I think the academic system is changing. There’s a bunch of reasons why but one of them is that funding does oscillate between industry and academia for r&d but usually not this quickly. But also, simply put, academia has been overtaken by a lot of waste in the bureaucracy that limits and stifles innovation. Grants that are applied for and won by academic researchers that then lose half their value to the nebulous overhead causes harm. university wide partnerships with industry suppliers such that you simply cannot buy the computer or api access or lab equipment from the supplier you want causes harm. And the places to do research in industry are better funded and often are doing the core research found in universities [1]. Simply put, universities need to change and the unfortunate reality is that trump et al are pouncing on this to try and destroy them. And in Europe all of this is still true and there is also much less funding than traditionally in the USA.
1. https://open.substack.com/pub/mnky9800n/p/science-has-change...