Academia is overrated. If you want to study Chinese with a degree, the academia people want you to have a highschool degree with math and physics which has nothing to do with Chinese. I think these elite university people are in reality stupid, while the smart people would never get close to university because it's so mean.
Once you pass the test for eg. Chinese you can study, wheres the problem?
The 3% kids who had hard time in school will not be able to make a highschool degree because going into a classroom is not possible anymore.
There was the doctor congress in Amsterdam recently and I talked to some doctors. They know nothing about drugs and are not friendly. I think most do not say what they think because they would get persona non grata.
The value of having some of the brightest minds in the world work on your pet problems for free and also actively look for ways to break it is beyond measure. This is especially true in the hard sciences. There is still rigor in the STEM fields and computer science is among the most rigorous. Why not make the initial investment? You get free labor, branding, potential partnerships and recruits as well as legitimization in the eyes of many legacy actors. You win the free thinkers on the vision. You win the world with rigor and strong execution.
And you lose on the ability to ship a product in a timely manner. This is an age old debate between engineers and scientists and mathematicians. Engineers only care that something works, where as a scientist wants to know why, and mathematicians want objective proof.
There is a time and a place for all of the above. I am very interested in understanding WHY things work and breaking it down. I like to explain / teach what I learn, but when it comes time to formalize it I find it adds little extra value to what I am doing. I leave it to someone else.
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
Generally speaking, academic papers are produced by those who can add more value by teaching than by doing. More often than not academic papers are so formalized that they do a terrible job teaching. In other words, academic papers are written by academics for academics and are usually useless for those who actually want to DO what the papers talk about.
The one thing academic papers do provide is "respect" whether or not it is deserved. I give them about as much respect as I do a college degree. They are meaningless predictors of the ability of someone to actually do a job.