Not entirely true - much of the basic science research is done in universities - corporations tend to avoid much basic science work for the obvious reasons - it's highly risky and not always guaranteed to lead to a profitable product.
Point taken but the qualifier is noted as well. In the future the problem of profitability (even within a university) will be an even bigger concern than it is now. How far into the future- who knows? But it is inevitable.
Profitibility equates in the end to application. If a knowledge isn't applicable to life it is essentially useless. The pursuit of knowledge (or truth) for its own sake is funded based upon the assumption that it will eventually become useful to us. But there is a horizon we approach where the "usefulness" of knowledge is either so far in the future or so arcane and/or pointless that it will not provide the economic incentive needed to fund its pursuit.
Space exploration is a good example. In its infancy, space exploration yielded useful knowledge. Now, we debate how much money NASA should receive. There is no great economic incentive to continue to provide the NASA geeks with new satellites and space stations. Increasingly the argument is being presented that space exploration should be left to the private sphere.
This can be applied to just about any discipline of science. And again, keep in mind, I am speaking towards the future- not the present. Education is not something that happens solely in the school environment. When you land a new job and begin working it, you are furthering your education. You are learning skills (useful ones) that enable you to survive. I am endeavoring to point out that there exists no dichotomy between "school education" and "education per se". That in the end, it matters not so much from where you receive your education but how relevent that knowledge is. Since industry provides the economic incentive for education it seems to follow that in the end they will be the major determinants of what is relevent and what is not. The college campus is increasingly an indoctrination ground for ideology. Ideology is irrelevent to knowledge in a free society and indeed it can hamper its aquisition. Industry cannot afford this political baggage that is attached to education.
Eventually, there will come a time when our education system will have to address the fact that if it isn't providing people with the skills they need to survive in the free market (ie the real world) then its usefulness to society at large must be drawn into question.
Not entirely true - much of the basic science research is done in universities - corporations tend to avoid much basic science work for the obvious reasons - it's highly risky and not always guaranteed to lead to a profitable product.
I see this frequently - many people don't know the difference between research and development! The industry is good at development. The universities are good at research and except for a small number of exceptions (such as Bell Labs, which although private, was owned by a government-regulated monopoly) the private industry did not fund basic research. Like I pointed in another thread, the research in genetics was unprofitable for the first one hundred years, and no, it was not funded by pharmaceutical companies during that time.