All of those students ARE working on real problems. These papers are fun asides, not the core of the research agendas.
Stop with the professional attacks against researchers until you at least take the time to read their CVs. What you we doing here is attacking peoples professional reputation. And you’re doing it without knowing anything about them. Stop.
At least half the money goes to the student in stipend+core benefits, and another third covers fringe benefits and overhead - lights, bathrooms, offices, security, data centers, travel, … It’s pretty common for the total cost of an employee to be 1.5x+ their salary.
Sometimes grants fund faculty summer salaries, but I kind of doubt those faculty spent any time on these specific projects.
Actually, I've been there and done that. There is a huge difference between the relevance of the problems people are officially targeting and the actual substance and relevance of the research being done. I've seen first-hand that even at top institutions the priority is to maximize PR, often based on number of papers published (in prestigious-sounding venues if and when possible) and to maximize rankings to attract more students and funding.
The reality is that the incentive system is wrong. Impactful, long-term research is super hard to achieve like this.
You're latching onto a set of kinda transparently obvious joke papers [1] written by clearly accomplished individuals [2] and claiming that the whole institution is rotten. You're not being realistic; you're being absurd -- literally using a bunch of April Fools Day jokes as evidence that all of academia is broken.
Stop pretending this is about some kids. I'm talking about the system and culture today. A lot of academic research is broken and you can't pretend you don't see it. The main goal is to maximize metrics.
Just look at many authors' publication lists that look like paper mills. Quantity over quality. Irreproducible results, bad study design, too many hidden variables, unrepresentative subjects. Unrealistic and oversimplistic assumptions. I've even served as subject of studies published in top venues, and I can tell that the study was a joke.
My hill to die on: Don't be an ass. Let the 20 somethings olds working at a 150K discount for 50-60 hours a week have their funny April Fools jokes. They're probably working on their jokes on evenings and weekends anyways.
Aside from that, IDK. I'm sorry you had some sort of negative experience, but I don't have time to engage with "all of academia is a scam" levels of crank. That sort of thing very much goes into my "p=np" inbox.
Stop with the professional attacks against researchers until you at least take the time to read their CVs. What you we doing here is attacking peoples professional reputation. And you’re doing it without knowing anything about them. Stop.
At least half the money goes to the student in stipend+core benefits, and another third covers fringe benefits and overhead - lights, bathrooms, offices, security, data centers, travel, … It’s pretty common for the total cost of an employee to be 1.5x+ their salary.
Sometimes grants fund faculty summer salaries, but I kind of doubt those faculty spent any time on these specific projects.