Social value of academia

This page discusses the social value of academia | View other pages on the social value of particular activities

This page elaborates on the social value consideration for academia as a career option. Academics do research and teaching, each of which can contribute social value, and we discuss these separately.

Research

Your measure of the social value of academia depends to some extent on how you define social value, but the general conclusion is that academia passes the social value test only in one of these two cases:

• You are really good at it, so that you can change the paradigm of thinking.
• The discipline you are picking has high social value, so that every minor contribution there counts for a lot.

See also:

• Social value of mathematics research
• Social value of computer science research
• Social value of physics research

Also, this page deals with social value in the sense of impact on the real, existing, social world. Some people view academic work (research and teaching) as a merit good -- expanding the frontier of knowledge is valuable in and of itself, independent of the practical benefits. See research as merit good and teaching as merit good for more detailed discussions of these.

The following need to be kept in mind:

• A number of disciplines, including many branches of mathematics, have advanced far, far ahead of anything that might be of practical relevance, and further progress in these is unlikely to be of use. However, a counterpoint is that a number of mathematical techniques that were considered to not have much application have been quite important: differential geometry was useful in relativity, matrices and linear algebra were important in physics, statistics, and eventually all the natural and social sciences, and number theory is critically important to much of modern cryptography. There is considerable debate on whether current work in mathematics will be similarly useful later, but the evidence currently does not seem to be strongly in favor.
• Even for disciplines that are in principle of practical relevance, the theoretical questions considered in academia are often orthogonal to the manner in which those disciplines would be relevant. For instance, many questions asked in philosophy are relevant to practical ethics, but the mode of discourse of philosophy is unlikely to settle these questions. However, this may be more a question of it taking time for the insights to percolate into the real world. Many deep theoretical insights from statistics and economics have percolated into the general intelligentsia from as recently as 30 years ago.
• There are huge differences between academic disciplines in terms of both the expected impact and the variance in impact. For instance, for disciplines such as biomedical research, it can be argued that every bit of research helps at the margin, by investigating and eliminating particular research pathways. In a discipline such as theoretical physics, coming across a fundamental insight comparable to quantum mechanics would revolutionize the subject, but most work is likely to have zero impact.

Teaching

It's hard to evaluate the social value of teaching within academia, but we would guess that the social value that graduate students and professors contribute through their teaching is lower than what they're paid to do it.