Why do people who want to do research go into academia? It seems like the economics are just completely not favorable in academia -- you have to spend a lot of time teaching and doing other overhead and you barely get any pay. It seems like the only economically rational reason to become a professor is a love of teaching for its own sake. Maybe it makes sense because you get underlings for free...?
Man, I don't mean to comment-whore this thread, but it happens to be one of the topics I know the most about :)
I can think of a couple of reasons:
1. Access to grant funding. It's really hard to get granting organizations to take you seriously if you are applying for monies unattached.
2. Teaching load actually isn't that much of a concern for people at big research universities. One of my mentors described it like this: you have "cosmopolitan" professors and "hometown" professors. The cosmopolitans are always presenting their work, speaking at conferences where they were invited, and bringing in huge grants. They don't do much committee work, they don't have teaching loads (or, when they do, they hire someone to do the teaching for them). This leaves them plenty of time to concentrate on writing (or managing their ghostwriters aka grad students, spouses, research assistants, etc), presenting, researching, and publishing. The hometown faculty actually do all of the "dirty" work of running the university: sitting on committees, teaching, designing policy, etc.
3. They do get a cadre of grad students to help them out. Basically, they get to hand-pick a research team and work with them for 3-10 years (this happens more at large research universities and with senior faculty). These students are there to work with you because their interests and/or past work somehow connect with what you are doing (research interests, publication plans, lab work, etc).
4. Teaching a graduate-level seminar isn't like teaching an intro to technology or English 101. It's mentally tough and rigorous for everyone involved, including (and, you might argue, especially) the faculty. You have to be on your game, every week. And good faculty will use these seminars to develop and flesh out new ideas, concepts, and arguments. Like your cadre of grad students, this is another place where you get to exchange ideas on things that YOU are interested in.
That's just a couple of the reasons I think people go into it. However, I do think that opportunities to do work at this level will continue to shrink as universities are seen, more and more, as a place where you go to get trained for a job. It isn't too distant in the future that we will start seeing standardization movements in higher ed. Then you'll get everyone teaching to the test rather than their passions.
Research professors spend much more time doing research than teaching. Usually you love doing it which offsets some of the monetary compensation issues. Also, "barely get any pay" is relative. It depends on where you live, the type of school, the department, seniority, and in some cases whether you do something like spending your summers consulting.
$77k, one of the numbers cited, is hardly a pittance. Okay, you can reasonably easily make a lot more by selling yourself on the open market (especially in IT) but if academia and research is what you want to do, $77k is pretty livable in all but the most expensive of locales.
The story lists £70k as the salary for a full professor. I worked in the UK as an assistant professor for 7 years, having to re-apply for my job every year. Finally I admitted that per hour worked burger-flippers were being paid more than me. I left, got a job in IT support in an accountancy firm. Within 5 years I was the lead developer, because everyone else in the IT department was dumb or lazy or both. Per hour I was earning 1000% more than as a teacher. The truth is that US and UK societies do not really respect education - school is fundamentally a child-minding service, university is a rite of passage. School teachers have more industrial strength than university teachers, because if the schools close the lack of child-minding causes far more problems.
Seriously. I have friends who once worked in Agilent Labs. Now Agilent Labs is gone. I have had many professors and bosses who worked at Bell Labs. Now Bell Labs is gone.
There are small companies that do funded research. There are grants earmarked for companies like that, and it keeps them afloat. But you have to spend a lot of time just to raise small amounts of money.
