Comment by JohnFen

This is not a good thing.

> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?

That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.

And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.

> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?

The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.