Because
- Teaching obligations... which is fine with me, I _love_ teaching, but it earns you zero credits. Listening to other profs complaining about teaching is tiresome and goes completely against my view of universities: places to build next generations of good people.
- A lot of time spent on acquiring funding, it doesn't matter whether you're employed at a research institute or university. University profs probably don't get fired if they fail to acquire funding, but the pressure is there.
- A lot of time spent on reviewing the work of your subordinates: master and doctoral students' theses. (OK, it doesn't go into the teaching quota, but it's part of teaching as I see it.)
- Publication pressure and inflation. Count earns you points, not quality or impact. This encourages authors to publish multiple partial papers instead of one "complete" paper. It's also devastating for the field as searching for relevant papers (on any topic) is way harder.
This leaves you with little time for actual _research_ in the work hours. Most part of your official working hours are spent on administrative tasks and (co-)authoring papers. It is not environment for someone like me who likes to _build_ stuff as well. Income was only secondary to my choosing industry over academia.
For me personally, the money hasn't been a hard thing to let go. (Professors in the US get paid relatively well compared to academics in other countries, even places with much higher cost of living.) Nor the stress. The thing that's been hardest is not being able to pick where you live. But even if academic jobs were more plentiful, fact is there just aren't that many cities with multiple research universities.
The pay is much much better. Work life balance is waaay better. Career prospects are better....
My biggest regrets in life are...getting a PhD, and going to university at all, in that order.
The opportunity cost for not just reading a few basic books and getting entry level tech certs and instead getting an education are on par with owning a house outright where I live, and not having a decade of unbelievable stress and pressure to succeed in academia.
:)
At every step I basically went more and more practical and further away from theory and science.
I think the problem here is that studying complex stuff is glorified in our society. We naively think that every problem can be solved by studying it hard enough and that productivity is at least linear. I mean, it is true that we need science, but there is a universe of well-paying existing jobs (and those yet to be created) that are way easier and provide a decent payoff for workers and society.
I am convinced only a small fraction of people are suited for the lonely grind of academia. Most others would be better off getting more practical experience.
Smart people end up studying, so university degrees are associated with smart people. But the chance that they would have been successful without a science degree is pretty high for a lot of them.
What signal this sends to me is that science is, and excepting a cold war arms race level of public funding always will be, nothing more than two broad groups:
those without external material demands ( no need to pay rent, etc)
the rare insane genius ( driven by lifelong obsession)
Everyone else leaves for a real job once they realise they have bills to pay imho.
Science is not part of our society, it is a fringe luxury indulged in by an elite social class that fuels itself with the pyramid scheme esque hordes of naïve young grad students, who are swiftly forced to choose between poverty and abandoning what they have wasted their youth training to become experts in.
Or in other words, higher education is the greatest waste of human capital since the world wars.
Or finance (or “crypto”)