Ok, but not what this article is about at all. Six figures is for undergrads. The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students, who are typically fully supported.
What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?
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.
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.
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.
Researchers are funded largely by government grants.
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.
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.