I haven’t been in academia for ten years. I just went back this semester and am around a lot of very smart people, but their heads are in the clouds. I’m not talking about all of them, I would venture to say a majority.
The sad thing is that it seems like they become institutionalized to the academic world that they stay in it in research or teaching and it is all they know. They work hard on creating a product with such a little slice of the market it makes you wonder why someone would put so much effort to receive next to nothing of a return. Most people I have come across haven’t even stepped into practice and just want to do research funded by state entities or governmental organizations.
I just don’t get it. The market is where things get fun. You succeed or fail but you receive feedback, lessons learned, ways to change, ways to adapt, and ways to listen to your consumer in a way that propels the product to tangible benefits for others. I know there are a handful of PhDs on here - did you exprience the same thing? Its mindboggling and frustrating at times to talk about how to apply these concepts in the real world with consumers making the decision to accept or reject your product.
Although not an academic myself, my wife is a researcher at a very highly regarded university, so I have a little bit of insight. From what I can see, academics work with other people’s money so they just research/develop whatever is interesting to them. On the flip side, one of my clients is a now successful biotech company that originated from research being done at U Penn/CHOP.
You seem to be blind of the fact that everyone doesn’t have the same risk tolerance as you. “The market is where things get fun” and you can either get crushed or make a ton. Plenty of people in academia aren’t interested in that risk reward tradeoff and are plenty happy to do research in their field that interests them.
It may shock people on this board but not everyone in the world bases their decisions on economics and making as much money as possible. There are people that are incredibly pasisonate about their field and dont care about the financial aspect of it, they just want to do their research in a field that interests them, that is funded by someone else, and then hand off the rights to make money on that idea to them in return for providing them a salary to live comfortably. Different strokes for different folks.
^ the average researching academic is also from a somewhat well-to-do family (i.e. upper middle to upper class) so the urge to shoot the lights out just isn’t there. if you didn’t have student loans and you stand to inherit several hundreds of thousands or several million, there is no real urge to make more millions. even though you probably will stash a few million in the bank before death anyway and do far better than the bottom 95%.
i also find that many academics just want to be and act pretentious. they grew up being told they’re better than everyone and being a academic researcher/professor fits the bill.
Well, the focus of career academics is generally to entrench themselves in the field, and this is accomplished not through commercial benefit, but by publishing papers and gaining peer recognition. I do not know if many academics spend a lot of time thinking about bringing products to market.
With that being said, some academic people ultimately leverage their position for economic gain. Look at all these AI professors who are running a (usually unsuccessful) hedge fund on the side, or all the science guys who work as expert witnesses for consulting firms. Some might not think about this on day-to-day, just because they are busy with other things. But they will eat the carrot if you put it in front of their face.
if you can get to a tenured spot at a decent university, academia has one of the best work/life balances you can get. Sadly, those spots are harder and harder to get, but the honey pot doesn’t stop people from trying.
The way to get ahead in academe is to publish original research that is recognized as clever. Given that the most common everyday questions in most fields were researched years and years ago, to make ones mark, you have to research more and more esoteric things to find something original, which is why you get people who know more and more about less and less.
Its not that the individuals don’t value real world practicality, it’s that the process of getting ahead places it second to publication records. After a while, people in that line of work can start to lose track of how the rest of the world thinks, just like the financial crowd can lose track of the fact that most of the rest of the world doesn’t make all their decisions based on NPV…
Hahahaha yes. The management bit is hilarious. I agree (to an extent) with that saying for business profs, but many of them have previously worked in the world and were looking for something easier. In the sciences/philosophy/arts etc many of them just dont want to deal with the business side of working for a company.
My gfs dad is a civil engineer, and at this point he is a manager. He talks al lthe time about how he barely does anything anymore related to his field he is too busy doing administrative crap with budgets, hiring, dealing with HR for his team, presenting to executives, dealing with clients. If you are doing that stuff you are doing a business function, and if you are passionate about the field you went into that stuff bores the heck out of you. He mentions he cant wait to retire, so he can go teach part time and actually be involved in his field. From what I have seen, its that way in most fields. The higher up you are, the more administrative nonsense and client BS you deal with.
The Woody Allen quote is: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym.”
The quote has a certain amount of truth to it, but the assumption is often that people who can’t do something can’t do it because they don’t understand what they are teaching (it asks why we bother to try to learn from such people). There may well be other reasons that they can’t perform: they have knowledge but no capital, their personalities aren’t suited to 100 hour weeks, maybe they think about something too long and so can’t strike when the iron is hot. Or maybe they just enjoy teaching (once you get good at it, it can be very satisfying).
None of this means necessarily that those who teach are failed human beings, or that the stuff that they teach is valueless. There are bad teachers of course, and public school systems love to s#!t on teachers, so the smarter ones try to run if they can.
People love to diss teachers in general, but virtually all of us have had at least a few teachers that really made a difference in our lives, and the luckier among us have had more than a few.
I think the hatred for teachers comes from the fact that no one likes to be graded, and at least half of us had to fall below the median. So at least half of the population feels that teachers said bad things about them, and much of the remainder feels they should have been given better grades.
meh, people have little respect for your average public school teacher because a large proportion of them are not very bright or talented people and they only seek out teaching because it’s an easy gig with loads of time off and relatively good salaries. there are exceptions – people who genuinely love teaching and strive to do it very well. I know some of them and they are definitely smart, motivated people. for every one of those I know 5 who fell into teaching because it doesn’t require much out of you in order to not get fired.
This Spring I’m teaching a second-semester accounting course.
On the first day I gave a quiz that asked the students to write out some journal entries. My first-semester students had no problem with this. Those from other instructors told me that they’d never written a journal entry before.
My wife is a 4th grade teacher, and she spends a lot of time and effort on her craft. But agreed–a lot of teachers don’t really give a darn what they’re doing, and once you’re hired, it’s difficult to get fired.
Another thing (IMHO)–most of the people who go into teaching aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. I recently read that of all majors, the lowest SAT scores are sociology majors, followed by education majors. Moreover, a lot of teachers are people who went to school to get “soft” degrees, like Art History or English (their native language). Then they realize that they’re only qualified for jobs that pay $25k per year, so they get their teaching certificate so they can double their pay.
IMHO (and please don’t tell my wife I said this) - teachers generally get paid too much. As noted, the alternate salaries are not appealing. If they were paid less, it would be more in line with what they are worth in the private sector.
Alternatively, some people argue that if they were paid better, then we’d have a better pool to choose from.
How do you get through a financial accounting course without writing a journal entry? (I’m assuming that the first course wasn’t a management accounting course, which normally doesn’t include JE’s.)
edit - that’s not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely curious, and I think you should be genuinely worried.
And I am (genuinely worried): I get their students.
(Note: in my classes, we have a quiz every day – except those days on which we have exams – and every quiz and every exam has the students write out answers: calculations, journal entries, posts to T-accounts, financial statements. When they get a passing grade in my class, I know that they’re well prepared for the next instructor’s class.)
This is my first semester teaching managerial accounting. I make the students write journal entries here, too. (For example, transferring goods from WIP inventory to finished goods inventory, or adjusting COGS for overapplied or underapplied overhead.)
I don’t think teachers are lazy and unmotivated on average, compared to people in most other professions. Their laziness is just more visible, because they deal with many students who judge them. What about the average post man, DMV clerk, IRS, MTA, or any other kind of government worker? It’s not like they do this if not for the pay and benefits.