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Comment by scottcodie | Hacker News Reader

I often think about the role of universities in the education process. It seems that universities are just profit maximizing entities. They don't care about student's education unless it impacts their reputation or ability to make more money. They give the bare minimum support to teachers to teach as well as bare minimum investment in processes like admissions. Seems like universities are doing exactly what you'd expect any company would do.

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> It seems that universities are just profit maximizing entities.

Most universities are nonprofits; universities tend to be research maximizing entities, with teaching as a distant second function.

There are institutions with teaching- (as opposed to research-) centric models, but they tend to do at most undergraduate, vocation, and/or professional education, not academic graduate education, and (somewhat ironically, in context of the comment above) tend to be far more likely to be profit-centric businesses.

>universities tend to be research maximizing entities

This really hit home for me reading "Excellent Sheep" by William Deresiewicz. At one point, a professor won an award for excellence in teaching and I believe the dean took the professor aside to reassure them that the award wouldn't negatively impact their career. Apparently, the common wisdom was you could either prioritize research or teaching and that an award in the latter implied you may not be completely committed to the former.

Universities are centers of research so working towards funding and endowments makes sense. The students are there to learn and be a part of the existing culture. There are plenty of small and community colleges directed totally towards imparting academic knowledge however.

What percentage of published research is done by a university versus a private entity?

sorry...most of researchers work for university, usually when open a random article, we can presume it is my wrote by a professor.

I hear that in many fields, papers are mostly written by grad students / post-docs. Professor gets their name on for raising the funds and sometimes managing the project, but not a whole lot of actual writing from their hands - any truth to that?

> What percentage of published research is done by a university versus a private entity?

What incentive is there for a private entity to openly publish valuable research in the first place? Except in certain unusual situations (monopoly justification a la Bell Labs, PR, patent applications), I would expect that private entity research results would be kept private by default so the business can maximally exploit it without assisting its competition.

Depends on the field, but 100% is not a bad answer for most non-applied fields.

This feels almost word for word true for any institution in the US today. It would be one thing if institutions mistakenly over-prioritized profits over their broader goals, but they don't even have meaningful missions beyond profit anymore.

in academia education is secondary to research... we make the mistake of thinking they it serves an education purpose, but in reality their focus is on research. this is what matters for their funding, their public name, etc etc

At research universities, sure that is a big part of it. The professors are paid largely from research grant awards that they bring in, and about half of that award is skimmed off the top by the university for "overhead."

There are many small colleges that are not research-focused. They teach. They make their money from tuition and gifts, and possibly other federal grants but not for research.

I have a degree in cultural anthropology and graduated in the mid-aughts. I remember several conversations about working at a university with my advisor. He basically told me not to, or do so very sparingly in order to have some income when you run into lean times with your research money.

Said he tries to keep people from getting pulled into the academia meat grinder. The politics, the intense competition for research grants, constantly fighting for tenure, the lack of support in their research - he didn't see it as a worthwhile pursuit compared to going after outside, private research money or working instead in the corporate world.

I could tell he was pretty jaded, but out of the five professors in the department, only one encouraged me to stay at the university and pursue a career in academia. Considering where academia has gone since then, I'm pretty happy I took their advice.

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