https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/01/the-intellectual-and...
But lots of other things have also changed that may or may not be causes:
- many fewer tenure track positions
- many more jobs in industry that require or value a 4 year or advanced degree
- obtaining a college degree as a right of passage seen as increasingly essential to you g adulthood
- the rise of data science: more jobs in industry that have access to lots of data and demand scientific rigor
- the rise of private cloud supercomputing (is deep mind) vs, say, a public university's cluster
- the obsession in some foreign countries of getting advanced degrees from American universities, creating essentially a guest visa workforce that is easily abused
- rise of Big Tech which has money to throw at things like protein folding
That said, this is primarily a computational problem, so the advances here might not be applicable to basic research.
If the goal is to just produce researchers that can work at corporate research labs, then I feel we could get more bang for the buck.
If the goal is to do move research in the public good, something needs to change. Maybe it’s the fact there’s too little money out there, and it causes everyone to chase meager grant money. Or that there’s too much competition between groups. Or a million other reasons.
But I’d love to see it fixed and have more faith in public investment in basic science.