Despite how obtuse the current administration views are, this has been true for decades. The churn of new papers and hype around medicine/biotech is nothing new.

Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.

Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.

Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.