The universities, at least here in the U.S, are pretty focused on becoming independent profit centers. Take, for example, their emphasis on athletics such as football and basketball. They spend millions in order to generate that large volume of revenue. Now, the net benefit to the university is generally negative, but, they, the regents, presidents, etc, can claim that they're managing much more money, hence, deserve a share of it, and that fattens them, but the trend over the past two decades has been that fewer professors are involved either in teaching or in independent research.

When I was an undergraduate, it was a privilege to sit in a lecture hall with a Nobel laureate lecturing to us about a subject in which I didn't realize I had any interest. It truly changed my views about a number of subject areas. Today, few undergraduates even see a professor, let alone sit in daily lectures by a Nobel prize winner. What they do today, I guess is raise money for the university.

I've never understood the general philosophy that, for one thing, the "boss" has to earn more than the engineers under his management. As I recall, the boss had no problem putting his most junior engineer in charge of the most valuable asset their company owns, namely their mainframe computer, which, back then, cost multiple millions of dollars, and that was back when a dollar was a Dollar, and not just the price of a candy bar.

What I find disturbing these days is that a young engineer comes into an organization at a junior level and takes part in an ongoing engineering effort. If he's found to be useful, then he's allowed to participate, else he's relegated to fetching coffee, meeting with salesmen, and other meaningless tasks. If he's been useful, he's assigned a more significant role on the next project. When that's completed, assuming he's still shown he's worth keeping, he's put at the head of a team on the next project. After that, he's no longer an engineer, but is promoted into a management role, where he'll never do another useful thing as long as he lives. This is not only punishment to a "real" engineer, but it fails to allow him to gain sufficient experience to be a decent engineer, and, of course, it puts him in a role he would probably not, on his own, have chosen. I don't think this is an adequate way to manage engineering talent, nor do I find it a good way to select managers.

RE