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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?