Education here is a broken pile of crap. Politics and ridiculous rules and structure galore.

For example: I did electrical engineering and nearly got kicked off my course for daring to drop an email politely asking a user telnetted into the box I was working on, to stop trying to brute force su to root on my Sun workstation which was dumping logs onto the frame buffer console and screwing up my Cadence session. They were trying to crack root and I complained and ended up with a disciplinary for breaking the communication AUP.

The fucked up bit: The attacker actually complained that I'd caught him to his tutor who kicked off the whole disciplinary process against me.

So I learned how political it is and yes you're right there were people studying crap like that at PhD level in my department. Some guy was working on electrically stimulated sex aids on my tuition fees...