Comment by jimmaswell
5 months ago
That doesn't sound like a fair appraisal of university research at all. How much do we rely on day to day that came out of MIT alone? A lot of innovation does come from industry, but certain other innovation is impossible with a corporation breathing down your neck to increase next quarter's profits.
The person you replied to is talking about the UK and Europe. I suspect that funding for research works differently at MIT and in the US generally.
Europe also seems to hand out PhDs like candy compared to the US (you can earn one faster, and you're less prepared for research), and there's a lot more priority put on master's degrees, which are largely a joke in the US outside a few fields like social work and fine arts.
European academia is not as uniform as in the US.
Where I'm from, master's was the traditional undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degrees were introduced later, but the society was reluctant to accept them. For a long time, the industry considered people with a bachelor's degree little more than glorified dropouts.
Our PhDs also used to take really long, being closer to a habilitation in some European countries than what is currently typical for a PhD. But starting in the 90s, there was a lot of pressure towards shorter American-style PhDs.
These days, the nominal duration of studies is 3 years for a bachelor's, 2 years for a master's, and 4 years for a PhD, but people usually spend at least a couple of years more. Which is pretty comparable to how things are done in the US.
The other end of the spectrum is the British system, where you can do a 3-year PhD after a 3-year bachelor's. But they also have longer PhD programs and optional intermediate degrees.
I would argue a European PhD prepares you for research better than a US one. You're expected to hit the ground running with required prior research experience and you have no classes or teaching obligations which explains why they're typically 3-4 years long.
US universities (the usual suspects) have a substantial different approach to industry integration then European one.
Yet, European leaders have not got the memo, and expect the same level of output.
Your rhetorical begs the question -- I can't think of anything more recent than the MIT license.
What DO we rely on that has come out of MIT this century? I'm having a real hard time thinking of examples.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/fifteen-lincoln-laboratory-technol... Here are a number of things we will rely on presently.
I think when talking about university research output it's pretty clear that the objective of university research is to produce output that is much earlier in the stack of productisation than something that comes out of a corporate entity. The vast majority of university research probably won't impact people on a day-to-day basis the way that running a product-led company will, but that's not to say it isn't valuable.
Take mRNA vaccines for instance - the initial research began in university environments in the 80s, and it continued to be researched in universities (including in Europe) through the 00s until Moderna and BioNTech were started in the late 00s. All the exploratory work that led to the covid vaccine being possible was driven through universities up to the point where it became corporate. If that research hadn't been done, there would have been nothing to start a company about.
It's the same in computing - The modern wave of LLMs was set off by Attention is All you Need, sure, but the building blocks all came from academia. NNs have been an academic topic since the 80s and 90s.
I suspect that in 2050, there will be plenty of stuff being built on the foundations of work conducted in academia in the 00s and 10s.
I wouldn't expect to see that many groundbreaking innovations being useful in day-to-day life coming out of contemporary university research. You have to wait several decades to see the fruits of the labour.
Same, the best I could think of that they did since the 90s was MIT OpenCourseware