A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
president.mit.edu
president.mit.edu
Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions.
2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions.
3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again.
How to resolve?
1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members.
2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review.
3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.
Representative unions' incentive seems to be gathering the biggest bloc of members to represent, with their dues and bargaining power focused into a few union bodies for maximum leverage. This seems to be virtually all unions in the US.
Direct unions - perhaps more accurately works councils? - seem to exist out there, but more in EU - just from what I can read, not firsthand.
The huge unions enjoy more dues but the common denominator definitionally has to be substantially lower than smaller works councils to get the membership counts. Big general unions benefit unions themselves, while smaller unions specific to a company or protecting a professional standard benefit the skilled or specialized workers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of a marketplace in the US around that choice.
Essentially every large company and wealthy individual has a vested interest in reducing union power or preventing their formation, which results in a vast amount of anti union activity.
Has this changed recently?
But I don't think that's done with most science PhDs. Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor?
It's not just a culture; there is a lot of government and industry grant money funding (and enabling) the exploitation in the sciences. If applied philosophy is found to be productizable and/or beneficial to National Interest, the same exploitation would grow in Philosophy departments.
This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more.
Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)
i'd be interested in a source for this. i did not find in the article you cite mention of historical trends.
However there have been a couple of long term trends: Switch to gig economy for college teaching, and loss of manufacturing industry. My first job out of grad school was in a factory.
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
In general, pursing a doctoral degree requires a certain degree of financial stability. The successful doctoral students usually came from wealthy families, whereas the ones who struggled the most also struggled with finances. I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile. I also firmly believe that graduate student unionization is an elitist mentality that must be unilaterally opposed, as it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.
Your belief is well-founded: the effects of stress on performance are well-established, and financial instability is one of the major stressors.
> I also firmly believe that graduate student unionization is an elitist mentality that must be unilaterally opposed
...and you've lost me. Student unions are trying to achieve stability for those who are not independently wealthy. Calling it elitism doesn't sit right with me. Absent improved income for the working students who need it, the suggestion that only students from wealthy families should be the ones exclusively pursuing PhDs is the real elitism.
Where are you seeing remaining constructive academic culture, which parts of which institutions? Thanks.
how is this different than saying if folks don't get a job it's just because they "weren't qualified"?
And isn't that just a tautology?
Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?
I mean, "I'm not too poor to eat, I just can't find anyone to sell me food at a price I can afford" is -a- take, but maybe not a helpful one.
so yes, it absolutely makes sense to leave slots empty if you don't find candidates that you're excited about.
I don't think what I said is tautological, so let me rephrase.
I think it's a mistake to leave a field early solely because there are fewer jobs than people with the relevant degree. Not all jobs are created equal, and not all degree-holders are equally competitive for all jobs. Some positions have a hiring bar far above having a qualifying degree. It also helps to realize that programs graduate C and D students all the time.
So it can both be true that there aren't enough jobs for everyone with the degree, and also that the market is not saturated with qualified candidates for particular jobs.
> Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?
As you climb the ladder, competition gets fiercer. At the terminal-degree level, having the degree is the baseline expectation. Not having it may be enough to disqualify you, but having it is not enough to make you competitive, because your peers also have terminal degrees. A terminal degree may qualify you in the credentialing sense, but it does not guarantee that you meet the hiring bar for a particular position, or that there is sufficient demand for your specialization at the wages, locations, and conditions you want.
The general message was academia isn't a romantic pursuit. If you love doing research and writing, work in a more technical field where the pay is much better, the hours are more stable and you're not fighting an uphill battle against the system and the people who want to take away tenure (which was a big flashpoint in academia when I was there) and with whom you will always be in competition for grants and research funding.
Thankfully, I never went back. The summer before I was supposed to start, the enthusiasm for grad school just turned off like a light switch. I just had no interest in pursuing a masters in my program. I pivoted instead and ended up in a totally different field. I later found out only one person in our class of 15 went on to grad school. Kind of crazy.
I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.
Not the person you were asking, but I think we need to double down on disillusionment in these. I've spoken to too many kids who dreamed of careers in this well into high school, often at cost to other academic paths, when their performance already clearly showed they weren't going this route. Sadly, it is hard to be strong about correcting kids because it is seen as not believing in them and not encouraging them.
As disillusioned as one might become in academia, the path one is on to get there tends to better align with setting students up for a successful career outside of it compared to the ones you listed.
Some kids who try to compete in a winner-take-most market, whether that's being a famous artist, performer, or academic, will succeed; most won't. No one who doesn't try will succeed. Someone is going to succeed. (Who wrote The Teacher's Argument? People who by definition made a famous musical, that's who.)
The cost of encouraging the ones who fail can be heavy, but at least it's finite.
And it's not always obvious if "their performance already clearly shows they aren't going this route." The Nobel archives are full of acceptance speeches that describe how the recipient got off to a slow or unpromising start.
> The cost of encouraging the ones who fail can be heavy, but at least it's finite.
Assuming that every kid has a non-zero chance of being the "right kid," then discouraging only one child results in infinite cost and so every child should be encouraged to try to cure cancer...
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
Is the grass generally greener though?
I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.
... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.
Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design.
I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.
University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...
Lol. Well you should introduce MIT to the concept of supply and demand. I am confident you can find people to pay MIT to work there.
I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions.
Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal.
I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?
And just a side question, it's incredible that her advisor would not use their computer (especially since they were in an analytical field, would think computers were essential for statisticians). What were their reasons? One obvious thought was were they just much older and didn't learn how to use them?
Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.
Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.
I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.
During undergrad a bunch of us got good enough at electronics and the machine shop that we had grad students asking US for help. We didn't realize it at the time, but just the instrumentation work could have landed us many a phd program, we were just having fun.
Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic.
A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of specialization, your ability to write and do presentations, and your taste in research problems. These are all things take a lot of time to mature.
The problem with graduating fast is that (a) you wouldn't be able to do internships, (b) you would severely limit your ability to grow your social network (via workshops, conferences, internships, department service, etc), (c) you would limit your ability to deepen and broaden your portfolio of research, and (d) you limit the time your ideas have to percolate out into the rest of the research community and industry.
While I can't speak directly about your friend's experiences, learning how to do peer review and learning how to write first drafts are really important skills that can indirectly help with coming up and executing on a dissertation idea.
In my case I was making $32K/year with a tuition waiver and health benefits around ~2000, in SF, which was barely enough to rent a shared apartment and eat food. The only way I could rationalize it is that I was maximizing my future freedom (job choice).
That just sounds like indentured servitude with extra steps.
I eventually tired of the process and moved to industry because the struggle wasn't worth it.
I don't know how they paid any of their accumulated (I assume) student debt, let alone had an even decent standard of living.
Don’t want to deal with the machinations required? Opt for the masters track or just get an Undergraduate degree and spend 20y working your way up.
MDs and JDs are professional professional qualifications, which makes their situation a bit different from purely academic degrees. For example the ABA acts kind of like a cartel.
I don't think I disagree with you, by the way. I'm just more unhappy about it. All of these sclerotic, even corrupt, institutions acting like aging vats for talented youth, all to exclude newcomers and to maintain hierarchies...they're not ideal.
If you need a source; here is one: https://fulbrightscholars.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/US...
“LL.M. programs are usually only open to those students who have first obtained a degree in law, typically an LL.B. or J.D.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Laws
It’s generally for people who want to hyper focus on one area of law or switch countries.
Most of the other comments are basically saying this ("the pay is too low for too long for not enough reward").
Anecdotally: I'm teaching a course in "How To Be Successful In College" (not it's real name) at the US community college where I teach Computer Science. I've got more than 1 student who are going to get a credential for nursing because there's just no way they can spend 8-10 years in school to become a doctor.
Would they be good doctors? The question is moot because it's never gonna happen.
I can never tell if I'm pissing off [professionals] or third-parties invested in the idea of [profession] not being dysfunctional.
Best medical system in the world, except for all the others.
plus 10-15k hours of school, residency, etc give-or-take. Let's give credit where it's due.
If you have an advanced CS degree, and I come to you with a complex issue concerning my desktop, and you spend 15 minutes filling out a digital intake form, 2 minutes tapping the tower, and finally tell me to power cycle whenever it comes up, I have every right to call you no better than a Geek Squad agent.
Let's be less pompous and let conduct speak for itself. If you're a skilled and highly-trained professional, demonstrate it. No credit for phoning it in, no credit for limiting your level of consideration and attentiveness to what a nurse is capable of. You're not owed prestige.
Grad students should be paid for their work as well.
But it’s crazy to complain about getting paid to go to school. A grad stipend is there to minimally support you so you don’t have to get another job and can focus on your research. It’s not supposed to be a career!
If they pay their grad students, then at least the time the grad students spend creates enough value to offset the cost of paying them.
If not, stay far away from the program.
Also, regarding the career comment: If graduate school is not at least the first step in a given career (it should the second, undergrad being the first), how/why do you expect gifted intellectuals to spend their prime wage earning years doing it?
Most people do not have access to enough wealth to spend prime wage earning years toiling to help someone else’s career with no return on investment.
My then-partner was part of the strike. One of the strike demands was higher wages as teaching assistants. And while I worked 40 hours a week, for $11/hr, I made considerably more and worked fewer hours than her. She put in probably 30 hours a week just on her teaching load, plus an additional 30 hours split between explicit course work and dissertation work.
It's crazy that a job that requires excellent marks while completing a 4-year degree pays worse, has worse working conditions, and is considerably more competitive to get into than a job selling office supplies.
One of the other things the grad students were demanding (which they only sort of got) was paid parental leave, because they did not fail to notice that most of their professors were in their late 30s or early 40s before they could afford to stop work long enough to start a family. It was very rare for two academics to have children together, because of the heinous, career ending financial cost to having children when you were young enough that their high school graduation date was before your expected mortality.
I feel like PhD stipends are not a major problem. Like I got $40K in a low CoL area, but accounting for tuition and overheads I cost my advisor closer to $150K/year.
Now why are tuition and overheads that high is a reasonable question and it ties into inefficiencies in broader American administrative processes, but I cost society and taxpayers $150K/year, and that I'm doing it for societal benefit is honestly only partly true. The first 6 years was just me building real skills and letting myself be frustrated, and maybe in the last 1.5 years I did things that justify the $1M bill and more.
Even if I did eventually do things that justified the $1M bill, I think most students don't. The larger value IMO lies in a workforce trained in the failures and frustrations of grad school. While I could rattle of plenty of limitations of academia/grad school, I'm not entirely convinced that me being shortchanged/underpaid was one of those things.
Even more so for PHD work because the expectation is that after the training you will produce many things that make the cost of training you essentially negligible.
Also: it is school, not just a job. They are developing deep expertise and specialized skills. As a result, among other things, their earning potential tends to be significantly higher coming out of the PhD than out of undergrad.
The median wage number you cited is also for the total population. According to this graph the median wage for college graduates is around $7k/mo. I'm fortunate to make very good money but I'd still notice a $2k/mo pay cut.
I don't think the entire US matters for this point your trying to make. What are college educated people making in a city like Boston.
> What are college educated people making in a city like Boston?
And yes, that is "next to nothing" compared to the salaries they make now after quitting and just finding work. And their outlooks are in significantly better shape, whereas one friend was highly depressed before.
People can also develop "deep expertise and specialized skills" through their work, and network via conferences, generally paid by their employer. Well, if they can find a job as a junior nowadays.
Can you define that with more specificity? I find that academics have a major blind spot where good career means "the path I took" to the exclusion of all other paths.
>Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science
And your CV says another 6 dropped out. What was good for their careers?
The vast majority (>75%) of Computer Science PhDs leave academia. [0] Becoming a "world expert in a specific topic" is overfitting skills for a sub-niche of a specific career. There certainly aren't enough jobs in academia.
[0] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/213640/what-rat...
I agree with you fwiw.
This may or may not be in alignment with the student’s goals, and many students don’t really understand it going in.
Given the attrition, I really question if PhD programs are honest with incoming prospects. Law schools and business schools are similarly "guilty" of pimping outcomes.
ITT: it's people complaining about being overworked and mislead in their PhD programs.
I think there's some misinterpretation here. Not staying on in academia after PhD (common/modal) is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare).
In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K in the industry. I don't think there's any misleading going on.
Yes, I'd like to see data on what percentile gets this and breaks even for lost wages from their PhD years. IMHO, it's not fair to generalize this outcome. I could be wrong.
BTW, your perspective is bizarre.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that PhD candidate attrition is rare. Maybe at MIT where only 20% don't finish (within 10 years -- which is generous), but these are already pre-screened superstars. Most other places converge around 50%.
As for salaries, the median salary for CS PhDs outside academia is $180k. That means a lot are lower and probably aren't working at big tech with full comp pushing them above $300k. [0]
Often it spill over a bit and I guess France travail (French job agency managing insurance for people losing their job) should often be cited /thanked in Phd student thesis for funding the final steps of their manuscript.
There are limited internship culture during the phd itself Afaik.
However phd is never started at Bachelor level, only after Msc that last two years and requires an internship or research projet.
I heard a person saying a bit like you that it is not enough to grow a Real expert though compared to US phd. But Oftentimes postdoc always follow for Longer and longer
Also, depending on where you do it in Europe, the pay as a PhD student is higher. At the extreme end, I knew students getting paid $60K/year in one country, while I was getting $24K/year in the US.
In some countries, the PhD program is fixed at 3 years. You either graduate by then, or you're out (in reality, they give some option for you to pay to continue, but almost no one can afford it). I suspect in those places, people have done a 2 year MS.
In Europe you just study what it says as well. You happy to do a bachelor's in physics, your classes are all physics. You don't read shakespeare and learn french.
You can also do this in high school, so you can from age 16 be studying just physics and math.
I've checked random people I know from oxford and none started after 3-year undergrad and those how did after 4 all did 4 year dphil (small sample size warning). 4+4 is reasonable.
But to give some examples, I know colleges (both in US and abroad) where people did real analysis and abstract algebra in their first year (and why not - neither requires prerequisites other than maturity).
I know a college (in the US) where they did Jackson for E&M in the 3rd year (and some advanced students did in the 2nd year). In most US universities, people normally do Jackson in the first year of their PhD.
I think it's rare to do QM before 2nd year, but in principle, as long as you know calculus/diff eq, you can get going on it. The catch is that the interesting applications require other branches of physics (e.g. E&M). When I did QM, all those applications were part of QM II anyway.
But yes, again, these are outliers and I wouldn't want to say it's the norm in the whole country.
Yes it is.
In most European universities, you will graduate in 3-4y.
And there is simple reasons for that: The funding associated with a Phd in many European country is 3-4y. So if you do not graduate, you actually become a burden for your lab.
However, taking more time than the standard length, whatever it is depending on the university or country where you are pursuing the title, is also something universities and specially PIs should be actively avoiding.
Maybe I have this view because I got mine in NL, where a PhD is a job with a defined length (4 years) and if you go over it, you don't get paid. So yes, it is an apprenticeship, but you should not be doing work for free in any case. Becoming an expert and the (relative) independence on how to do your research are of course selling points of the PhD, but a job is a job.
this is such a "trust me bro it's good for you" con.
i graduated in 3.5 years and went directly to FAANG where i make 2x the highest paid TT at the T10 school i graduated from. do you really have the gall to tell me that it wasn't good for my career to accelerate my PhD and thereby minimize its cost (i.e., opportunity cost).
> A PhD is more like an apprenticeship
the vast majority of advisors have no skills other than how to hack the pub game. they literally have zero clue about the research. the remainder are the "exceptions that prove the rule".
In my opinion and from my experience, this is an odd expectation considering that a PhD is the absolute beginner career stage in research. It's the equivalent of being trusted to not mess up the morning coffee run.
A PhD is only indicative of having demonstrated the ability to complete research to a level that satisfies other researchers. Many of the things you describe are things one is expected to learn in their postdoc and as a junior researcher.
I finished mine (computer engineering) in ~5 years, practically 7 since I transferred near the end of a 2 year masters program. I was/am blessed with a good supervisor though.
The straw that broke the camel back was being treated like shit by my avisor for the nth time. I still remember it. He was like let's meet tomorrow at 8.30. I woke up at 6.30 to be there in time. He shows up at 10.37. Mind you, this happened like a 10s times over the 2 years I was doing my doctorate. And that was just one of the things he would do to undermine you and have the feeling he hold you by the balls. And he sort of did. Not being able to do anything because of potential repercussions was dreadful.
Anyway, after that day I decided it was enough. I slashed his car tires in the evening, still showed up for a couple of weeks to avoid suspicions, and only then formally quit.
In my program the main reasons people took a long time to graduate was: by year 6 you are usually very well-trained and highly productive (making you very useful to your advisor), and advisors often require you to publish an important paper in a major journal (Science, Nature, Cell) before they sign your dissertation.
A molecular biochemist PhD I know was forced to redo her advisor's experiment over and over again because it wasn't getting the results he wanted. She knew she was beating a dead horse over the several years she was directed to work on the experiment, and had no other choice but to continue marching forward.
You must learn to write good reviews. That doesn't happen without writing quite a few.
Of course grad students should generate the first draft of talks, collect data, and generate graphics. That's exactly the point of grad school. You need to learn how to organize and present knowledge. How to tell a story.
>My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.
The point of the PhD is to learn to think about hard problems that are vague, to find your way around them, and learn how to do something new. It's not to stuff as much as possible into a dissertation or anything else.
And 6 years for a PhD? That's about right. You need to go from 0 to being the go-to expert everywhere on a totally new problem.
This is not disconnected. It is also not new. People have been disillusioned with academia since there were students.
> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia.
It’s very hard to make a sweeping statement like this. PhDs are segmented by field and subfield.
Almost everyone entering a Ph.D. program does it to have the option of going to academia. It’s a _research_ degree. Unlike a JD or an MD it doesn’t lead to a licensed profession. Or even a job.
But in some fields (eg: chemistry and many areas of biology), 80% of grads have ended up in industry for decades. There’s also a long tradition of Nobel Prizes going to people in industry, so it’s not viewed as a second-rate choice.
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
It’s true that the pay is (relatively) bad. I liked to think of it as an incentive to graduate, but then I did a postdoc for similarly bad pay before leaving for industry, so maybe it wasn’t enough of an incentive.
But the length has been 6ish years in a good portion of the physical and biological sciences for a couple of decades.
I wouldn’t call the work “grueling.” In most fields you’re doing lab work or desk work, not manual labor, and while the hours can be long, at the end of the day it’s driven a lot by the a startup-like mentality: this is your career and you get what you put into it.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia.
MIT is not a thought leader here. Unions have been a thing since at least the mid 2010s at a number of Ivy’s, and various University of California schools have had a union since the early-to-mid 2000s.
> I can see how undergrads may look <things> and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.
It’s a valid choice. It’s been a valid choice. This has nothing to do with AI. You start a PhD to pursue original research (fsvo original), and that’s _hard_. It’s always been hard. It didn’t get hard last year.
Depending on the field, the job market has been bad for decades, too. Humanities fields are always a bear market. There used to be blogs about leaving for industry in history in the 2000s. In the 90s you’d hear cautionary tales about someone’s uncle had a PhD in physics and was now managing an Arby’s.
Departments could do a much better job with prepping graduates for industry. Successfully completing a PhD comes with a lot of hard-won skills that transfer to industry. And it would help if faculty didn’t view it as “giving up.”
But this is a long-running problem. I don’t think the undergrad zeitgeist has changed. I think the current administration has cut funding and closed off the immigration pipeline. We’ll be feeling those effects for a long time.
I'm deep in the weeds and literally everyone around me has a "make as much money as you can while it lasts and maybe you'll have enough to retire in some remote village if the job market goes to shit" attitude.
So yeah I can imagine people taking that $150-250K entry level silicon valley job over the $30K/year PhD and risking having nearly zero savings and no job prospects at graduation time.
Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.
There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.
You can't guarantee every IC they will become a manager (which a professor essentially is) in any area and academia is no different. Larger number of students is what allows both the scientific progress and better filtering of potential professors.
Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.
This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it.
TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions:
1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored.
2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral.
If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. ... grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
If there was more research funding and more jobs for researchers in academia this would result in both better pay for PhD students and more academic jobs post-PhD. The disillusionment is related to the funding.
Imagine if the US currently had a new massive project for physics research, you would get a lot more people doing physics Phds and much faster progress in physics. We know this because Edward Teller tricked Reagan into pumping billions of dollars into optics research and that resulted in optics being one of few areas in physics to see breakthrough after breakthrough.
The admins statement in TFA speaks more to financial policy and grant declines. Unfunded students are much less likely to accept an admission. That's just a fact of life.
Everything is a bank for the rich. The people who “invested” in the endowment would rather burn their money than let someone use it without getting a multiple return on it
You got the pipeline backwards. The government picks the research areas/priorities then allocates funding for those, and universities apply and compete to get grants. _Then_, once a grant is given to a school, is funding for labs and graduate students allocated.
If the government has no interest in doing research and provides no funding then schools don’t have projects to work on and no money to hire graduate students.
It's also worth noting that the structural costs of research are far larger than what any single institution would be able to shoulder. For instance, MIT has extremely limited supercomputing resources under their own maintenance. Researchers would typically use such resources from centralized places funded by the NSF or DOE, where larger pools of money can be assembled.
And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
You might as well argue that companies should never take venture capital - e.g. if they can't finance their growth through profits alone then they shouldn't raise any money. The whole point of grants or investment is to subsidize and incentive work which has payoffs on much longer timescales than what market dynamics can sustain alone.
Some of it has some restrictions, but money is fungible. I do not believe that MIT is actually limited (in practice) from writing their own grants because of donor restrictions (if they wanted to).
> And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
Somehow they spend $1.2B/year on administration, so, yeah. Don't do that. But they easily have enough principal to cover grant funding for the remaining years of this administration. Especially if they can play on their lib donor heart-strings about how mean the current administration is being to them.
Yes, like those famous liberals the Koch family who paid for prime real estate across from Stata.
It's just not as simple as you lay it out to be. Do you _seriously_ think that if hunkering down and paying out of the endowment to sustain nominal operations for a few short years was a viable strategy that they wouldn't be doing just that?
MIT's endowment is ~80% earmarked to whatever purposes the donors considered important. The remaining ~20% is unrestricted, but unrestricted does not mean unallocated. Everything has already been allocated to some purpose, at least implictly. If you want to allocate more money towards something, you need to take that money from somewhere else. And then you get politics.
Isn't that the responsibility of the dean to fix? I think a lot of us have no idea how this actually works, but do understand the difference between impossible and hard. This seems more like it's on the hard side than impossible.
Many things are possible in the same sense as rewriting the US constitution. The mechanism for it exists, but using it in practice would require widespread agreement on the specifics. When there are many people making independent decisions, it's best to see the situation in statistical terms. Outcomes that are too many standard deviations away from the expected are effectively impossible.
And the argument is that research funding is coming back but just not to MIT. So I think it is a serious long term issue that they have to consider going forward, and not something that they can just hope goes away.
The government isn’t “picking” the research topics. It’s the scientists in places like the NSF that are. No system is perfect but some system is better than nothing, which is where we are going.
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. (Unrelated note: all freshman-level math courses have been moved to Temporary Building #17.)
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2028: We have a $24.8 billion endowment. And congratulations to Chancellor Trump! (Note: all freshman humanities classes have been moved to Temporary Building #17.)
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2029: We have nearly $23 billion in our endowment. We can easily fund these positions. (Note: due to recent outages, all students residing in purple zones should use their personal data plans until further notice.)
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2030: We have nearly $21 billion in our endowment. We can easily fund these positions. (Note: Due to wait times at the Student Supplement Center, please consult your family practitioner for all supplement-related issues.)
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2031: We have plenty in our endowment, frankly. Probably more than anyone's ever seen-- billions, with a "b." We can easily fund these positions and honestly, many, many others. (Note: all classes currently scheduled in Temporary Building #17 will be rescheduled at a location TBD.)
Chancellor mcmcmc, 2032: It is with deep regret that I inform the students and faculty that I will be resigning at the end of this year's streamcast. It's been such an honor to...
Edit: clarification :)
With that much capital, even conservative management should exceed $100M in interest annually, meaning they could have a $100M+ budget indefinitely. That's enough money to give a couple thousand employees a six figure salary while reserving 2x the salary amount for overhead like benefits, facilities and research efforts.
> The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding.
Minor quibble: It's not merely external funding. In many sciences (math, physics, chemistry), it's common for the department to promise funding through non-research means for a number of years. In my top school, I think physics students were guaranteed TA funding for 2 years (until they pass the qualifying exams and find a professor). Math students are almost always funded as TAs (the department guaranteed 6 years).
It's mostly engineering departments that don't do this.
The engineering departments, however, admitted students regardless of funding as long as they met the bar. On the application they'd ask the candidate if they wanted the admission to be contingent on funding.
Universities like MIT that admit only if they have funding for engineering are the outliers. Usually they're private universities.
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
> We’ve already seen clear signs that policy changes affecting international students and scholars are discouraging extremely talented individuals from applying to join our community.
Whose policy? What policy?
I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.
Federal funding is supposed to be in the interest of the American people. If you're adopting extreme left-wing politics at the institutional level, and shouting down political views associated with half the country, how exactly is giving you money in the interest of the American people?
I wouldn't expect a far-right university to get federal funds. Why should a far-left university get federal funds?
Furthermore: The US government is trillions of dollars in debt. MIT has billions in their endowment. I'm not sure a rich institution like MIT should be demanding funds from a government which is deeply indebted.
These talking points are such a great example of the effectiveness of organized groups versus individuals in the market place of ideas.
It makes me appreciate the early days of the internet even more, and the good fortune to be alive in that moment.
>It is a great reminder that eventually these talking points will always swamp any communication channel.
I notice that some people will respond to arguments by saying: "Oh, that argument. I've heard it many times before."
What's interesting to me is that they seem to think simply saying "I've heard that many times before" should suffice as a counterargument.
Really, it should be the opposite: If you've heard it many times before, you've had plenty of time to think about it. If the argument is invalid, you ought to have a very good counterargument by now. So where's your incredible counterargument? Seems rather suspicious that you're unwilling to share it!
So when people choose not to engage, you assume that is simply a sign of the fitness of your argument. Not that the argument has fundamental divergences from reality.
Having done my tour of duty in the moderation trenches, the only people I would spend the incredible effort to communicate in their terms, with their model of reality, are people I love dearly.
When I encounter commenters and nodes of the tree you are a part of, I use it now as a chance to be greatful of what I have. That way at least one of us is better off.
You've now written 7 smug paragraphs, yet you claim you are "not engaging". This is annoying.
I could literally copy/paste paragraphs like yours into any HN thread on any topic, if I wanted to be insufferable.
Please just save yourself the effort next time. If you don't want to engage, then don't engage.
There are a ton of great things that come out of universities but it’s also clear that a model of charging folks well into the six-figures for a useless degree that doesn’t prepare them for the workforce is dead and a reckoning is underway.
Many schools will fail and shut down. Of those left they will be much smaller and with tremendous focus on bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end.
The institutions that teach researchers also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme.
After thinking about it, I came up with a straightforward solution (at least in STEM): offer more than one type of of doctoral degree. Every program will have at least two doctoral programs: a Doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics/etc.
The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program is academia at its core, where the students in this doctoral program are explicitly seeking an academic teaching or research position as their career path. The coursework and educational activities are explicitly aligned for this area.
The Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics is focused on creating a top-of-the-line researcher intended for industry or an FFRDC. Those students receive a different type of education which explicitly gives them the deeper research skills and connections needed to become an accomplished industry researcher.
The two programs are equally rigorous but have different end goals in mind. This specialization is overdue, and most departments already have a fuzzy line separating the "academics" from the "practitioners."
Anyone who says otherwise is just either uninformed or selling a dream.
Your observation that the doctoral degree system has always been that way is precisely my point: the world has changed, and new forms of training are needed to complement the paper-publishers. The PhD system is broken in part because it's catering to multiple audiences when it should regain its focus on its core mission. That being said, many people want to do research but don't want to work in academia; in fact, I think their numbers are far greater than the academia-oriented. My idea caters to those people, and I think all parties (students, schools, industry, government, the general public) will benefit in this arrangement with almost no drawbacks.
From a degree-focused perspective, it's somewhat unusual that U.S. universities almost exclusively assign PhDs, save for the professional degrees (e.g., MD, PharmD, JD). Multiple types of bachelors and masters degrees exist, and those degrees are certainly differentiated from one another. In some European countries, the ScD is a terminal degree higher than a PhD.
I follow a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science.
It is progressing beyond 'backyard science'.
Evidence of something that's been impactful?
You speak of "market" and "cost-value" and economic darwinism. You seem to be confused: many things do not work based on next-quarter revenue optimisation, fundamental science research being one of them.
This is a bit short sighted. Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance). Some university studies need to work together with industry (again, law. or some physics studies).
Next to that, even for studies that do fundamental research (mathematics), a lot of people attend university for it’s job prospects. For instance, if you want to become an actuary - having done mathematics as a degree will help.
My point being, a large part of university studies and their students are there to “Prepare for the workforce”. I don’t think you can do without that. Fundamental research is not some fantasy world that can do without industry or other things developed by the outside world.
MIT doesn't have a law school. MIT cutting grad spots means national research priorities being compromised.
The answer seems to have become "yes", so this is a rhetorical question, but ideally _information_ would be apolitical.
We also see the current administration politicizing things like the federal reserve, which has tried VERY hard to be apolitical.
I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT.
The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump.
What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?
Turns out, this is also research grant money. Half or more of every grant usually goes straight to the university.as "overhead."
The universities could change this so more finding went to researchers, but they have zero incentive to.
There is no shortage of money.
This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy.
I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it.
It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, airports, air traffic control). They even need a functioning academic ecosystem if they want their children to receive a real education, not just access to a few famous professors they can buy.
You don’t have to share the education time for your kids with the poor and think of how exclusive and how much status is advertises.
As for everything else you said about it not being in the interest of the billionaires. Even if you are 100% correct they have enough money to pay someone else to deal with any frictions in life and not think about it.
On top of that, if you look at their behavior, there’s a lot of similarities between the wealthiest in society and how they treat money, and how addicts treat heroin. Addicts frequently engage in self destructive behavior for the next hit.
They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting. They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.
They don't want to live their life in a zombie apocalypse shelter.
And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?
> They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.
If you weren’t aware the first car capable roads were laid by the rich to go racing around in their new technology called the “automobile”
> They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting.
We already have evidence of Zuckerberg buying up multiple houses to make a ring of privacy, or Bezos leaving his hedgerows higher than allowed around his property and just paying a fine. Or musks baby mama compound to handle his breeding fetish. For the physical security they already pay for armed guards.
> And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?
Who cares how they are produced if there are millions of people around the world who could be classified as professors and they could just hire the best?
To be clear I’m not saying these viewpoints are viable, but they fit the behaviors we are seeing from the ultra wealthy and I already said, addicts don’t always act rationally.
There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system.
You have to stop relying on their nonexistent "better angels" and actually start resisting and fighting back. Every single right or benefit that workers have gained was because they died fighting for it.
We have to continue this fight going forward because we're finding out that no one will save us except ourselves.
* The reason MIT has such a big endowment is because wealthy elites gave MIT money.
* The reason MIT is short on federal funds is because poorly educated voters (working-class) put their man in office.
Since you reflexively believe elites are the big bad, you should be happy with the new tax on big endowments like that of MIT. Soak the rich. Perhaps the endowment tax should go even higher. Power to the people.
Sound about right?
We've seen such cycles before. Elites getting too wealthy and influential, until they are stopped. Long ago it was feudalism. But even early capitalism had such an example with the Gilded Age in the US. After WW2 it probably reached the state of being mostly reversed, only to start redeveloping. Funnily enough the Gilded Age was ended by Republicans.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
Your expectations aren't matching reality
The graph shows just under 23% in 1989, going up past 27% by 1996, then dipping a few years later only to go up to 29% a bit before 2008, then another dip and rise to almost 32% today.
Am I misreading the graph? If not, the percentage of wealth owned by the 1% is on track to have increased 50% over ~40 years. (23% --> 34.5%)
The annual US federal budget is around $7 trillion. The remaining Gates fortune is around $100B. So the feds are chewing through about 70 Gates fortunes per year. And that doesn't even account for state and local spending.
The idea that the system is crumbling because all the money is ending up in the pockets of billionaires does not pass the sniff test.
Researchers are funded largely by government grants.
I firmly believe looking at academia through this lens is part of the reason why it has been so firmly exploited as a business.
To treat the school as a business in partnership with corporation treats the student as the customer and product. Like everything in our time, the push for profit leads to optimization and enshitification.
The student experience, student outcome, and quality of academia have all been sent through the enshitification wringer.
We can point to the lowering in quality of research to this, the reliance on poorly paid grad students, which end up producing worse work, worse research, and less effect on industry.
I firmly believe there needs to be a degree of separation between academia and corporate interests.
To optimize for profit finds local maxima and limits the ability of academia to do real research.
That has changed. It should be reinstated. Cut red tape, get back into the business of taking (literal) moonshots as a government.
That is a nice sound bite for TV--the reality is that the government has been systematically rejecting visas in a bid to kill universities. Yes, it's true that universities counted too much on rich MS students and the like. But the reason for the failures isn't that "it is not any more," as you say--it's a very calculated move by the current administration to eat universities' bottom line.
That said, the letter here wasn't about undergrad or expensive college - its about the federal government stripping funding for research for political reasons. Sad. We should be investing in US research capabilities. And like it or not, our research universities are pretty freaking good at... research.
People were talking about housing market being overheated (Financial Times, UK's finance minister etc) since, yet it carried on for 8 years before it exploded.
Markets can stay insane for years, if not decades
This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.
So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.
Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.
The top colleges are arguably now in China.
China is providing free education in many poor African countries. Chinese is one of many subjects offered.
Of course, a smart African college student will have no issue learning English, Chinese, as well her home countries language.
The future belongs to China. We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords.
China celebrates engineers.
Then again.
No country is perfect, China also has an over abundance of educated without enough meaningful work for them.
I sorta think a UBI( needs to cover housing, food and at least a small amount of leisure activities) is the way to go.
The end goal of automation is we only need a small percentage of people working after all.
Argued by who? Source?
>We're elevating fine institutions...
Who? Maybe you mean Europe? After all, why aren't all those brilliant African students studying German or Italian? I assume you also mean that Europe has terrible universities and has completely ceded the future to glorious China?
Harvard is slipping and with the Republican war on education our top universities will continue to fall behind.
This is 100% self imposed of course.
>The list of canceled institutions includes Ivy League schools Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown and Princeton as well as other top universities like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
>That comes after the Pentagon chief said earlier this month that he would cancel professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard.
>In his memo, Hegseth also included a list of potential new partners schools: Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine, University ofTennessee, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, Clemson, and Baylor, among others.
https://fortune.com/2026/02/28/pentagon-officer-education-iv...
I'm not making any of this up.
If Harvard can't recruit top international students they don't have a chance. The Republicans have decided to randomly suspend students visas, so there's not much Harvard can do.
How long do you think it's going to take the Republicans to ruin Harvard and the other schools they have vendettas against ?
I'm far from an expert here though.
However, Liberty University offers Creationism. Do you really need all that book learning when Jesus provides all the answers?
Still a far cry from the number of top-tier unis in the US/Europe.
Chinese unis pump out tons of engineers and tons of papers but the quality of most of those papers is quite low.
But I agree that China, very smartly, is very active in Africa where the US used to be -- the US stupidly dropped the ball in Africa first with its endless "war on terror" and now with its even more stupid "america first (except when we bomb Iran)" policies
China's population pyramid is worse than the USAs. The present belongs to China. This is as good as it gets.
Most real comment today
Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
We either accept "there are some things you shouldn't be able to democratically vote for" like, say, the Holocaust or reinstating slavery, or we do not.
You added Trump to the conversation, not me.
Most Trump voters didn't. A sizeable fraction have openly agitated for, and supported, violently overthrowing our elected government.
Less so when they elect/appoint them to national-level leadership.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
No state is a monolith.
Because blaming a foreign country for your woes just doesn't happen.
who in mississippi is blaming california for their problems, other than state politicians who think that is effective political rhetoric? all of the voters i know can read past that BS even if we have different political ideology.
idk this is just my experience growing up there and then later studying the south as an academic. we are used to being condescended to.
is that who you’re talking about?
I’m literally 10 toes down on the ground trying to do exactly the thing that everybody says should be happening which is democratizing community development and nobody gives a fucking fuck
they will show up when you give them resources but never step up to lead after
I’ve started so many goddamn community things but the second I pull back from them to let others lead nobody picks up the slack
I’m excruciatingly done with over and over and over trying to help people take care of themselves
I challenge this.
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
These places aren't homogeneous in their political tastes.
I live in a northeast blue state, but there are rural pockets that are still heavily MAGA. And I'm sure Mississippi has liberal enclaves.
That being said, I don't know what the "solution" to this problem is.
Democracy works, we just have bad partners right now.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
So, I'm not sure what your point was.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.
If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.
Anything.
Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.
Some things are better. Game theory demonstrates this.
Especially when the suggestion is to talk about changing a bunch of variables at once.
That's akin to a revolution, which historically work out badly for the people clamoring for it.
Either we overhaul the system that got us to this point or we concede.
I'm tired of dumbasses in Montana having 50x the vote in the Senate and 4x vote on the POTUS as a Californian. That's not democratic.
> all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists
Systems create the incentive! Changing the system changes the incentives and is the only way we can reduce extremism.
2. They're probably up for the challenge. But also, that still doesn't solve the disenfranchisement much. My idiot neighbor with the Trump banner (in our 100% Democratic city and county -- Western Washington) will never have his vote make a difference. But if he could combine his vote with some fellow idiots out east, then they could pick the person that most represents them. And either that person will learn to compromise or they can just sit out while others do advance legislation. Just like in better republics.
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.
The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad.
I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study.
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
However that's not what brain drain means. You would say "Iran had a brain drain in the 70s" not "America was brain draining Iran" makes no sense.
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
> Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...
For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.
Whether to educate young Chinese nationals in the US who plan to return to their home nation isn’t a similar situation.
But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.
Unfortunately for the past 3 elections, it essentially came down to the obviously untrustworthy "outsider" vs the ultimate establishment candidate. For a lot of people, it's as simple as that.
What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!"
Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority.
Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them.
Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.
Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
The Clines, Justices and even Manchins have money. The miners are almost irrelevant.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)
And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Something I learned at The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston [1] is that Southern slaveowners were almost all terifically leveraged. Slaves were purchased predominantly with borrowed money (from, I might add, the North). And slaves were expensive, making up a significant if not dominating fraction of estates' assets.
For Southern elites, therefore, abolition was an existential question. It meant bankruptcy and poverty, with insult added to injury in their creditors being Northerners. To my knowledge (and I'm no expert in this) the question of abolition paired with debt forgiveness was never seriously discussed by the Union.
So yes, Confederate racism absolutely condemns its common folk. But even a moderately well-read Southern commoner would understand that abolition meant financial crisis, taking out their communities' largest tax payers, donors, consumers and employers in one swoop.
I didn't walk away from the Museum sympathetic to slavery. But I did become more sympathetic to the South; in particular, to their bewildering decisions to continue prosecuting a war they were so very obviously, from a history textbook's perspective, losing. (To be clear, slavery is wrong. The South seceding was stupid. Not suing for peace after Gettysburg and Vicksburg stupider still.)
It also doesn't explain what happened after the civil war: the KKK and Jim Crow. The only possible explanation for these is...
I guess democracy was a mistake and we need to get back to inbread monarchy instead of the blood thirsty unwashed masses.
That seems all too nonsensical.
The median professor makes less than, say, an electrician. I am a professor in a good school, and I could probably triple my pay by going to industry.
This propaganda needs to stop.
"academic/intellectual/educated person" != "owner class"
I feel like that's the big misunderstanding between working class libs & working class conservatives.
I'm (working class liberal who went to college) not the one oppressing you (working class conservative). We make basically the same money and hold the same power, lol.
Clever of the (actual) conservative elites (1%, billionaires) to shift the blame to the intellectual class, when we don't own shit. We just piss you (working class conservatives) off at Thanksgiving with "new ideas" so we're an easy target.
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
MIT would always have more applicants than positions. The only thing that would drop total numbers of students should be fewer positions.
Which of course is just as much of an issue since it highlights a blatant attack on education in general.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.
And we all know that the current US senate isn't anywhere near passing any reform, as nothing can hit 60, and if anything did, it would be immigration restrictions.
There was a time that the road was kind of easy: During the Clinton and early GW Bush years, the H1 limits were very high, so if you could find a job, you at least got on that train. It was a long wait if you didn't have a Ph.D, but it was extremely reliable. Not so much anymore.
This will be goodhearted to hell in this day and age.
One thing, discuss, vote.
No "hey if we give you this, you give us this." just simple "do most of us agree on this?" level politics.
That's real democracy, not the crap we have today.
The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to <their side> to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
I wish our parties didn't view each other as opponents as much as collaboration partners ultimately responsible for the continued well being of the nation rather than only for their own political good.
They are looking at alternatives in Europe instead.
See for example "Graduate work visas: a disaster we were warned about" here: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-deliveroo-visa-scandal
The prior poster is making the case that might not be a bad thing, but its not just graduate students
But then who could push through some redneck agenda that is actively harmful to future of given society, but with apropriate emotional charge to ruffle feathers and get people into voting against themselves. You need simple people that can easily believe the dumbest shit you can cone up with. Smart educated folks usually know better, definitely on average.
I dont claim there is some big conspiracy around this, that would be too convenient copout when human greed and stupidity is enough, but it would make a typical Bond villain chess move.
Really, there is no good excuse for public education to not be accessible to whole public. Unless you want class based society, which US in many regards is and will be for foreseeable future.
Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest.
You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system."
Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.
In my department we have research staff to look at research proposals and make sure they're good before they're submitted to the grant agency.
Someone might look at the budget and say "This is administrative bloat because it is not teaching focused so we are cutting them."
What's the downstream effect? Well now those professors who relied on the research staff have to take time out of their schedules to do deeper reviews of their work, so they reduce teaching time and increase research time.
They are not as skilled as the dedicated staff, so now there are fewer proposals being accepted. This means less money to the university, and particularly the department.
So what does the department do? They stop hiring undergraduate graders and they institute a hiring freeze. Now that means they cannot admit as many students, teaching costs go up, class sizes go up. And for the admitted students, now they've lost their work study, so it means fewer students are going to enroll because their aid has decreased, effectively increasing tuition. This can be a vicious downward spiral if not checked.
So the original intent of "tighten belts and reduce waste" is really "we made everything worse for everyone"
If every university were subject to similar constraints, the average "quality" of research proposals would go down (everybody would have less time to spend on it) but since the pool of research dollars is assumed constant everyone would still get roughly their same slice - just with less overhead.
In your example, I'd be more worried about the case where the specialized design reviewer knows what the available sources of grants are and procedure to apply to them, and the professor has since forgotten that knowledge, and so the department now cannot bring in any grants or revenue. That'd kill science even at established institutions like MIT or Yale or Harvard, even if they have very good researchers.
There's not really an equivalent in the education world, because of how the university prestige economy works. Prestige is sort of like a natural monopoly: The more prestigious your university, the more talent you attract in terms of students and professors. The more talent you attract, the more prestige you generate via their discoveries. And both talent and prestige lead to donations, which in turn attract further talent and prestige.
The solution for the prestige economy is as Paul Graham wrote:
> Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first.
https://paulgraham.com/love.html
Basically people need to defect, ignore prestige, take the hit, and do what they want to do regardless of what other people think. Note that this will destroy the job market, because so much of it is based on prestigious credentials because people are apparently unable to screen for the qualities that are actually needed to do the job. But the job market is in the process of being destroyed by AI and liars and lying AI anyway. The future looks like a bunch of new startups starting from scratch and inventing new ways of doing things, and largely ignoring the existing "real world".
The part I'm worried most about is government, which is another natural monopoly that serves as a social Schelling-point, and one that has become badly outdated for the conditions we're about to face. Unlike prestige, however, you kinda can't just ignore the existing government and do what you want. It's very, very rare for a government to get replaced peacefully, particularly a replacement that doesn't just change the people but wholesale ways of doing things. While I'm hoping that that's what happens, history has plenty of examples of revolutions that ended up extremely bloody, and didn't actually solve anything.
The part that makes me concerned is efforts by leaders to change the structure of our democracy from rules explicitly laid out in the Constitution to rules implicitly laid out in party bylaws and customs. Gerrymandering in particular is bad news: instead of having voters choose their leaders, it lets leaders choose their voters. Also the increasing centralization of power within the executive branch and within the federal government, the increasing politicization of the courts, and the influence of money on politics and politics on money.
All of these make the system more brittle. Democratic capitalism is effective because it tolerates partial failures well; if you get a bad leader, vote them out at the next election. When people no longer believe that they can vote out the bad leader, or that voting out the leader will change anything, then that release valve disappears.
Do you have any sources or citations to support the broad claims about increases in administrators or broad surplus revenue? As non-profits, if tuition is going up and all other fund sources are flat, then expenditures have to go up as well, there is no owner's profit to absorb excess revenue.
The best data I has is from the Education department, see the last part of this chart (Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant 2022-23 dollars):
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...
At universities like MIT, Stanford and others, many undergraduates do not pay anything close to sticker price. Students from lower and middle income families often receive major aid, and in some cases pay no tuition at all. Full tuition is paid mostly by wealthy families and international students. I myself went to the most expensive university in the country circa 2005, but paid less than state school because they gave me a bunch of grants (not mere loans). For this reason, undergraduate education is mostly break even or a loss leader at many institutions.
Tuition inflation is also tied to inequality. If very wealthy families can pay $60k-$90k a year out of pocket, elite universities can set prices at that level, acting as upward price pressure in the broader market. That's just the magic of the market dynamics at work.
> I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff.
Some bureaucracy may be wasteful, but some exists because modern research universities are genuinely complex institutions. Yes, fewer administrators are tied to teaching, but a professor's job is only about 30% teaching, and classes are not in session 25% of the year. I never understand this idea that all or most of the administrative staff at a university must go toward teaching or else something is wrong / broken.
Large universities are small research communities verging on city status, not mere schools. If you want mere schools we have those in various forms (SLACs, community colleges, trade schools, etc.), but it seems to me people also want all the advanced stuff coming out of the research output these universities produce. The higher the tower of knowledge, the more it's going to cost to build on and maintain it, and the costs don't go up linearly.
> And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR.
Research is also and expensive loss leader. Labs, buildings, equipment, safety systems, compliance, grant administration all cost a lot of money, to the point that research is also a loss leader. At my institution we charge about 65% overhead on research grants, but for every research dollar we bring in, it costs 70 more cents for the university to support said research.
The upside is that these universities produce enormous value in the form of scientific discoveries, medical advances, new startups, an educated workforce, and regional economic growth. They bring in foreign and nonlocal money and spend much of it locally. Many of them are economic engines in places that otherwise would be considered "flyover country", acting as an anchor for educators and their families, students, and that attracts hospitals, other schools, restaurants, and suddenly a local economy is formed. You think there would be any economic activity at State College, PA if it weren't for Penn State University? It'd just be another part of Pennsyltucky. Instead there's a whole thriving town there; per capita, State College is in the top 5 economic regions in PA, and Penn State as a whole accounts for 10% of employment in PA (it's not a coincidence the other top 4 economic regions in PA are full of colleges and universities).
https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-stat...
So yes, universities should control costs, reduce administrative excess, and protect students from bad debt like you said. But simply starving them of funding risks damaging one of America’s most productive assets. The better goal is a funding model that reduces student debt, preserves world-class research, demands accountability, and recognizes that valuable institutions are not cheap to run. But that's not what's happening, not even close.
Really I don't see many downsides unless you're leaning heavily on the idea immigration is a bad thing for America.
> And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs.
I think you'll need to support that statement with a better argument.
I don't know about Brown specifically, but schools like MIT receive large amounts of federal funding to do research. Administrating that funding requires staffing (paperwork for proposals, contracting, accounting, invoicing, etc). MIT probably also has non-teaching research staff that are entirely grant-funded. I'd be surprised if undergrad tuition is paying for any of this.
US universities were an incredible blessing to the “brand” of the USA. Foreign students come to the US, pay an inflated full sticker price, subsidizing US students, and learn from top educators who generally have a lens of Western values.
Many of these students pursue permanent citizenship and bring with them new ideas, businesses, and grow their families who all become new members of the American economy and social fabric.
I personally know people from other countries that I met in school who came to the US and came out of that experience with a much more pro-Western mentality.
Just look at the story of the CEO of Nvidia.
But now the United States is going to be the opposite. Jensen Huang resolved to move to the United States to escape the social unrest of Taiwan, now we see the best and brightest young Americans with options preferring to move elsewhere to escape the ever-growing regression of this country.
People keep mixing correlation with causation.
The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.
Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.
But that's about it.
There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.
There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.
Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.
You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.
The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.
And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.
And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.
And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.
Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
Curious take; do you think if there were a no-immigrant law on the books those professorial positions would have gone completely unfilled? You _GOT_ an education with the help of immigrants, but that does not imply you wouldn't have had they not been there.
Universities can't just replace missing students with American citizens. University enrollment peaked in 2010.
Universities are deeply impacted just like other immigrant and migrant worker-concentrated industries like farming, construction, and hospitality.
I am obviously not saying that I would not have gotten any kind of education. But what could happen is that there could be less supply, higher pricing, decreased research output, and/or lower academic standards to make up for headcount shortfalls.
Around 10% of Ohio State University students are international, but this number is higher for postgraduate at approximately 16%.
Remember that research is a huge function of universities. Having no international students doing research would be devastating to the USA. International students attend US schools and the schools then keep intellectual property rights of those inventions.
Yes, you heard me right, international students literally come to the United States, pay top tuition rates for their education with no state subsidy, and then their research IP is owned by those US institutions, with the researchers only receiving a tiny fraction of royalties from profitable innovations.
This is an amazing deal for the United States.
While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.
I did graduate in an Italian University I'm co-author of multiple high-impact papers.
Each and every one of my professors led advanced research in their field. Yes, they were limited in their budgets, had a handful of postdocs, not 50, in their labs, but that didn't make them any less good or prepared as scientists.
And I've also studied and worked in an American university, Ohio State in my case, as did several of my peers that went to ivy league ones.
I stand by my opinion: what makes some universities better is funding and the average quality of the student being impacted by the acceptance filtering.
The argument you bring up, if relevant, makes a difference when your education ends and your research career begins. Does not make you better at understanding organic chemistry or calculus.
You call them table stakes, yet, lack of fundamentals is widespread even among ivy league graduates in my experience.
Moreover, when it comes to teaching load, some schools you have a course load of 4-5 classes each semester, maybe more; whereas at other schools you only have to teach 0-2 classes. There's a big difference in the amount of face time you get with a professor who has 300 students versus 30. Also there are big differences on whether a school can attract enough grad students for TAs, whether there are research opportunities for undergraduates, whether there are campus jobs for undergraduates, etc.
E.g. while during the cold war US excelled in multiple chemical fields like photonics or organic chemistry, the Soviets smartly focused on less capital intensive ones like electrochemical chemistry and they excelled there.
But I hope you understand my perspective: I've graduated at a university nobody has ever heard about and at no point in my chemistry career I was anywhere behind in preparation to people from top tier colleges.
And the fact that this gets repeated endlessly and taken at face value is a gigantic distortion of what makes an individual prepared, because there's way too many variants.
I can easily stand by "on average ivy leagues produce better graduates", but there's no chance in hell I will ever buy the "top educators" argument. It's plain and simply false, with 0 hard data to back it up.
On top of that, this is repeated by the people that attended those very institutions but had no experience of how it is elsewhere.
If you've graduated like me, you know very well that each program has a wide variety of different educators. Hell, even the same university from year to year may change who holds what, with dramatic differences in the quality of teaching or difficulty and requirements to pass an exam.
I had an easy time doing Organic Chemistry 2, but those who enrolled just an year prior had to scale the Everest just to pass the exam. The reverse was true in calculus. And this is the same all over the world.
I have a BSc in Computer Engineering and I'm finishing a MSc in Computer Science. The MSc has been useless other than for being able to start doing research. I could have learned additional things in 1 more year, without repeating most of the knowledge in the other year, and then start the PhD directly. Instead I did a MSc where for 1 year I mostly repeated old topics before starting working on really new things.
I think Masters should be highly specialized for people that after a Bachelor start to work but want additional knowledge for their position.
TLDR: 4 years Bachelors -> 4 years PhD is the correct route in my opinion. We messed up in Europe
I don't have a lot of experience with the US system, but from my experience after 3/4 years newly minted postgrads are probably not yet ready to knowingly commit to 5 years of specialised training. European-style MA/MSc's often feel "useless" because they actually help people switch course and find a new footing. However, good master's programmes are either flexible enough for advanced students to take more specialised modules or have high demands to begin with.
That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.”
Not sure the HN title meets the no-editorialised-titles rule. (EDIT: Nvm, misread or title may have changed.)
What is editorialized? Those programs have not yet completed the admissions process for the upcoming year. Obviously any statistics about admissions for the upcoming year would not include them?
Meanwhile in China ...
Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
I browse science-focused social media and forums all the time. But the time spent doing that is never as good as going to a seminar presentation from somebody I've never seen before on a topic I never would have thought to investigate.
The world becomes poorer when these aggregation points are disaggregated. Reducing MIT's aggregation does not increase aggregation effects elsewhere.
I don't care if this happens at MIT in the US, or somewhere in Paris. Actually, I take that back, if the US continues its current authoritarian anti-open immigration policy, then I do care intensely that Paris or England or Berlin or wherever should become the center of academic innovation. Just as China's authoritarian closed policies make China unsuitable to be the academic center, Trump's authoritarian closed policies make MIT unsuitable. However Trump is weak, losing power, and in two years we can begin prosecuting all the people in his administration for their lawlessness, cruelty, and inhumanity. The US will rebuild, but it will take a while if we want to rebuild according to our constitution and laws.
And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
I actually agree with them that China is absolutely on track to surpass us, though the funny part is they never stopped to think about why that might be, nor what it will mean for Western countries and immigration going forward.
The writing is really on the wall for the death of "a country is an economic zone migrants should be free to enter and leave at will" line of thinking, but regaining the cohesion we once had and the previous pressure for migrants to actually assimilate rather than just forming closed satellite communities may take longer still.
And with an aging population and stagnant/declining productivity that seems unlikely to improve in the future.
If anyone is going to overtake the US, it will be China.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.
There's really nothing good about it.
People go to the US because of an abundance of infrastructure and money. Which now goes down.
It's a loss.
If you want to do cutting edge research you need money.
Try to do it in Italy, where an entire university has only one MRI working at 400 Mhz.
Then you go to EPFL, Switzerland, and a single lab has 15, I repeat, 15 .8 GHz MRIs.
Each of those instruments is in multi million $ range and requires expensive staffing and maintenance.
Then you need chemicals, you need an order for 6'000 $ worth of chemicals.
In Italy that's a lengthy and bureaucratic process.
When I was in EPFL, Switzerland, not even as a grad, but master's student, all it took was a half assed email and I would get everything I needed. No questions asked. Zero.
Need lab equipment? Every researcher and student had a "credit card", you'd go to the university shop and buy whatever you needed, no questions asked.
Hell, when I was in EPFL all it took me to get a GTX Titan X from Nvidia was to fill a form with my university email stating I needed it for research (I didn't, I used it for gaming), I had one one weeks later.
Do the same with the university email from Tor Vergata? When you truly need it for research? Laugh.
In US this abundance of resource is even higher, and it compounds.
Need some grad to help you? Her'es the budget. Need this? Have it. Need the most precise instrument of some kind on the planet? Book it.
I don't want to be harsh, but you're taking stances and having opinions on stuff you simply do not understand.
This isn't researchers being greedy, this is researchers understanding that if they want to do meaningful work, unconstrained, or less constrained, by budget reasons there is just a handful of places on the planet, half of them in the US.
I'm doing a PhD in STEM in a major Western European university.
And 500 grad students at what 50k per year for funding is what 25 million?
They really couldn’t hedge the risk with their own money if talent was truly that important?
I went digging. Turns out that's a 2025 "Big Beautiful Bill" thing, which raised that from 1.4% to 8% but only for colleges where the endowment exceeds $2,000,000 per student. Which meant MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard.
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/05/14/ways-and-means-vot... boasts that this "Holds woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations and other tax-exempt entities accountable".
But yes, the tax goes against "keeping sacred systems sacred" principles and is an opinionated policy against rich entities that the current administration dislikes.
Sounds ironically like "DEI".
DEI is about rewarding and punishing people for immutable characteristics like race and sex. Where people live isn't at all immutable, and a government may rightly do stuff to encourage economic activity (like research) in this area vs. another. In fact, they do it all the time.
So it's not that the administration wants them to only look at merit and nothing else, which I thought was the the explanation, but that they think some non-merit things are okay to balance for and try to encourage diveristy, equity, and inclusion on the axis of, and others aren't.
It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.
This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
> For departments across the Institute, the funding uncertainty I talked about has made them cautious about admitting new graduate students.
I'm sure it varies by department? Well I'm not sure, I assume...
1. Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity 2. Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution 3. Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply 4. Delivering Nuclear Energy that is Faster, Safer, Cheaper 5. Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy 6. Transforming Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization 7. Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI 8. Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery 9. Recentering Microelectronics in America 10. Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers 11. Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories 12. Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality 13. Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery 14. Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos 15. Predicting U.S. Water for Energy 16. Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy 17. Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets 18. HPC Code Curation, Translation, and Development for Accelerated Scientific Discoveries 19. AI for Scientific Reasoning 20. Cybersecurity for AI-driven Science Workflows 21. Artificial Intelligence in Fluid Flow for Energy Components and Technologies
destroying some of America's best institutions & best returns ROI wise - talent pipeline, R&D.
unfortunately the damage from these things take at least 10 years to be felt throughout the economy. & then blame will fall on someone that's not responsible.
academia gets destroyed
I just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrug
other countries have not stopped their 10-20+ year plans for education research
otherwise in a decade the USA is just going to be known as the country that makes the deadliest weapons to sell to the world and little else
Unfortunately this isn't something we can just vote our way out of. The people who support the destruction of America's science and research infrastructure will still be there, and will still be voting. Trumpism will survive Trump as more competent fascists take power. Rebuilding the knowledge base, infrastructure and trust destroyed will take years, with half the country steadfastly working against any attempt to reverse course.
I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it's going to require massive cultural changes and a complete redesign and decoupling of the federal system. Not secession - I think that would be a disaster - but a repeal of the Constitution's Compact Clause allowing states to enter into agreements with foreign governments without Congressional approval. Let the MAGA states retreat into their own Christian nationalist Juche hellhole while everyone else remains a part of the modern global community. It would be a win-win for everyone.
This is a 20% drop in enrollment, not in applications.
If applications stayed the same, it would be more competitive, if they dropped more then 20%, it would be less competitive.
That means fewer available slots overall. Kornbluth's comments don't explicitly state anything about _applications_, just _admissions_. Given the heightened economic uncertainty and poor job prospects for recent graduates, I'd expect more students to be looking for graduate school as a way to tide themselves over.
So a very, very bad picture for folks seeking graduate education and training.
Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants? The article does not seem to say.
The head of MIT needs to be clearer about that. It may be inconceivable at his level to say that fewer people would apply.
In the US, school enrollment is declining due to declining birth rates.[1] That's hitting elementary schools now, but hasn't hit colleges yet. It will in a few years, of course.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/declining-public-school-e...
The sad reality is given the unrealistic expansion of the education sector they were clearly admitting people who needed to justify being there...
I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be
This system needs a reset. It could (after a likely painful disruption) refocus on teaching, keeping current (exorbitant) prices but providing a better education. Or it could focus on costs (cutting off unnecessary expenses). Or do something else, but the current setup is not sustainable.
Most of the people in charge (faculty) are true believers and the acolytes (grad students) are as well.
They believe that a PHD and the years spent in pursuit of it will:
1. get the student a college or university professorship in the USA; and/or
2. allow for future opportunities that will outweigh the cost in time and money spent in pursuit of the PHD; and/or
3. advance the state of science/research/knowledge that will justify (in feel-good vibes/emotions?) the lost years
It is ironic that some of the brightest people ignore the data.
Oh.
(bit curious, when did that sprout?)
Well said
To be clear, I would still choose to do my PhD in the US. But this is a marginal effect, people weigh many factors. If you think, for example, you're going to be constantly worried about visa issues, you may just choose Europe or China over the US.
Edit- sorry NZ and australia, forgot about you
Oh, no. Eight percent of returns on $27.4 billion.
How will they go on?
Maybe this is just the cranky Millennial in me, but seeing how so many people of my generation were told they absolutely, positively had to get at least bachelors degree to be anyone in society, and accordingly took out high-five/low-six-figures in debt at the age of 18, only to get the shaft over the next decade or two of their lives as wages stagnated and more and more jobs (even knowledge jobs) moved overseas in search of higher returns by the same people making major gifts to those endowments...
I don't have a problem with the tax.
Hell, there were times a few years back when the MIT media page on Facebook did nothing but post stories about all of the tech and engineering going on in China. This is also the same institution that hosts a media lab that continued to associate with Epstein after his sex offense conviction because his cash was as green as anyone else's.
Edited: to add, this speech talks a lot about the reduction in research funding from the US government which arguably has nothing to do with the regulatory environment.
We are so very far from any of that, that people think it's merely funding or AI or immigration causing this current issue (maybe immediately but not on the long term trend if you see older articles on a "college bubble" maybe a decade ago), where it is decades of over-regulation of these industries preventing any competitive alternative to them
So you get less and less quality options that cost more
Evidence of this would be in contrast, something like computer hardware that keeps improving and getting cheaper, relatively speaking
Cry me a river.
1. MIT is one of the 'better' run institutions.
2. Most academic institutions are hilariously lean compared to most companies. The problem is the administrative burden associated with record-keeping, compliance, and 'student experience.' All 3 of these could reasonably be automated or cut.
3. On record-keeping: AI should help reduce that eventually.
4. On compliance, professors and universities need to restore academic freedom, period. Students have been pushing for 'all views' and the university model just doesn't support that. Different viewpoints will diverge, and some students will need to be threatened. Imagine a communist yelling at a business school about the principles of capitalism; an atheist yelling that God doesn't exist at Harvard's divinity school. Senseless.
5. On student experience: this is the shot in the foot. Students obviously want to choose the best social experiences, but getting gourmet food, shuttles, and super-designed buildings is nice to have. The competitive admissions process is competitive, but the cuts are probably stepping down the arms race. One $30M building can fund a lot of grad students. Which is more important to the institution?
On the tax itself, given most University's objectively socialist leanings, they should be proud to take an 8% tax on the GAINS of the Endowment, which is over $2M per student.
The breathless "let's go to Washington" on - again - a lower tax rate than nearly any graduate pays on their income on their massive per student endowment while they and their students preach and promote socialist policies across the board is beyond parody.
Where do they think the federal "funding" comes from?
All to say I find the response mostly spineless - unwilling to tackle the real issues facing universities today. For an engineering school to say 'let's beg for funding on Washington' suggests a wrongheaded institutional approach, regardless of politics.
> [Anxiety over the STEM Crisis] has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." [...]
> The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
> Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
EDIT: I forgot about the sidebar. This isn't the first time the MIT President has spoken about the STEM Crisis. Here's a quote from the article and compare it to the 2026 quote from Kornbluth.
> "Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence." James Killian, president of MIT, 1954
> "And frankly, it’s a loss for the nation: When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and you shrink the supply of future scientists." - Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, 2026
I don't mean to pick in MIT specifically, and I do think they are right to call out this administration for its disruptive behavior. They are hardly alone, and undoubtedly more will speak up. However we must rethink how we handle STEM education and employment because the current relationship is untenable. At the very least we should invest in repatriating existing STEM workers who aren't in the field. Otherwise the cycle will repeat to everybody's detriment.
I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?
Many foreigners stay away and some US students decide to study abroad.
Now, if you want AI-influenced decisions, that might have to do with undergrads and expensive institutions. If you are a high school senior now, and you aren't getting major rebates, you have to consider whether a degree at an expensive college, which might be be a quarter million dollars sticker, is going to be all that wise of an investment. If AI really has a big effect on hiring knowledge workers, any bet you make can be quite wrong. But this isn't affecting MIT, Harvard or Yale, which could fill their freshmen classes 100 times over with very good students if they felt like it. It's just deadly for 2nd and 3rd rate liberal arts schools though, as high prices, the international student drought and fewer american children are just wrecking havoc.
But again, the AI bits just don't matter to top schools like MIT in the slightest. Too much demand of American students for undergrad.
What I see is a wall of text that starts with “This is hands down the most pathetic thing I have ever read”, followed by an allcaps sentence; that’s two clear guidelines breaches in the first two sentences.
Glancing over the rest I see more all-caps phrases, ragey words, exclamation marks, and a final line starting with “That letter was written by a hack who needs to lose their job...”. This is an unusually high density of guidelines breaches.
We work hard to make this a place where people with different perspectives and values can discuss interesting and difficult topics. The only reason anyone thinks this is a good place to come to discuss anything is that we have guidelines and others make the effort to respect them and uphold them.
But I had assumed we’d end up with a bunching effect that would push up demand for MIT rather than down. (When there is an over decline in something, often remaining participants bunch harder into the most desirable remaining)