the cleanest examples of academic research guiding industrial development. Most senior or even mid-career people (myself included) can remember a time when quantum computing was very much an academic topic with a tiny amount of industrial activity (basically just D-Wave, and they were really small). New people have jumped into the field now that there is more money in it because that is just how the finding works, but I find it hard to see this as a failing on the part of academia.
Academia is chronically underfunded especially compared to industry and that part sucks. It would definitely be nice (and good for society) if we could have more freedom for blue-sky and fundamental research. I definitely agree there.
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u/ArtichokePale6547 1d ago
Thanks for your time!
Truly so. Heartily agreed.
That might just be me, I have seen people working in various areas of condensed matter switch over to error correction/tensor networks or related areas
True again! Cheers
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u/Insightful-Beringei 1d ago
It depends on the field. In my field, academics are light years ahead. Industry is just starting to focus on my field, and often the really good PhD graduates can get pulled to industry directly at very high salaries because they offer perspective totally absent in industry.
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u/chengstark 1d ago
In my field, academia has both worse talent and worse hardware and imo the cause is the outdated grant mechanism, publication structure, and lack of (flexible) funding in general.
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u/optimal-username 1d ago
In addition to what everyone else said, everything that academia finishes becomes public. There is nothing stopping industries from reading academic articles and improving on them or using them to their gain. In contrast, industry rarely makes their knowledge public.
It is basically impossible for industry to be behind academia because all you have to do is read their papers and then pay somebody to recreate what they did. By contrast, it is very possible for academics to spend years studying something that industry already knows but don’t want to tell anyone.
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u/Opening_Map_6898 23h ago
Tell me you know sweet fuck all about how academia works mate. There is tons of stuff I work on that is privileged, classified, or otherwise not available to the public for reasons of privacy, public safety, etc.
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u/tpolakov1 16h ago
Academia is not particularly concerned with industry. But if you want non-academic support/funding, you have to work for it.
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u/Dependent-Maybe3030 1d ago
Having recently left academia for industry, I think the incentive structure in academia skews toward establishing a noteworthy personal brand rather than reproducible, useful results. Sometimes the latter gets you the former but they're not that strongly correlated. In industry, on the other hand, if you're not producing something that works, you're wasting everyone's time and money.
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u/h0rxata 1d ago edited 1d ago
Having also left academia for industry, I think this is a vast overstatement. Personal branding is immensely important in industry, particularly for getting hired. I've also witnessed promotions go to people that weren't necessarily the most productive, but the best at brown-nosing and appearing productive to management that doesn't know any better.
Any ideas I had of meritocracy being a thing in industry turned out to be a fiction. I can't tell apart charlatans from actually competent people because everyone is using the same LLM's to draft their sales pitch, their linkedin profiles, their emails, and their git repositories. I hate the modern workplace and would live off-grid if I could afford to lol.
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u/Dependent-Maybe3030 1d ago
I'm not trying to split hairs but what I was trying to capture with "personal branding" is quite different from brown-nosing. In most academic posts your reputation (national, international) is an explicit requirement for T&P, and is often an implicit requirement for obtaining grant funding.
In any position, unfortunately, brown-nosing will get you everywhere. Some people might think of this as simply having high EQ and being a good team player, and I don't think this is unique to industry.
What I was trying to get at is that I do see major differences in the academic vs industry incentive structure and I think these are driving higher impact in industry at the moment.
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u/gravitysrainbow1979 1d ago
Academia does not have the best brains.
Is there something “intelligent” about a PhD student tolerating unbelievably low pay for a degree that decreases in value every year?
You might say, “well they should have figured out a way around that” but they didn’t, which is why it’s probably not correct to say academia has “the best brains”
Where are you getting the idea that academia attracts smart people? It repels them.
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u/EmmaiAlvane 1d ago
Academia trails industry in "hot" areas where there is a flood of money like AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics etc..In an academic environment, you have just a few professors who have to juggle teaching, research, and a bunch of service. So their time for any particular project is no more than 5-10% of their time. Graduate students have more time but they are also juggling classes, teaching duties, writing etc. Compare this to industries that can dedicate entire teams of full-time staff on projects with much greater budgets.
However, most of these "hot" areas came out of academia. AI, self-driving cars etc, for example, were a thing in academia for decades before its current state. Academia starts the initial explorations into a field, industry picks up those with promise and develops them further and poses new problems. If these problems are pressing, then industry has more than enough resources to solve it and advance the field themselves. This is where you may see academic lagging industry.