A few years ago, when I was actively involved with the academic world, I came to a similar realization. They're trying to do too many things at once. Universities need to acknowledge this reality and adjust.

After thinking about it, I came up with a straightforward solution (at least in STEM): offer more than one type of of doctoral degree. Every program will have at least two doctoral programs: a Doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics/etc.

The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program is academia at its core, where the students in this doctoral program are explicitly seeking an academic teaching or research position as their career path. The coursework and educational activities are explicitly aligned for this area.

The Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics is focused on creating a top-of-the-line researcher intended for industry or an FFRDC. Those students receive a different type of education which explicitly gives them the deeper research skills and connections needed to become an accomplished industry researcher.

The two programs are equally rigorous but have different end goals in mind. This specialization is overdue, and most departments already have a fuzzy line separating the "academics" from the "practitioners."

That is how it should be, and how it has historically been.

There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end.

The institutions that teach researchers also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme.

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Care to share any that people here might like to follow?

> a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science

Evidence of something that's been impactful?