> I don't think that good science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of the "best and brightest" in academia
As an adversarial opinion on _that_, what seems to have happened is that the "best and brightest" filter in academia is further filtered to "those who also have the well-off family background to support that". See also the Victorian "gentleman scientist".
Sure, this filter does serve to cut down on the numbers, but I can see problems with using this filter, e.g. the effect on those excluded, and the biases that it will introduce. I would not call it a good thing on the whole.
As an adversarial opinion on _that_, what seems to have happened is that the "best and brightest" filter in academia is further filtered to "those who also have the well-off family background to support that". See also the Victorian "gentleman scientist".
Sure, this filter does serve to cut down on the numbers, but I can see problems with using this filter, e.g. the effect on those excluded, and the biases that it will introduce. I would not call it a good thing on the whole.