Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to actually like teaching grad courses.
Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.
In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.
It blew my mind when I found out.
At least english majors don't have a profit motive!
Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry. Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two steps above ramen-profitable).
That is the big problem. The problem is that the sole method of employee evaluation for University professors (and postdocs - anyone in an academic career) is publications.
This encourages bad publications, a focus on research (or more accurately, publication milling) rather than teaching and a focus on many publications - instead of good research.
At least 99% of conference articles are worthless and 85% of journal articles are crap.
I wonder if the world would not be better served if professors were encouraged to study deeper and target the high-hanging fruits, instead of producing (mostly) worthless research.
But that is completely flawed! Some research areas (which is inconsequential but easy to do) produces a lot of citations. And what also happens is that people start building research groups which cross-cite each other.
What is your solution?