Many good comments here pointing out the reasons for this. One overarching problem I see is that academia (just like many/most institutions) is a bubble. People who are immersed in it are only able to see the way things work from the limited perspective of that academic bubble. There are few senior members of the bubble (in this case professors) who can really teach you to think in terms of the bigger picture of life and society as a whole. And even if they exist, there isn't a class for that.
When a starry-eyed high school graduate with little knowledge of how the world works, but with a strong interest in and ability to do science, goes to a top research university, he gets a lot of that academic bubble viewpoint. He's not taught to think independently or to identify and question the fundamental assumptions of that bubble. So he just takes it all in and does "the right thing" to go on to get a PhD, without necessarily thinking about all the implications for how it determines the rest of his life.
Doubly so if he comes from a cultural background that puts academic achievement and degrees on a pedestal. A lot of Asian cultures, for instance.
I don't know if there's a top-down solution for this. Any institution will be blind to the fact that it isn't able to look at the big picture of reality with minimal bias. It is really up to those of us who are aware of these issues to talk about this on the internet, and hope that as more people use the internet, curious individuals can learn enough to make a good decision.
BTW, the above description is based on myself. I am Asian American, had a sheltered suburban upbringing, really excelled at math and science, got almost full scores on college entrance exams, went to college at a top research university, etc. This university was really geared toward pushing people into scientific research. Fortunately I wasn't good at research but was great at building things, and realized early enough that I should go into industry. I've learned so much more about the world since then through my experiences outside of academia.
In my opinion, there's a much worse issue than universities being an ivory tower bubble. They are extremely corrupt. I don't say this lightly. I've spent more than a decade as a grad student in several top institutions. It's hard not to become insane. I've seen many of my fellow students and postdocs going mad, literally.
I've seen people holding papers they had been sent for review, copying and testing their ideas, and then rejecting them to send the same stuff for review themselves. Once you become reasonably well cited within a subfield, all stuff is sent to you for review. You become the gatekeeper. It's a winner-takes-it-all game.
I've sent a paper to Nature, which got held up because our reviewer was about to send the same stuff to Cell. After a year of intentionally slow reviews, our paper lost novelty and went into a different, but still good, journal within the Nature Group. This kind of stuff can wreck your career.
My previous principal investigator got expelled from the University for serious misuse of funds. I reported him because he used all my funds for travelling to all sorts of exotic locations instead of the experiments we had to do. It took years of reports from other people and extremely serious incidents to get him kicked out. Most of the times, political leverage and interconnections give principal investigators more or less carte blanche.
I could be writing all night, but I would rather not because I will go to bed upset. All biomedical departments, where tons of money is handled, are full of charlatans and scammers. It's sad. My prior probability of decency is only high for pure math and less flashy fields. CS is much better too.
>"I've sent a paper to Nature, which got held up because our reviewer was about to send the same stuff to Cell."
I suspect this reflects a much deeper anti-scientific attitude that I have seen in academia. If it was the exact same methods it would be great to see independent groups publish their results. Using different approaches to study the same thing is also great.
The only way I could see a problem is if they literally copied your results without running their own experiments/analyses.
Not to detract from all the valid points raised in this thread, but the elephant in the room is that an individual’s level of education is generally associated with increased intelligence, and higher intelligence is associated with much higher rates of almost all psych diagnoses.
The same is also true in most other areas of higher personal achievement: lawyers, CEOs, politicians, etc are all disproportionately on various spectrums of depression, substance abuse, sociopathy, narcissism, and so forth.
At least part of the problem is how we view mental conditions as a society, which leads people to think that this is abnormal.
High intelligence is also associated with the following:
1) not fitting in socially;
2) higher awareness of things.
Neither of these are good for anyone's mental health, but they're not problems directly caused by intelligence itself. Their combination is especially bad, as one could be aware of potential problems while others aren't, generating all sorts of friction.
I believe higher intelligence simply requires better personal mental health management, but there isn't really anywhere for people to learn that and I would say our current philosophical assumptions do not facilitate it.
Yeah, it's possible that people with higher intelligence are more susceptible to some of the mental health issues that academia seems to induce. I know I struggled with some issues the last ~2 years of my PhD, but the issues were probably already there at the outset.
Couldn't it be that a high level of education/intelligence is also a sign of high socioeconomic status which would imply better access to healthcare and more psych diagnoses?
This might be wrong but it seems like an obvious superficial criticism.
I actually disagree with the idea that academia doesn't teach you much about "how the world works."
In my life, my time in academia was probably the most "real world" experience of my career. I find many people who crave a more straightforward relationship between effort and recognition to be slightly naive about just how much of society is dedicated to essentially make-work tasks.
In a country where most basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) can be provided relatively cheaply by a small number of workers....well, what the heck is everyone else supposed to do?
I think it's an awesome privilege that middle class people have the opportunity to basically be paid by the government to pursue their own academic interests for a few years as a young adult, even when the return on this "investment" is highly uncertain.
The reason that the money gets dumped into STEM seems to be mainly just a coincidence of what our political culture is most likely to agree on (libs don't want to pay for theology degrees, and cons don't want to pay for gender studies or whatever).
But there's never been a better time to be alive if your interest is in mathematics or the natural sciences.
When a starry-eyed high school graduate with little knowledge of how the world works, but with a strong interest in and ability to do science, goes to a top research university, he gets a lot of that academic bubble viewpoint. He's not taught to think independently or to identify and question the fundamental assumptions of that bubble. So he just takes it all in and does "the right thing" to go on to get a PhD, without necessarily thinking about all the implications for how it determines the rest of his life.
Doubly so if he comes from a cultural background that puts academic achievement and degrees on a pedestal. A lot of Asian cultures, for instance.
I don't know if there's a top-down solution for this. Any institution will be blind to the fact that it isn't able to look at the big picture of reality with minimal bias. It is really up to those of us who are aware of these issues to talk about this on the internet, and hope that as more people use the internet, curious individuals can learn enough to make a good decision.
BTW, the above description is based on myself. I am Asian American, had a sheltered suburban upbringing, really excelled at math and science, got almost full scores on college entrance exams, went to college at a top research university, etc. This university was really geared toward pushing people into scientific research. Fortunately I wasn't good at research but was great at building things, and realized early enough that I should go into industry. I've learned so much more about the world since then through my experiences outside of academia.