In 2008, Steve Jobs created Apple University, an institution designed to help solve business problems and offer employees training primarily available at prestigious universities.
![Corporations are swallowing up America’s professors](https://20627419.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hub/20627419/hubfs/The%20Hustle/Assets/Images/1666016086-brief_2019-04-22T201940.386Z-1.webp?width=595&height=400&name=1666016086-brief_2019-04-22T201940.386Z-1.webp)
Instead, it helped ignite the trend of academics jumping from open universities to closed-off corporate backdrops. They’re leaving in droves, and it could soon be a major hit to public knowledge.
Apple’s not the only corporation that’s hot for Ph.D.ers
Pacific Science reported that more than half of university-hired scientists left academia within 5 years in the 2010s (it took 35 years for the same percentage to leave in the 1960s).
Amazon is the largest employer of Ph.D. tech economists (150+). But Google, Facebook, Uber, and dozens of others are enticing professors to ditch brain-growth (and $113k/year salaries) to focus on in-house IP growth.
O corporate! My corporate!
Obviously there are benefits to working at private companies (cough cough, more funding). But some argue this trend is causing a rift in the public/corporate-knowledge continuum by holding knowledge hostage in the spirit of corporate interests.
Of course, most academic papers are paywalled anyway…