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There's a crisis on the horizon anyway in higher education, in large measure due to a parasitic dependence on government money. Federal grants have been a huge source of funding for universities, and they are very much addicted to this money.

For every grant dollar that is given to a faculty member, the university receives additional money from the government for ‘overhead’. At Stanford, for example, for biomedical grants this overhead rate is 100%. So, if a faculty member is awarded a 1 million dollar grant, Stanford gets an additional 1 million. So 2 million dollars goes to Stanford.

Further, in many departments at many universities around the country the faculty are expected to pay a significant chunk, and sometimes all of their salary from grants.

So, the universities pay cut-rate salaries and get ‘overhead’ money from the government. This means that there has been little reason for universities to limit the growth of their faculty. It also means that they would rather their faculty spend their time writing grants than teaching.

They hire faculty, hope they'll publish something or do something that will bring kudos and money to the university, jettison them if they don't, and then just start the cycle again. Whatever kudos they do get they use to fish for philanthropic funding - to compliment what they get from the government. They use some of this philanthropic funding to build new buildings, allowing them to attract more faculty who hopefully will bring them more grant money.

How does one get grants? Publishing, for one, which is why there has been such an explosion in the number of publications. This in turn leads to lots of published chaff being added to the wheat.

The problem is that grant funding is shrinking, because the government is broke. They system is broken. It will be interesting to see what happens.