Many large corporations have decreased their investment in pure R&D. (Intel just closed its Berkeley research lab [1].) Yes, PhDs can make great contributions in industrial and gov't settings, but they are certainly not trained with those applications in mind. In most fields, professors are producing new academics.
Yes, PhDs can make great contributions in industrial and gov't settings, but they are certainly not trained with those applications in mind.
I'm not sure what it means to be "trained as a professor" rather than "trained as an industrial/government researcher", because I don't think I've ever been trained as either.
Certainly (and this is actually a problem) there isn't enough training of PhD students in key professorial skills such as "how to teach a class" or even "how to write a research grant" -- this is something which freshly-minted professors have to figure out on their own.
[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26607/?p1=Blo...