Reader was used and loved by a LOT of people WITHIN google, but it was shut down (and the leadership that loved it even made arguments in front of the company why it "had to be shut down").

AFAICT Scholar remains because Anurag built up massive cred in the early years (he was a critically important search engineer) with Larry Page and kept his infra costs and headcount really small, while also taking advantage of search infra).

If it matters, they cited declining usage of Reader as a reason for shutting it down.

It seems like Scholar has an overall upward trend, although their methodology notes make it hard to compare some periods directly:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

I'm basically assuming this is the rate of growth of graduate school, and no competing products have had any real effect?

Reader usage was declining because the application was not being developed. The other reason they mentioned is that it would have required a lot of work to rewrite the app to be consistent with the new user data policies being put into place.