Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
At some point, this nonsense has to stop. Both in the UK and the US.<p>1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren&#x27;t earning enough to pay them back either.<p>2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.<p>3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows post-covid.<p>4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending Uni.<p>5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly unsustainable.<p>6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials&#x2F;gen-X with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for different purposes.<p>Don&#x27;t even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.<p>7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.<p>8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears to be rapidly changing.<p>9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn&#x27;t worth it, especially with rapid CoL rises.