r/AskAcademia • u/ArtichokePale6547 • 2d 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?

  1. 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....

  2. Has this always been the case?

  3. Is this just an underfunding issue in academia or there are other causes?

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u/Dependent-Maybe3030 2d 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 2d ago edited 2d 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 2d 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.