&quot;<i>You might think that every professor is ... smart, interested in their work, and invested in the success of their students. Or ... are not particularly interested in science, but have big egos and are particularly skilled at promoting themselves.</i>&quot;<p>In the first place, those two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the second, there are other kinds: some of the best scientists I know have essentially set up an assembly line: students are plopped on one end of the conveyor belt, papers are chiselled off of them just before the two major conference seasons of every year, and a skilled researcher is boxed at the end of the line and shipped off to a grateful academic or industrial research institution.<p>The principle scientists are great people, they do excellent work, their students are good and well taken-care-of, and no one really has any reason to complain.<p>The only down side is that the papers coming out are kind of incremental, given the schedule of publishing at conferences twice a year, and a student that goes in at the top of the machine <i>is going to</i> come out the bottom as a researcher on a particular topic. I have no idea how well they&#x27;re doing, in aggregate, a few years after graduation.