The current malaise of academia and the way research is done may push people to find other options in the future.

I attended grad school during the early 90s and left ADB, but with a Master's. Went into the software industry (video games, defense, etc.) and made good money, but have ended up in a Ph.D. program at a top-20 university, working at a research institution getting paid more than I made in industry, while being allowed to do my dissertation on a topic I've studied for years, which would never have a chance of getting funded under a grant because it's too blue-sky. I brought my own funding for the degree, so advisors were more willing to entertain "out there" ideas and let me work on exactly what I want to (not much risk to them). As it stands, I will probably end up with Ph.D. research that gets a lot of attention in my field once I'm done because other students can't afford to work on such risky (and promising) subjects. Other students are doing research here that they have to because that's what they're grants require them to work on.

I realize that other disciplines (Physics, Biology, etc.) require large amounts of money for research, and my discipline is different in that it doesn't (CS), but I do think that doing things normally (postdoc, tenure track, etc.) isn't so productive these days. I know many poor, miserable postdocs who will never have a tenured position, and I know many tenured professors who aren't that happy.

I wonder: why is everyone wanting a tenured professor job? Maybe the promising research is going to come from people who don't follow the traditional route.

I am in graduate school right now, and purchased a LiveScribe pen for taking notes in class. You write on notebooks made with special paper (they are inexpensive and last a long time), and you have the benefit of having a audio recording of the class synched up with the written notes that you take. You connect your pen to a computer to archive and back up the notes, but you can also leave them on the pen for listening when your computer isn't around.

The pen I have is the 2GB model, which can hold the notes for several classes for a whole semester. I received it as a gift, but they are fairly inexpensive these days, especially given what you'd pay for tuition, books, etc.

The benefit of this approach is that in addition to text notes, you can also draw any diagrams by hand. The audio has also saved my *ss several times, since I could go back and listen to the lecture on important points that were covered too quickly to get them all down on paper.

Funny you should choose this example---I live in a predominately "white" area of my city, and all the people who work behind the counter at my local McDonald's are black. Free market indeed!