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. 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. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. I can see how undergrads may look at how AI can do most of their homework assignments, and see how miserable grad students are, and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.
I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD?
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.
Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science...
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.
Taking a longer time to graduate to become the “world expert” in their field is fine if grad students weren’t paid next to nothing for the 60+ hours a week that they are expected to work. As it is now it’s better to finish as quickly as possible so they can have a real life.
To make "next to nothing" concrete: MIT EECS PhD students are currently paid about $4700/mo. This is substantially less than they'd make in industry, but it's around the US median personal income across all working-age adults, and well above the average 24 year-old. They frequently make a substantial extra at summer internships, putting them well above US median in the years when they do.
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.
You're looking at students at a top tier university in a field that pays extremely well. The numbers are going to be at the high end for what a grad student can make. A quick search for PhD salaries suggests that $20-35k/year is more common.
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.
That's MIT. At a state university my friends were making in the ballpark of ~30k.
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.
As someone who graduated with a 7.5 year long PhD last month,
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.
It's great that you recognize that the last 1.5 years were the period you feel like you did things to justify that bill. However, much like juniors everywhere, you justify all of your pay because we are not paying you for your skill at that moment, but for who you will become.
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.
I worked a ton in grad school, and it definitely sucked at the time.
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!
It’s not crazy… the wages are below food prep. What would be crazy is paying to help someone else’s career. That’s why a well known rule of thumb for graduate program evaluation is whether or not they pay their grad students.
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.
I was working retail in Eugene, Oregon during the 2014 University of Oregon grad student strike. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because I was working retail with a master's degree in physics (because I did not have the endurance to complete a PhD, but had not yet accepted that fact).
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.
It would be crazy if the university were getting nothing out of it, but your work as a PhD student benefits not only you but the university as a whole. I think it would be reasonable to give students a living wage. I don't think anyone is expecting to make 100k.
I think the key difference is that: "going to school", sure you need a living stipend, but the actual research phase has serious WLB and working condition issues
Most applicants know that that outcome is antithetical to pursuing a PhD. It's common knowledge that a PhD involves 5-7 years of academic work (read: low pay) in pursuit of becoming an expert in a specialized topic. You don't enter a PhD program expecting to immediately make money or to graduate as soon as possible. It's not a coding bootcamp.
I agree with you. It is definitely what the PhD student signed up for. But like I said in a sibling reply I think if we are worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that we should be), then we may need to change the incentive structure surrounding the PhD programs to make it more worthwhile for people to invest the time and energy. Because how it is currently going it seems to me like fewer and fewer people are going to consider it worth the investment just for the credential alone.
re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.
Football and other sports are marketing and their wages should be paid for by that department. Along with proof the marketing return on investment is there.
Grad students should be paid for their work as well.
Isn’t this sort of how all terminal degrees work? MDs, JDs, etc are all putting the candidates through the wringer, for relatively low wages, until they’re “experienced”. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s common knowledge it’s the way things work if you want to have those magic letters of a terminal degree next to your name in your email signature.
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.
In the US, phds and professional degrees are more or less geared toward students who are comfortable enough financially to stomach the opportunity cost of 6-10+ years of additional education, unpaid or underpaid residencies and internships, and long apprenticeship hours (which prevent backfilling financial gaps) before making “real” income.
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 don't know that people even care, at that. The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system, a doctor is just a nurse in a white coat who's also a bit of an asshole (aloof and/or smarmy). Especially when they misdiagnose or miss a diagnoses.
>The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system
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.
JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think.
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.
Yes, but I think as time goes on, fewer and fewer people are going to consider those letters next to their name worth it for the years that they need to invest. So, I am just saying that if MIT or whoever else is worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that they/we should be), then maybe it's time to change how it works.
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.
Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout.
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.
> Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout.
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.
>is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare)
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]
PhD programs have remarkably high attrition rates prior to graduation (ie dropout). I don't know that it's 50% and obviously it varies by institution and field but it's quite large.
>In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K
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.
A research professor typically graduates dozens of PhD students. Perhaps there was a post-war bootstrapping period where every one of those students got a tenured position somewhere, and in turn also trained dozens of PhD students; but it's pretty obvious it's not realistic to expect this to continue indefinitely. We're way past saturation right now. Certainly very few are going to get their own tenured positions, and as for the rest, it depends on the winds of funding availability in industry.
A very US-centric perspective. Whereas the folks in Europe do it in 3-4 years, come to the US and do a 2-3 year postdoc (with higher pay than a PhD student), and are ahead of their American peers.
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.
> A very US-centric perspective. Whereas the folks in Europe do it in 3-4 years
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.
A US thing again? My friends all did 3 year bachelors, 3 year PhD. Some dragged out the PhD to 4. Those who do a masters do it in one year, and typically don't do a PhD. Some undergrad courses are 4 year and you get a masters at the end. And my UK bachelors was recognized as equivalent to a US masters degree for visa purposes.
Maybe this is CS-specific? Finishing physics PhD from high school in 6 years sounds just not enough time. Even exceptional people I know in my field needed at least 7-8 (3+4 or 3+2+3). 3 years into theoretical physics grad school is around the time people start doing decent research
It's common, most of the people I know from the UK system did their PhD in 3-4 years.
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 did none of my degrees in US, and my physics degree was 95% math and physics.
Physics degree is quite sequential anyway. You can't do QM in your first year or QFT in your second year.
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.
Maybe things have changed. We did QM in our first year at Imperial. I suppose we have to make allowances for Oxford. Got to fit the poetry in somewhere. =)
Obvious disclaimer: At this point we are talking about outlier colleges/universities.
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.
Yeah 3 - 4 is typical in STEM at Imperial, depends on the scholarship or funding source. The standard funding tends to assume 3 - 3.5 years, but I vaguely recall that in some departments supervisors had a habit of forcing people to stick around for a few months without funding.
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.
I agree with all those things, but we should be starting that training in middle school. Deconstructing arguments, making reports, giving presentations, solving open ended questions. Many of these things involve a modest amount of critical thinking, prediction and self-reflection.
Are those PhDs being paid with a decent salary? If not, I can’t agree with your statement.
PS. I did my PhD in an EU country where it’s treated as another researcher job with salary and benefits
PhD candidates in the US usually get somewhere between $25K and $50K stipend, also some level of benefits (typically health care). Sometimes there is a tuition waiver (student does not need to pay grad program tuition).
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).
Yes, I suppose you could try to justify it as "this is the price you pay for having the freedom to build your own research plan in the future" ("maximizing your future freedom") but in reality, this just sets you up for more of the same- getting a faculty position (pre-tenure) with a low salary, and immense pressure to bring in funds via research grants/publish papers.
I eventually tired of the process and moved to industry because the struggle wasn't worth it.
No it's typical. It's just that your stipend is usually just x amount of Dollars + whatever tuition is so you never have to care what it is and you don't pay it directly per se, it's just included in your stipend. Someone pays for it at the end of the day though.
Yeah, I distinctionly remember a postdoc I knew who was irrationally excited to move to a role where they were going to get paid $35k, in 2010s money, and they were damn excited about it. And they were moving to a high cost of living area (from a high cost of living area). I was utterly flabbergasted because they were very smart, very technical and should have been earning 5-10x that. I feel like they didn't know what they were worth and academia had utterly failed to teach them that.
I don't know how they paid any of their accumulated (I assume) student debt, let alone had an even decent standard of living.
In France STEM PhD are expected to last 3 year and the funding is sized like that. It is also considered as a job. It is only done if salary is funded in most cases.
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
It’s also a set of credentials, which might be immediately useful for one reason or other. All those other things you can do outside of a program, especially if you’ve already got the network or career trajectory to support it.
>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.
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.
I agree that completing a PhD under the time originally agreed may not be good, as you lose some of the learning opportunities that come with the apprenticeship (yes, it is) program.
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.
All of the things you mention can also be done as a PostDoc. Which might be even better for social networking, broadening your research portfolio, etc. than staying in a single PhD position for the duration of a PhD + PostDoc.
> Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career.
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".
As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.
This seems to be how many PhD programs go. Almost all want to quit in the last couple years despite the time invested already. Few want to stay in academia, because they have been abused and used and realize that the same would happened if they try to earn tenure.
I am one of those guys. I left for a big tech job even though doing research to push the boundaries of human knowledge was my dream. I know, a cliche, but I was a 20 something year old at the time.
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.
R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis was a fun look at the hell that is graduate school told through a fantasy lens. That paired with the McSweeney’s snake fight article should be essential reading for all would-be grad students.
Those are typically skills a starting scientist needs to learn. At the same time, sometimes it does feel abusive especially if the student doesn't get some sort of credit for doing the peer review and talk prep.
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.
yeah I do feel like the PhD system is not uniform in terms of students’ experiences. some get out quite quickly if their advisor is chill while others are stuck being stack ranked in their labs or doing grunt work. your fate is basically in the hands of your advisor..
Which is why you should shop for the advisor and then tailor yourself to the labs you want to apply to. Interview current and former students. Go to conferences where that lab is presenting papers, etc. Have some solid blue collar academic skills like cleaning data, doing instrumentation, hell even making bad ass slide decks will get you noticed. Getting a PhD is similar to landing the job you want. Also showing up with a problem you want to solve that aligns with the lab AND the skills to pull it off, boom!
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.
there are two types of people in post-grad academia. those who are interested in advancing knowledge, and those who are interested in advancing their career. i've worked with many phds who were completely useless - they understood how to work for a career minded advisor because they were career minded themselves. those were their skills: doing what they were told, kowtowing, reading other people's work and talking about it as if they understand it. generating and iterating ideas at the pace required for business? non-existent to the point of appearing mentally incompetent. i'd go so far as to say that the office politics involved in academia is antithetical to knowledge creation. i've also worked with phds who were absolute creating geniuses, but I've worked with even more who didn't do a phd or who quit their phd to focus on commericalizing an idea.
My PhD advisor found out that my English writing skills are quite good and the rest of their lab were Chinese internationals, so they started making me write all of their research grants. 30 pages every 2 months, pre-ChatGPT days.
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.
I've graduated many PhD students at a top tier university. That advisor was correct. What they were doing is teaching their PhD student.
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 insanity. Then let them learn by advancing their own goals, not the goals of their exploiter. I won’t even call it advising because it clearly is not as you yourself admit.
I decided not to get a PhD against the wishes of my professors and family members because I felt the opportunity cost was too high. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Being amazed at how that's allowed displays a naiveté only one could have if they've never been in the process. What you describe is exactly what being in academia is all about for the last couple generations. Being a grad student sounds prestigious to an outsider, but the system is literally built to exploit their labor.
that's a very weird comment to make. the scope for doing novel work and contributing to the canon is almost always zero. its extremely difficult to maneuver yourself into a position where you're permitted to scribble outside the box at all. and those situations where you are often require having a phd and a track record in doing research.
Reviewing papers, writing papers, these are all part of what grad students do and what they should be doing to learn. They should be getting academic credit for it, however. Your friend sounds like he had an extremely unusual and bad experience, or there's a bit more to the story.
I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense.
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.
Yes similar, some time back I was in a grad program that I was really interested in and decent at, but by then married and child on the way. My Master's adviser was honest that it's better to just work somewhere vs go down PhD path as I was doing this for the job prospects. The folks who stayed with this were "family-funded" and well to do in their home countries. They basically were doing it for various reasons aside from "I need a job".
I knew a foreign student like that. He was a great guy and a friend, and we worked in the same building. One day, I told him that I purchased a condo to save money during the doctoral program (in my unique situation, my mortgage was less than basically all other grad student's rent, at least those I knew). A little while later, he told me that he also purchased a condo. I asked him about his mortgage rate, and he gave me a puzzled look. His well-off family paid >$250k, cash, for his condo.
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.
> I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile.
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.
While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.
Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art? Most people who study and aspire in these fields don't make a sustainable living in it either. It's a tough competition. There's work and luck involved, as well as talent.
I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.
>Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art?
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 thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.
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 thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.
> 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...
Those other fields are ones in which there is a lot of readily-available support to pursue them as hobbies, without going broke or being put on a three-letter-agency list somewhere.
Was also in a similar position around the same time. When I was an undergrad, my two professors told me to stay out of academia it wasn't worth it. I plowed ahead anyways. I had the same conversations with grad students I really admired I think finally got through to me. This was between graduation and starting grad school in the Fall.
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.
That may well be true but it's not the whole story. My department has been hiring continuously for 15 years, and there have been more than a few years we have not been able to hire anyone because the applicant pool was underqualified. So while it's true there aren't enough jobs for everyone, there are still jobs for those who want them enough to get the qualifications for them (your field may vary).
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.
It's not a qualification, it's a competition. It's not like there is a minimum bar to meet and everyone who meets it gets to go in. It's like "We have 10 seats, so we take the 10 best people who apply". Your qualification is that you have to be one of the 10 best people, however good they are.
its a different relationship entirely. you're hiring someone to mentor grad students, get grants, and teach. and while you aren't given tenure right away, that's certainly the goal, which can be a multi-decade commitment. everyone is trying to raise the bar with their program, and a couple 'meh' hires can really change that trajectory for quite a while. there are only like 20 faculty in your department, its not like development a giant tech co where there are tens of thousands and they are constantly moving in and out - each of these hires has a dramatic impact on your culture.
so yes, it absolutely makes sense to leave slots empty if you don't find candidates that you're excited about.
> 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.
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.
Not that I’m aware of? Most PhD grads not staying academia seems to be a long-running phenomenon. The number of permanent academic positions simply does not match up against the number of PhD grads.
> 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.
Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards.
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)
My dad got his PhD in the 1950s,and went straight to industry. He said it was always this way.
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.
My fiancee left a lovely stats PhD program at Maryland after two years and entered the workforce instead. She started the fall before the COVID-19 quarantine in the US, and while the shift to online only exacerbated her feelings, there was plenty worrying her to make the decision palpable. Her stiped was meager, her advisor was functionally absent and _would not_ use their computer, and the thought of coming out the other end six years later with debt from her undergrad and no job - or worse, a job she would need to spend more money to accept and move for than she had on hand - was terrifying. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think she regrets her decision. I'm sure she wishes the conditions were different, but the value of a PhD today has been dragged down so thoroughly that it only makes sense for a privileged few.
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?
I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
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...
The card check election was in 2004. I was part of the drive at the time (although I graduated before the union began—that was one of the challenges in the drive: a lot of us were essentially working for the benefit of those who came after us and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors). It wasn’t the first, but it was still a relatively new thing at the time.
My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.
"Money" is subjective. Professors are paid a pittance (barely middle-class in some areas), are no longer generally respected, and are abused by their students and leadership at rates that have never been seen. There aren't many pros to academia.
The idea of a union for graduate students seems silly to me (and I was one for six years). The idea that you're exchanging labor for money is insane: any grad student at MIT could 10x their $/hr by taking a job in the private sector. And they could get those jobs easily. They're students, they're getting training.
I saw those videos of horrible people at MIT disrupting classes last year, with the school doing nothing. I'd rather spend the first two years cheaply at a local community college and then finish my undergrad degree at a nice State school than suffer through all that.
> 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. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
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
The squeeze is not worth the juice. The pay is bad, the sector is heavily regulated that you could lose your job for a post you made online, dealing with student is pain (I have been there), expensive tuition, the titles are saturated too, the other day I saw a 24yo a “phd student”, plus the AI making education less valuable in general, at least from average person view. All that plus other factors just make it useless to waste time in anything beyond bachelor, even in engineering, a master degree is usually substituted by few years experience.
There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.
There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.
I'm not arguing against anything you have said, but there is an important connection here that I want to make between disillusionment and funding.
> 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.
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.
2 is key. omg the number of students who are like "I want to be a professor" and can barely name a program they're targeting much less the people in it
>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.
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.
Everyone in tech is uncertain about the future of software, engineering, and science jobs.
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.
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.
It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever
I love the work they do. I think it is vital for progressing humanity.
They are not quite as important as sanitation workers and yet their career is about as enticing...
It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.
Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.
Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010.
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.
The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons:
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.
What do you think about representative vs direct unions?
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.
I think you’re missing the point #1 reason people talk negatively about unions, they cost shareholders and management money.
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.
That I agree with. Rich people hate unions. But their reasoning is shit. They're only of consequence because they lobby hard against unions. The reasons I listed, however, are more valid (imo) and should be addressed. Addressing them would do a lot to diminish anti-union talking points.
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay ...
... 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.
So I’m not in academia but even I’ve known for 20+ years how horrendous the job prospects are. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where everybody sat down in 1972. Academia is full of baby boomers who refuse to retire or die. And the number of positions just isn’t growing anywhere near to the demand.
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?
> 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.
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.
What a Rorschach blot. Comments range from AI to immigration to doomsday results for USA.
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.
There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.
Isn't that what the article is saying? Less research funding == Fewer admissions.
> 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.
While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs from grants) or their own indirect costs. And they will not be admitting students if they do not see a clear path for them to be externally funded after their first year or two.
Oh yes. As I said, the math department guaranteed 6 years. If they can't guarantee it, they won't admit the student.
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.
I was recently shown a grad office door covered with home grown memes. There was a printout of a disassociating cartoon teddy bear taped on top in the center with the caption "unfortunately the vibe continues to deteriorate".
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
Fund them to do what exactly? Come up with their own research ideas?
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.
A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
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.
> A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
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.
The vast majority of the endowment isn't money (dollars in bank accounts). University endowments work like private equity funds, most of the funds will be invested in assets, most of which hardly liquid enough to reasonably convert them into cash on short notice. They could try to borrow money against the valuations of those assets, but it's not sane to take on debt in order to sustain a level of expenditures that was adjusted to a much higher level of income (true more generally). Especially when the alternative of temporarily scaling back expenses is relatively easy.
Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.
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.
>practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.
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.
A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused.
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.
> 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?
I think this is a valid point, but if the talent pool shrinkage was truly a threat to your academic institution are you really going to just watch?
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.
Government is not great at picking up or creating ideas. Academia has to lead in that and then show government why it would be best for the nation to fund those. The government is good at long term funding for ideas that may not be the best for private sector right away but it should not be creating ideas themselves otherwise you would get things like Lysenkoism.
Allow me to disagree while I look back at the last 80 years of US government-funded research.
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.
At this point, these well-endowed universities are essentially Private Equity firms, each with a university hanging off the side as a minor, semi-profitable department within the firm.
Is that across all universities? Because I would guess that, for example, University of Illinois gets a much larger portion of its funding from government sources than University of Chicago (which would be one of those well-endowed universities which, incidentally, just cut tuition to zero for undergrads from families making less than $250K).
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
Chancellor mcmcmc: We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions.
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...
> We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions.
> Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment.
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.
Are all your comments this abrasive and obtuse? Obviously chucking a million at every grad student every year to do whatever they feel like is poor financial decision making. If the university is funding the research, they can retain the IP and reap the financial benefits. It’s a private for-profit organization. Endowment aside, they have hundreds of millions in surplus operating income. What do they need public funds for?
The article is politely calling out the effects of the current regime in Washington and indicating that the government is finding other ways to not give funding to schools they don’t like.
I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.
MIT started it. They cancelled Dorian Abbot in 2021.
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.
>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!
See, you are in “not even wrong” territory. This is like someone planning a green cheese mining mission to the moon.
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.
> 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.
Presumably that you'd have to be white as driven snow and have a Confederate-flag carrying Jesus holding an assault rifle tattooed on you to avoid ending up in a detention center awaiting deportation to some foreign hellhole prison.
Why? The point was made very clearly; everyone who is in academia or research knows. People who are unaware or uninterested will move on and not be affected.
Academia is about to go through a generational reset. The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long.
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.
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.
Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks).
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.
I am looking at your link and thinking I took crazy pills.
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%)
I don't see why a shift from 23% to 34% should produce a qualitatively different result.
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’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle.
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.
This is not true. Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports. They need police, so angry people don't buy rockets and shoot their planes down.
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?
> Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports.
> 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.
Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death.
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.
Perhaps you could clarify your view. Here is my understanding:
* 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.
I agree with you to some point. I just wouldn't frame it in a Marxist way, working class vs. everyone else. It concerns nearly everyone, not just the working class. Limiting it to the working class, excludes many influential people who are more wealthy, far away from being billionaires, but still suffer from the current developments.
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.
Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc.
I had no idea the on-going costs of physical things did not decrease over time, what an interesting thing to know. Here I thought that after you build the building and paid off the building, then for funsies also bought all the land surrounding the building, that at some point it would drastically cheaper to maintain it; but what you're saying makes so much sense!
Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.
What fantasy world do you live in? I want to be there, the world I'm everything granted to the public is always under constant attack and threatened to be destroyed and their proponents destroy and their benefactors humiliated.
Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.
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.
This is about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
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 about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
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.
Departments base grad school admissions on grant awards. The article states: grant awards for MIT went down more than 20%, then new MIT grad students went down 20%. The decrease in students has nothing to do with academia being detached from industry.
It's simple. The US used to be the most desirable place for immigrants and the US higher education system used to be the envy of the world and now for both of these it is not any more. A reset was always inevitable.
> The US used to be the most desirable place for immigrants and the US higher education system used to be the envy of the world and now for both of these it is not any more.
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.
I don’t know what you’re talking about but both of those are definitely still true. It’s just that this administration is trying to stop the first from happening.
> bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
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.
>> The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long.
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.
My favorite idea is to tie student loans and grants not to the individual per say, but rather their choice of institution and study. For example, a student going to MIT for a hard, well-paying science career should be able to access more capital at a better rate than someone attending a party school to major in a lower-paying humanities field. Some have taken the current state of things to imply a failure of capitalism - when in fact what we are seeing is a distortion by non-capitalist principals. When you subsidize without regard for investment risk you skew the incentive structure. As it stands the optimum result is generated by maximizing enrollment and changing whatever additional sum a student can pay on top of what the government provides. Since it doesn't matter what they major in, or what the institutional quality is, the market adapts accordingly. By attaching student loan quantities and qualities to both the major and institution, we ensure equal access to the individual but leave market incentives to ensure quality. The break down in academic quality and corresponding labor market corrections is entirely predicated on institutional optimization through misalignments in subsidization. You can still make the system fair to individuals from non-traditional backgrounds without making it equal. I would argue that you can even do more to increase equitability to historically marginalized groups once you decouple from the 'flat rate' approach. The system is broken because we broke it. The solution is not to continue down the path of misaligned incentives but rather make sure the incentives are properly considered.
This has been tried multiple times actually via ISAs and other instruments. Immediately inverts to adverse selection - eg the students who are going for a more lucrative option don't want to participate.
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.
Not really relevant to this article, which is about graduate students in research programs, who get a stipend and don't pay anything. Of course, low stipends are also a big detractor for potential students
Education yes, research unfortunately no. I'm not saying research outside of academia is not possible, I'm just saying it's not taken seriously and this needs to change. We really do need to go back to the 19th century model of the researcher gentleman.
A real shock to academia is that top research increasingly takes place outside universities. On many areas universities are now 5-10 years behind what’s happening in the private sector. That’s causing a lot of panic within the system and a growing stream of departures as PhDs favor the private sector over academic tracts.
A few years ago, when I was actively involved with the academic world, I came to a similar realization. They're trying to do too many things at once. Universities need to acknowledge this reality and adjust.
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."
This just kind of sounds like a random idea that sounds good in your head but not based in reality; the point of a PhD has always been one thing, and one thing alone: train someone who can publish influential papers in top-tier venues.
Anyone who says otherwise is just either uninformed or selling a dream.
I've seen the ins-and-outs of academia within an R1 research institution from about as top-level as one can while remaining a student, and my idea is based on extensive interface with the reality of academia.
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.
That is how it should be, and how it has historically been.
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.
Research is usually a collaborative effort nowadays. You’d need a League of Research Gentlemen. Not to mention that an important number of research fields require expensive research labs/equipment.
I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.
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.
China does have some top-tier unis but only a handful: Tsinghua, Beida (Peking), Fudan, Zhejiang, Renmin (humanities mostly), Hangzhou -- maybe a couple of others if you squint hard enough
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
Conventional wisdom always used to be that China would never compete with the US because they were rote learners and we were more creative. I'd say that is no longer the case. China has been doing a LOT of interesting things. I joke with my son that given the state of the US lately, I'd almost rather move to China.
Whereas in China, and in a lot of other countries around the world, when they talk about moving to the US they are completely serious about it. They are actually highly concerned with what specific options they have for getting some kind of visa to the United States, they are genuinely upset with the recent US policy changes that have made it harder for foreigners to get such visas.
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.
Best thing about the word "arguably" it's not a hard fact either way.
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 ?
What are some of the Chinese colleges worth paying attention to?
Is most of the AI research coming from these colleges or are they primarily from private labs?
CSrankings.org is a (flawed for sure, but still) ranking of the research output of various graduate institutions. China has 3 of the top 10 ranked universities according to this ranking.
The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.
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.
> Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves
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.)
We need to finish Reconstruction. That sounds idealistic, even pie in the sky unrealistic. But we could certainly measure progress in that direction: US incarceration rates are insanely high, and the prison industrial complex is modern slavery. We would know victory when we put fewer people in prison than China, for example.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Are you equating sone teenage students shouting during a conference by some bozo on tour with every middle-aged political representatives from a single party rewriting the law to kneecap the fundamental civil rights of a third of their population?
The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
But supporting industry of coal mining/coal power plants gets money to tilt or buy senators and their votes - college students are too sparsely distributed to have an equivalent effect in USA. It only took one senator to give us an completely unregulated supplements industry.
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.
There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.
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.
They might struggle understanding why the decision-makers were elected, though maybe not even that. It’s well-documented why the decisions are being made. Decisions being bad doesn’t mean that they aren’t perfectly explainable.
Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.
Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
What if the electorate is so stupid that what appeals to them is ruinous?
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?
Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc.
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.
> 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"
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.
I think there is a shortage of would-be leaders like that though, that's the problem. Or at least would be leaders that gained any real traction. The only other one in the past decade was Bernie.
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.
> 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
Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
> 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.
It seems pretty cut and dry to me: Boomers I know today still rave about Regan-era policies and how good they were for everyone, although I'm not sure what "everyone" they are referring to in that sentence. Regan-era deregulation, cutting of social spending, and favoring asset-based versus wage based economic growth certainly laid the groundwork for where we are with today's K-shaped economy.
There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results:
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.
re:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist
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".
Actually a much better and easier solution to gerrymandering would be to increase the number of House representatives to be the same proportion of population it was in 1776. There will be roughly 15,000 representatives in the House. Gerrymander that!!!
1. That doesn't solve the Senate problem. The Supreme Court has failed to uphold the 10th amendment and we should stop pretending we're actually 55 mini countries.
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.
We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections.
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.
> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance.
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.
Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
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.
It's First Pass the Post that causes that. We have maybe 30% is the population that wants guns highly restricted and a different 30% that wants abortions highly restricted. We have something like 52% that want Medicare4All. But we just seesaw between gun grabber and pussy grabber because those M4A aren't the majority of either party primary.
MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
I lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi.
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, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.
You know, we can blame China (another country I've lived in) all we want for our problems, and China definitely blames the US for a lot of its problems...but at the end of the day, the Chinese and the USA don't really have to care what the others think about them.
i'm from there and there are so many people trying to fix it. somehow you lived there so long and didn't realize this fact, bless your heart. (this is helping prove my point btw)
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.
How is it condescending to say that Mississippi should just do its own thing and we don't have to bother ourselves with their choices? I feel like we are in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. Whatever we say, or even if we say nothing, will be seen in Mississippi as being condescended to. Just us existing is seen as condescended. This is why we should just give up, we do our thing and they do their thing, if Mississippi is still offended by our existence, we can just ignore them.
So? How's that any different than everyone in Buffalo just having to bend over and take it because NYC and Albany want to do spreadsheets and services instead of factories?
I mean it'd be less divided insofar as the minority would be more thoroughly subjugated by the state. No pesky federal government getting in the way. Though that's probably not a good thing.
You mean Southerners like me in Virginia who are actually doing that “fighting” and it’s making absolutely no difference whatsoever
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
further, California is a big state. For the concept to work you'd have to split California lengthwise, the Western 1/3 would align politically how the op is assuming but the Eastern 2/3 would not. If the counter argument is majority rule then you're pretty much back to where you started with a divided population and 2 wolves + 1 lamb voting on lunch.
There will still be liberals in a new confederacy, and there will still be conservatives in a new union, we are only really talking about changing 50/50 into 60/40 on either side. BUT let's face it, our current equilibrium is not sustainable, this country can't survive another Trump, let alone the current one. Trump is talking about disenfranchising voters in blue states (because we must be cheating or we are illegal immigrants or something), I feel like that if we continue to union with these states, I will just wake up with a knife in my back someday.
Democracy works, we just have bad partners right now.
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.
It's a tempting thought but play it out. Now you live next to a belligerent fascist theocracy with nukes who likes to invade foreign countries and aspires to control the entire western hemisphere from Canada to Chile. How does that end?
> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic
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.
This is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three.
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.
Probably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing.
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?
To clarify, you agree that the Trump admin / MAGA political movement isn't fascism and his election wasn't an overthrow of democracy? Your earlier remarks were just a thought experiment? That isn't really the sense I've gotten from your historical comments.
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.
Isn't that basically what a constitution is for? A constitutional monarchy limits the power of the king, and a constitutional democracy limits the power of the elected government?
It's mostly inaccurate to characterize large groups by their minority fringe members. (I don't like Trump, MAGA, or January 6ers either, FWIW. But it's important to speak about this stuff truthfully.)
It's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population.
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.
> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population
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.
are there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
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.
Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
Whether to help an existing accomplished researcher change address because their home country is not an option, is not similar to the question of whether to educate chinese students who plan to return home.
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.
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.
I think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
Brain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.
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.
It’s brain drain from other countries, especially China. The pipeline was simple: go to a mid tier Chinese university for undergraduate studies, get a masters or PhD from an American university, be advantaged in H1B due to this graduate degree, get a green card and settle permanently. That’s the brain drain. This pipeline has slowed down massively.
They are saying the opposite. People have been coming to America for higher education and staying here and that has historically benefited the US. And that seems to be changing.
I would say there was a brain drain from Iran to the US but I've also heard it used as a transitive verb. I think if there is a clear place talent is moving it's useful to specify it (and fwiw it doesn't sound weird to my ear).
Every prestigious (STEM) college I’m aware of, a large ratio of graduate students and professors are foreign.
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.
I'm amazed at how many of the respondents in this HN thread aren't discussing the super-mega-seismic externalities laid upon universities by the current administration. Universities always have issues, but there's an orange elephant in the room.
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.
If you look at most decent engineering universities, are they any different if you restrict to engineering/science departments? I don't have statistics, but when I was in grad school, the mini-institute I was part of (5-6 faculty members + students) had more than 70% foreigners. And I think all the non-foreigners were born abroad (whether Green Card or US citizen).
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
Would be nice to see if this number dipped from before. International students typically end up paying out of station tuition and is a huge source of income for the univs.
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
That is much less true of grad programs in technical fields. Undergrad, international students are indeed more likely to pay full-boat--or at least larger boat--than US applicants.
The real problem is we make it too hard for international researchers to stay here. These high end student visas should have strong paths to permanent residence - maybe even an expectation
This was a relatively widespread opinion 20 years ago. I had Roy Blunt, Republican senator from Missouri at the time, come to talk to us, telling us that he thought a science Ph.D should come with a green card stapled to it. But the politics of immigration never let small bills through, as people wanted bigger ones, and the bigger ones always had things that would risk filibusters.
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.
Well the popular argument is that it takes so long to pass any kind of bill that smaller bills would just mean more bills and a bigger backlog. I don't really buy that.
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.
Yes; it wouldn't take so long if bills were simple, straightforward and easy to understand. Instead they're rubberband balls of horse traded, full of items that as you said someone has tried to 'sneak' in.
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.
You have to be careful. These student-to-resident visa programs end up being used by "students" who really just want a visa. And then the "educators" turn into toll collectors who are accepting "tuition" in exchange for visa access.
Not sure this distinction matters in practice. Either way you're creating an economic incentive to go through the motions of "studying" at a university.
This is the case. A friend, born outside of the US, who is a researcher at Harvard is now looking at options outside of the US due to their visa being about to expire and it not looking like it will get extended.
They are looking at alternatives in Europe instead.
I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.
I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly.
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):
I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading.
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.
He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.
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.
How it would actually work is only the best schools would keep their funding while lower tier schools would be shut out entirely and be forced to severely reduce their research agendas. There's a school near me that just went from College to University status because they grew their graduate program enough, they would probably not weather the storm the same as MIT.
On a system's level, that's probably the desired outcome in a world where total science funding is shrinking and fewer people can be employed as scientists.
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.
Capitalism handles this problem well because a dysfunctional company can be replaced by a nimble startup.
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.
Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations.
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.
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.
Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?
I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete.
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).
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.
Most universities subsidize their undergraduate program using graduate and professional degrees. And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs. Yes, even at elite universities.
It's true that master's degree programs and professional degrees help subsidize undergraduate degrees, and that's a good thing for several reasons. First, it brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to local communities to help educate Americans. Second, it creates lasting bonds between America and the peoples of foreign nations; either the students learn and stay here to create value in America, or they go back home and bring with them American values and (hopefully if the program did their job right) a good view of Americans and America. If the only things we export are bombs and war, that reflects poorly on us as a country. Third, it means that when the world's top talent aspires to come to America rather than some other country for their education. Fourth, their presence in a local community creates demand for services and goods, and the fact there is constant churn creates enough sustained demand to support local economies in remote areas.
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.
That's an interpretation, not a fact. And “glorified immigration program” is not a neutral factual label because it implies the educational function is mostly pretextual. I can understand your perspective, but please stop pretending to me that you're simply making factual statements and not a value judgement.
It is pretextual for a lot of foreign students, I don't know how anyone can deny that in good faith. Its definitely not a value judgements because I never said whether it's a good or bad thing on net. Sometimes good things have to be smuggled through a pretext.
"pretextual for a lot of foreign students" means something very different from "these degrees are often glorified immigration programs", which is how you entered the discussion. Can you at least admit that if you're here in good faith?
Yes I'll admit that these statements imply different things. But I maintain that advanced degrees at American universities are functionally an immigration program and that this is unspoken yet by design
Unless I'm missing something, the linked article from MIT is about more than graduate students. That article talks about how changes introduced in 2025 are causing taxation on budgets that (as far as I can tell) affect all students.
The prior poster is making the case that might not be a bad thing, but its not just graduate students
Investing in educated population in future is investment in given society itself. Triple that for US where most folks remain in adulthood, so brain drain aint an issue. State/society would get those money 10x back easily.
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.
Unfortunately, when you try to starve the beast, it's the essential functions that get slashed instead of the leadership and adminstrative apparatus. The animal is harmed further while the parasite intercepts the generated value.
We have never seen a presidential administration misunderstand soft power so badly.
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.
Jm2c, but I really don't believe the "top educators" argument.
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.
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.
> Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world.
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.
Yes and no, it depends on the program. I definitely agree when you get to choose your students it's a lot easier. But as far as course content, maybe not chemistry or calculus, but for capital-intense programs like robotics definitely. At CMU, there was a class students could take where each group gets to use a $15k humanoid robot (Aldebaran Nao) for the semester. When you take a class on super computing there, you get terminal access to a super computing cluster for your homework assignments. That's just not something you get at every school.
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.
You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.
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.
> 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.
If we are talking about a no-immigrant law, the whole United States would be deeply impacted. The US would have a negative net population growth without immigration. That would mean institutions of all types are going to contract in size and start closing down and consolidating. Your local schools, libraries, police stations, road maintenance departments, etc.
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.
Obviously there is a selection effect that confounds any causal comparisons between those who do and do not get into MIT. But the better counterfactual is students who are accepted but do not attend. A diff-in-diff study with these two groups would be a better test. There are unique features of MIT: more money, elite network, etc. I do share your skepticism though - I've worked w/ MIT people before. I think they are very smart but also very lucky.
“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.
There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.
Master's programs in Europe are commonly the pathway/requirement to applying for a PhD position. This supports why they might be commonplace there, but it also means the same reason would not justify the master's only programs in the US in the same way.
In many places, there is a distinction between "master's through research" (a gateway to PhD) and "master's through study" (more coursework, less independent research, a gateway to r-n-d-level positions in the industry).
Yeah but as a European I think we took the wrong route. I am from Italy, and until 2001 we had 5 years undergraduate programs only. We then chose to do 3 + 2, but we should have gone with 4 + 1 years instead.
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
But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).
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.
> “Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.
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?
Granted that Academia is very exploitative. My wife is a Post-doc, so I hear these extremely heart breaking stories of how professors have all the power when it comes to graduate students and post docs. But this drop in graduate students is not because of that - this drop is purely because of funding cuts and the AI hype. Why would humans wanna go through a Phd when you have industry leaders harking about how AI is going to do original science, when the political leaders of the country wanna cut funding for basic science research. On a slightly different note, China increased funding for the basic science research. This is peak of "how to shoot yourself in the foot".
Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.
I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
Exactly this, it's hilarious seeing the reasoning ITT and elsewhere that we need unlimited foreign immigration to possibly keep stride with China, a country with extremely strict immigration opportunities and as a result, much better cultural cohesion.
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 I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really.
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.
Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.
Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.
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.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
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.
Most of Europe is behind because the money there has dried up. (Except for Norway)
> 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.
If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.
Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.
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.
This is exactly right, the massive benefits of sticking a bunch of people with very abstruse interests close together is basically impossible to replicate. Labs, where people interact with each other daily and every week, where there's in-person exchange and chance encounters, is pretty difficult to simulate even with chat like IRC or forums or social media.
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.
Is open research a weapon? I think there are many more things the US spends its money on that could be argued to be weapons, much more convincingly than publicly accessible research.
Talent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.
And neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)
History is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.
I wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.
That's very funny because up until very recently there was very little competition because one nation was dominating research using talents from other countries. Consider it as a weakening of a monopoly
I don't think you've ever worked in academia or research.
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.
No this is not good for the World in case you have forgotten America is part of the world and though I hate what is happening just as much as anyone I will work to make this nation better. We are in a tough time and I genuinely do not know if things will get better but we will try.
"due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools"
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.
Respectfully, comparing a janitor's 401k to a $27.4 billion endowment is (very) tone deaf.
But yes, the tax goes against "keeping sacred systems sacred" principles and is an opinionated policy against rich entities that the current administration dislikes.
> Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone.
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.
Having polities to look at promoting regional diversity, equity between regions, and making sure all regions are included, instead of only one axis of "merit", in awarding research funds, is literally DEI.
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.
I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.
But you and I and everyone else here knows about MIT and can probably list a few major breakthroughs that came out of MIT... what's the name of your major public research university?
Since this is the first comment that emphasizes research which most are conflating with graduate school in general. I think that is the salient effect of the funding cut, which affects research (PhDs) more than cash cow coursework programs such as Masters, MBAs, and JDs. Most are forgetting that US global position Post-WWII comes primarily from basic research -> applied research pipeline; Silicon Valley alone did not endow us with the internet, satellite, rockets, etc.
In STEM, federal grants pay for almost all US PhD students. And the tuition they would charge would never have covered the actual cost. It has always depended on research grants. Which makes sense, a PhD is mostly and apprenticeship in how to do cutting edge research.
The article mentions that a major factor in technical grad school is research funding. Most grad students in engineering, for example, don't pay tuition themselves. They work for a pittance and receive tuition as a benefit.
Schools like MIT pay PhD students barely above or sometimes below the poverty level of that particular state as monthly stipend. Yeah, research funding got slashed but if they had the will they could have come up with the money for that 20%.
My spouse was a PhD student at MIT, graduated in 2022. He was getting paid $58k a year when he left. Not an extravagant living in the Boston area, but not bad. On top of that is amazing benefits.
I'm sure it varies by department? Well I'm not sure, I assume...
Here’s one problem - the DOE’s Genesis Mission referenced in the transcript has nothing earmarked in its 20 line-items for solar/wind/batteries/UHV grids! You want to work in that area, you have to leave the USA. Looks like fluff, but that’s been DOE for many years - captured by entrenched finance and industry, not looking to upset the apple cart.
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.
My partner recently applied to quite a few extremely prestigious graduate programs. We're not married and she made $16,000 dollars last year. She's won several national competitions in her field. The main deciding factor for her final choice was the price. It's just not worth it to go into six figures or more worth of debt for a degree.
>I just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrug
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.
Only a 10% budget cut? Should have been way more. I hear victimization throughout the article. It was the school's choice to focus on politicizing and prioritizing foreigners, and looking as "accepting" as possible, rather than educating and funding our citizens which is what matters.
It is mainly because of federal funding cuts that departments accept fewer students as written in the actual text. But I might add that the changes of immigration and the changes in foreign policy might played a rule. There are no mention of AI at all.
"Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone." DEI by another name?
I read this as saying that MIT is becoming less competitive? Means if you just finished your BS, applying to a PhD program at MIT may be a 20% better bet than before, especially with the job market in its current condition…
It would actually be _more_ competitive, because what's driving the reduction in admissions is uncertainty in grant/funding availability.
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.
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.
I work in a large public university system and we are also seeing enrollment drops across campuses. We are also seeing declines in enrollment in the K-12 education too.
Fewer graduate students is a good thing. Academia produces WAY too many graduate students relative to the jobs available (in aggregate, some fields it's more of a problem than others). It's good for the PIs (professors in charge of a group) to have lots of graduate students, but as a whole that means most of them will not get a job...
As someone who is continuing graduate level education and explored programs from MIT, I find that the major deciding factor to be the administration's willingness to censor pro-Palestinian activity. I don't think it's worth all the time and money at that point. I'm not going to spend all those resources to get a zionist education.
Speaking from the academic sector if they're all able to meet ALL of the admissions criteria there would be no justification their presence, they would be in demand.
The sad reality is given the unrealistic expansion of the education sector they were clearly admitting people who needed to justify being there...
In the last 25-50 years the universities pivoted from providing an education to focusing on research and viewing students as pesky legacy, whose education is delegated to grad students. Even at large public universities, very few tenured professors teach anything except grad and senior level undergrad classes. The contracts are scoped for minimal teaching load.
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.
This is what happens when you model education like factories and have it be a product rather than a basic human right, it needs to sell and it needs ROI for shareholders.
Many PHD programs might best be described as cults:
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
... despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It is ironic that some of the brightest people ignore the data.
Did people even read the article? Endowment taxes make sense - 1.4% taxes on investment vehicles in the billions just do not make sense. Then the president masquerades enrollment by ignoring the ~4% bump for Sloan (and EECS). Grants / funding though is a different story and worth mentioning/discussing...
The speech makes a lot of arguments. It argues against the endowment tax, which seems politically deaf. But it also cites research-funding cuts (both legal and illegal).
> 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.
> For more than a year, we’ve all worked on responding to extraordinary new and sustained pressures on our budget (due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools)
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.
Yeah. It's called brain drain. Talent has options. It weighs pros and cons. When the relative attraction of a country and thus institutions within it drops, they choose to go there less.
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.
Note that MIT carefully avoided identifying one of the root causes of this - the so called "Genesis" program that replaces all traditional, peer-reviewed national science funding programs with a half-baked GenAI drivel-fest with no clear application guidelines, a 6-week application timeline, and rules that funnel half of a now diminished national research funding pool to corporations that bribed the Trump administration.
If you're stuck in the US for practical reason, it might be time to start pretending to be dumb. When there's no more immigrants to threaten with deportation, if they don't help the government build the machines of control, they will start forcing anyone with a hint of intelligence to do the work.
Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs
Can you back that up with.... you know... evidence? "regulation bad" tends to be a political talking point more than a valid argument when you're this vague.
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.
You should be able to open up shop as a doctor or lawyer or engineer without any degree (!) in a free market, or spin up a school if you want
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
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.
We are in the "Bust" phase of the STEM Crisis Myth[0]
> [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.
Except for 8% tax on endowment returns, that sounds fair to me, no?
US universities got it very cozy: federal subsidies, admission income, donations, AND investment income. Like Harvard buying very expensive vineyard land (in Napa valley California) using excess cash.
Very few people are paying their way to MIT's graduate programs, so it's not as if it's a matter of AI scaring people into not paying for expensive education or anything. Graduate programs are full of international students that used them as ways to enter the US job market. With that road getting harder for a variety of policy decisions, there's just less reasons to consider it.
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.
The same as it was before AI. AI is a bubble which isn't going to fundamentally change anything about society, because the tech simply does not do what is promised. Eventually, CEOs will stop being able to deny reality and AI will crash and burn.
Academia is fundamentally in for a long and unstoppable decline due to population changes and birth rates.
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)
For the past decade or longer, top PhD programs in the US have systematically favored foreign applicants over Americans, particularly American men. It's high time for that to end.
I’m not so sure about it being a waste of money. I got an almost full ride 15 years ago because of their generous financial aid program, that had only expanded. And time? Are all college programs a waste of time in your opinion, because of AI?
This is actually good news for society as a whole. There are way too many people who spend time in grad school only to discover that society doesn't have a job for them. Yes, it's not nice for the people who don't get in, but there's been way too much overproduction.
This is certainly true for 80% of universities and degrees. Even most bachelors degrees in my opinion. But if I’m being fair, maybe that’s not as true of places like MIT that teach tough and much more in-demand skills compared to universities where most students are studying things there is no demand for, and paying $150,000 or more for the privilege.
this might be true, but certainly isn't/shouldn't be true for MIT graduates. if you own a business of any kind, hiring an MIT grad is basically never a bad decision.
yeah are you saying society does not have a job for an MIT graduate ? this is mistaken let them learn don't worry they'll find a job thank you for thinking about the job prospects for them since you know better than someone who got admitted to graduate school.
I don't know or care what your opinion is (but by now my eye-rolling muscles are becoming ripped from the ever-conflicting ideological epithets that get hurled at us by people who seem affronted that there are standards of conduct that apply to them regardless of their “side”).
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.
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. 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. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. I can see how undergrads may look at how AI can do most of their homework assignments, and see how miserable grad students are, and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.
I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD?
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.
Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science...
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.
Taking a longer time to graduate to become the “world expert” in their field is fine if grad students weren’t paid next to nothing for the 60+ hours a week that they are expected to work. As it is now it’s better to finish as quickly as possible so they can have a real life.
To make "next to nothing" concrete: MIT EECS PhD students are currently paid about $4700/mo. This is substantially less than they'd make in industry, but it's around the US median personal income across all working-age adults, and well above the average 24 year-old. They frequently make a substantial extra at summer internships, putting them well above US median in the years when they do.
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.
You're looking at students at a top tier university in a field that pays extremely well. The numbers are going to be at the high end for what a grad student can make. A quick search for PhD salaries suggests that $20-35k/year is more common.
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.
That's MIT. At a state university my friends were making in the ballpark of ~30k.
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.
It's 56k a year for 6 years?
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.
Is that $4700/mo net pay? Or do they have to pay tuition fees out of that?
If you're paying tuition for your PhD, you're getting scammed.
Is this true for arts and letters as well (non-STEM)?
Generally speaking PhD students do not pay tuition, they are given a stipend and so there are no tuition fees.
What's the cost of living in that area?
High inside Boston city limits, but not as crazy as Manhattan (NYC).
As someone who graduated with a 7.5 year long PhD last month,
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.
It's great that you recognize that the last 1.5 years were the period you feel like you did things to justify that bill. However, much like juniors everywhere, you justify all of your pay because we are not paying you for your skill at that moment, but for who you will become.
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.
I worked a ton in grad school, and it definitely sucked at the time.
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!
It’s not crazy… the wages are below food prep. What would be crazy is paying to help someone else’s career. That’s why a well known rule of thumb for graduate program evaluation is whether or not they pay their grad students.
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.
I was working retail in Eugene, Oregon during the 2014 University of Oregon grad student strike. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because I was working retail with a master's degree in physics (because I did not have the endurance to complete a PhD, but had not yet accepted that fact).
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.
It would be crazy if the university were getting nothing out of it, but your work as a PhD student benefits not only you but the university as a whole. I think it would be reasonable to give students a living wage. I don't think anyone is expecting to make 100k.
I think the key difference is that: "going to school", sure you need a living stipend, but the actual research phase has serious WLB and working condition issues
Most applicants know that that outcome is antithetical to pursuing a PhD. It's common knowledge that a PhD involves 5-7 years of academic work (read: low pay) in pursuit of becoming an expert in a specialized topic. You don't enter a PhD program expecting to immediately make money or to graduate as soon as possible. It's not a coding bootcamp.
I agree with you. It is definitely what the PhD student signed up for. But like I said in a sibling reply I think if we are worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that we should be), then we may need to change the incentive structure surrounding the PhD programs to make it more worthwhile for people to invest the time and energy. Because how it is currently going it seems to me like fewer and fewer people are going to consider it worth the investment just for the credential alone.
re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.
Football and other sports are marketing and their wages should be paid for by that department. Along with proof the marketing return on investment is there.
Grad students should be paid for their work as well.
Isn’t this sort of how all terminal degrees work? MDs, JDs, etc are all putting the candidates through the wringer, for relatively low wages, until they’re “experienced”. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s common knowledge it’s the way things work if you want to have those magic letters of a terminal degree next to your name in your email signature.
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.
In the US, phds and professional degrees are more or less geared toward students who are comfortable enough financially to stomach the opportunity cost of 6-10+ years of additional education, unpaid or underpaid residencies and internships, and long apprenticeship hours (which prevent backfilling financial gaps) before making “real” income.
Can I ask why this is getting downvoted?
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 don't know that people even care, at that. The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system, a doctor is just a nurse in a white coat who's also a bit of an asshole (aloof and/or smarmy). Especially when they misdiagnose or miss a diagnoses.
>a doctor is just a nurse in a white coat
plus 10-15k hours of school, residency, etc give-or-take. Let's give credit where it's due.
>The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system
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.
*diagnosis
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.
JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think.
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.
A JD is most definitely a terminal degree.
If you need a source; here is one: https://fulbrightscholars.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/US...
That’s arguable.
“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.
That's strange, I was just asking Claude to write a motion for me earlier, and I've never even taken the LSAT.
Masters in Law so you can…pontificate about the law?
Yes, but I think as time goes on, fewer and fewer people are going to consider those letters next to their name worth it for the years that they need to invest. So, I am just saying that if MIT or whoever else is worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that they/we should be), then maybe it's time to change how it works.
everything points to money
>but it's not really good for your career
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?
He appears to be tunnel-visioning on academia.
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...
The goal of a PhD is to become a world expert in a specific topic, whether or not you’re planning on staying in academia.
This may or may not be in alignment with the student’s goals, and many students don’t really understand it going in.
Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout.
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.
> Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout.
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.
>is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare)
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]
[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26312
PhD programs have remarkably high attrition rates prior to graduation (ie dropout). I don't know that it's 50% and obviously it varies by institution and field but it's quite large.
>In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K
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.
You’re arguing that we have too many PhD students in CS, not too few.
I agree with you fwiw.
A research professor typically graduates dozens of PhD students. Perhaps there was a post-war bootstrapping period where every one of those students got a tenured position somewhere, and in turn also trained dozens of PhD students; but it's pretty obvious it's not realistic to expect this to continue indefinitely. We're way past saturation right now. Certainly very few are going to get their own tenured positions, and as for the rest, it depends on the winds of funding availability in industry.
A very US-centric perspective. Whereas the folks in Europe do it in 3-4 years, come to the US and do a 2-3 year postdoc (with higher pay than a PhD student), and are ahead of their American peers.
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.
> A very US-centric perspective. Whereas the folks in Europe do it in 3-4 years
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.
With 2 years master's before for the same total?
A US thing again? My friends all did 3 year bachelors, 3 year PhD. Some dragged out the PhD to 4. Those who do a masters do it in one year, and typically don't do a PhD. Some undergrad courses are 4 year and you get a masters at the end. And my UK bachelors was recognized as equivalent to a US masters degree for visa purposes.
Maybe this is CS-specific? Finishing physics PhD from high school in 6 years sounds just not enough time. Even exceptional people I know in my field needed at least 7-8 (3+4 or 3+2+3). 3 years into theoretical physics grad school is around the time people start doing decent research
It's common, most of the people I know from the UK system did their PhD in 3-4 years.
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 did none of my degrees in US, and my physics degree was 95% math and physics. Physics degree is quite sequential anyway. You can't do QM in your first year or QFT in your second year.
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.
Maybe things have changed. We did QM in our first year at Imperial. I suppose we have to make allowances for Oxford. Got to fit the poetry in somewhere. =)
Obvious disclaimer: At this point we are talking about outlier colleges/universities.
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.
I have three friends with Physics PhDs from Imperial and Cambridge and they did it in three years. That is/was the norm.
Yeah 3 - 4 is typical in STEM at Imperial, depends on the scholarship or funding source. The standard funding tends to assume 3 - 3.5 years, but I vaguely recall that in some departments supervisors had a habit of forcing people to stick around for a few months without funding.
In the UK I started a (3 year) PhD program without a Masters. It was not untypical.
Varies from place to place.
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.
I agree with all those things, but we should be starting that training in middle school. Deconstructing arguments, making reports, giving presentations, solving open ended questions. Many of these things involve a modest amount of critical thinking, prediction and self-reflection.
Are those PhDs being paid with a decent salary? If not, I can’t agree with your statement. PS. I did my PhD in an EU country where it’s treated as another researcher job with salary and benefits
PhD candidates in the US usually get somewhere between $25K and $50K stipend, also some level of benefits (typically health care). Sometimes there is a tuition waiver (student does not need to pay grad program tuition).
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).
Wait, some PhD candidates are being paid near minimum wage and are still paying their university to do work for their university?
That just sounds like indentured servitude with extra steps.
Yes, I suppose you could try to justify it as "this is the price you pay for having the freedom to build your own research plan in the future" ("maximizing your future freedom") but in reality, this just sets you up for more of the same- getting a faculty position (pre-tenure) with a low salary, and immense pressure to bring in funds via research grants/publish papers.
I eventually tired of the process and moved to industry because the struggle wasn't worth it.
PhD students paying tuition would be highly unusual.
In STEM fields, yes. In humanities it’s not uncommon.
No it's typical. It's just that your stipend is usually just x amount of Dollars + whatever tuition is so you never have to care what it is and you don't pay it directly per se, it's just included in your stipend. Someone pays for it at the end of the day though.
Yeah, I distinctionly remember a postdoc I knew who was irrationally excited to move to a role where they were going to get paid $35k, in 2010s money, and they were damn excited about it. And they were moving to a high cost of living area (from a high cost of living area). I was utterly flabbergasted because they were very smart, very technical and should have been earning 5-10x that. I feel like they didn't know what they were worth and academia had utterly failed to teach them that.
I don't know how they paid any of their accumulated (I assume) student debt, let alone had an even decent standard of living.
In France STEM PhD are expected to last 3 year and the funding is sized like that. It is also considered as a job. It is only done if salary is funded in most cases.
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
It’s also a set of credentials, which might be immediately useful for one reason or other. All those other things you can do outside of a program, especially if you’ve already got the network or career trajectory to support it.
>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.
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.
I agree that completing a PhD under the time originally agreed may not be good, as you lose some of the learning opportunities that come with the apprenticeship (yes, it is) program.
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.
All of the things you mention can also be done as a PostDoc. Which might be even better for social networking, broadening your research portfolio, etc. than staying in a single PhD position for the duration of a PhD + PostDoc.
> Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career.
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".
As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.
This seems to be how many PhD programs go. Almost all want to quit in the last couple years despite the time invested already. Few want to stay in academia, because they have been abused and used and realize that the same would happened if they try to earn tenure.
I am one of those guys. I left for a big tech job even though doing research to push the boundaries of human knowledge was my dream. I know, a cliche, but I was a 20 something year old at the time.
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.
R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis was a fun look at the hell that is graduate school told through a fantasy lens. That paired with the McSweeney’s snake fight article should be essential reading for all would-be grad students.
This one? https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-port...
Those are typically skills a starting scientist needs to learn. At the same time, sometimes it does feel abusive especially if the student doesn't get some sort of credit for doing the peer review and talk prep.
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.
yeah I do feel like the PhD system is not uniform in terms of students’ experiences. some get out quite quickly if their advisor is chill while others are stuck being stack ranked in their labs or doing grunt work. your fate is basically in the hands of your advisor..
Which is why you should shop for the advisor and then tailor yourself to the labs you want to apply to. Interview current and former students. Go to conferences where that lab is presenting papers, etc. Have some solid blue collar academic skills like cleaning data, doing instrumentation, hell even making bad ass slide decks will get you noticed. Getting a PhD is similar to landing the job you want. Also showing up with a problem you want to solve that aligns with the lab AND the skills to pull it off, boom!
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.
there are two types of people in post-grad academia. those who are interested in advancing knowledge, and those who are interested in advancing their career. i've worked with many phds who were completely useless - they understood how to work for a career minded advisor because they were career minded themselves. those were their skills: doing what they were told, kowtowing, reading other people's work and talking about it as if they understand it. generating and iterating ideas at the pace required for business? non-existent to the point of appearing mentally incompetent. i'd go so far as to say that the office politics involved in academia is antithetical to knowledge creation. i've also worked with phds who were absolute creating geniuses, but I've worked with even more who didn't do a phd or who quit their phd to focus on commericalizing an idea.
My PhD advisor found out that my English writing skills are quite good and the rest of their lab were Chinese internationals, so they started making me write all of their research grants. 30 pages every 2 months, pre-ChatGPT days.
Just sharing another story:
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.
I've graduated many PhD students at a top tier university. That advisor was correct. What they were doing is teaching their PhD student.
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 insanity. Then let them learn by advancing their own goals, not the goals of their exploiter. I won’t even call it advising because it clearly is not as you yourself admit.
I decided not to get a PhD against the wishes of my professors and family members because I felt the opportunity cost was too high. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Being amazed at how that's allowed displays a naiveté only one could have if they've never been in the process. What you describe is exactly what being in academia is all about for the last couple generations. Being a grad student sounds prestigious to an outsider, but the system is literally built to exploit their labor.
Sad to think of the kind of impact someone like that could have in private sector had they not pursued the phd.
that's a very weird comment to make. the scope for doing novel work and contributing to the canon is almost always zero. its extremely difficult to maneuver yourself into a position where you're permitted to scribble outside the box at all. and those situations where you are often require having a phd and a track record in doing research.
Reviewing papers, writing papers, these are all part of what grad students do and what they should be doing to learn. They should be getting academic credit for it, however. Your friend sounds like he had an extremely unusual and bad experience, or there's a bit more to the story.
your friend should make a blog post about that. People like that should be exposed.
Not much to expose. Go to any top department in the US, and there will be a handful of them. It's not exactly a secret.
People like what? Bosses whose methods you disagree with?
I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense.
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.
Yes similar, some time back I was in a grad program that I was really interested in and decent at, but by then married and child on the way. My Master's adviser was honest that it's better to just work somewhere vs go down PhD path as I was doing this for the job prospects. The folks who stayed with this were "family-funded" and well to do in their home countries. They basically were doing it for various reasons aside from "I need a job".
I knew a foreign student like that. He was a great guy and a friend, and we worked in the same building. One day, I told him that I purchased a condo to save money during the doctoral program (in my unique situation, my mortgage was less than basically all other grad student's rent, at least those I knew). A little while later, he told me that he also purchased a condo. I asked him about his mortgage rate, and he gave me a puzzled look. His well-off family paid >$250k, cash, for his condo.
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.
> I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile.
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.
> it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.
Where are you seeing remaining constructive academic culture, which parts of which institutions? Thanks.
While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.
Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art? Most people who study and aspire in these fields don't make a sustainable living in it either. It's a tough competition. There's work and luck involved, as well as talent.
I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.
>Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art?
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.
The Teacher's Argument, Fame, 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OVfOJ4Oi0c
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 thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.
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 thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.
> 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...
True if resources are infinite, but they aren't.
Those other fields are ones in which there is a lot of readily-available support to pursue them as hobbies, without going broke or being put on a three-letter-agency list somewhere.
Was also in a similar position around the same time. When I was an undergrad, my two professors told me to stay out of academia it wasn't worth it. I plowed ahead anyways. I had the same conversations with grad students I really admired I think finally got through to me. This was between graduation and starting grad school in the Fall.
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.
That may well be true but it's not the whole story. My department has been hiring continuously for 15 years, and there have been more than a few years we have not been able to hire anyone because the applicant pool was underqualified. So while it's true there aren't enough jobs for everyone, there are still jobs for those who want them enough to get the qualifications for them (your field may vary).
So, question from the peanut gallery:
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.
> And isn't that just a tautology?
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.
It's not a qualification, it's a competition. It's not like there is a minimum bar to meet and everyone who meets it gets to go in. It's like "We have 10 seats, so we take the 10 best people who apply". Your qualification is that you have to be one of the 10 best people, however good they are.
its a different relationship entirely. you're hiring someone to mentor grad students, get grants, and teach. and while you aren't given tenure right away, that's certainly the goal, which can be a multi-decade commitment. everyone is trying to raise the bar with their program, and a couple 'meh' hires can really change that trajectory for quite a while. there are only like 20 faculty in your department, its not like development a giant tech co where there are tens of thousands and they are constantly moving in and out - each of these hires has a dramatic impact on your culture.
so yes, it absolutely makes sense to leave slots empty if you don't find candidates that you're excited about.
> 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.
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.
The trend is somewhat new if we look long term. The gap between PhD’s and number of openings in academia has gotten a lot worse.
Between 2010 to 2015 my top 20 ranked university had 1 permanent job per 50 graduated PhDs in physics and maybe 1 in 30 for mathematics.
> 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
Has this changed recently?
Not that I’m aware of? Most PhD grads not staying academia seems to be a long-running phenomenon. The number of permanent academic positions simply does not match up against the number of PhD grads.
Some disciplines are much better at managing the PhD admissions to match the job opportunities. Philosophy for example.
But I don't think that's done with most science PhDs. Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor?
> 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.
Or perhaps because of the vast appetite for the benefits that accrue from scientific research, without wanting to truly fund science and education.
Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards.
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)
> Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards.
i'd be interested in a source for this. i did not find in the article you cite mention of historical trends.
My dad got his PhD in the 1950s,and went straight to industry. He said it was always this way.
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 suppose the Trump administration didn't improve the situation.
My fiancee left a lovely stats PhD program at Maryland after two years and entered the workforce instead. She started the fall before the COVID-19 quarantine in the US, and while the shift to online only exacerbated her feelings, there was plenty worrying her to make the decision palpable. Her stiped was meager, her advisor was functionally absent and _would not_ use their computer, and the thought of coming out the other end six years later with debt from her undergrad and no job - or worse, a job she would need to spend more money to accept and move for than she had on hand - was terrifying. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think she regrets her decision. I'm sure she wishes the conditions were different, but the value of a PhD today has been dragged down so thoroughly that it only makes sense for a privileged few.
Ah, makes sense, good for her:)
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?
I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
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...
The card check election was in 2004. I was part of the drive at the time (although I graduated before the union began—that was one of the challenges in the drive: a lot of us were essentially working for the benefit of those who came after us and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors). It wasn’t the first, but it was still a relatively new thing at the time.
My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.
If money is what you are after the PhD offers one of the worst (effort / probability of becoming rich) ratio .
"Money" is subjective. Professors are paid a pittance (barely middle-class in some areas), are no longer generally respected, and are abused by their students and leadership at rates that have never been seen. There aren't many pros to academia.
The idea of a union for graduate students seems silly to me (and I was one for six years). The idea that you're exchanging labor for money is insane: any grad student at MIT could 10x their $/hr by taking a job in the private sector. And they could get those jobs easily. They're students, they're getting training.
Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.
I saw those videos of horrible people at MIT disrupting classes last year, with the school doing nothing. I'd rather spend the first two years cheaply at a local community college and then finish my undergrad degree at a nice State school than suffer through all that.
> 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. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
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
The squeeze is not worth the juice. The pay is bad, the sector is heavily regulated that you could lose your job for a post you made online, dealing with student is pain (I have been there), expensive tuition, the titles are saturated too, the other day I saw a 24yo a “phd student”, plus the AI making education less valuable in general, at least from average person view. All that plus other factors just make it useless to waste time in anything beyond bachelor, even in engineering, a master degree is usually substituted by few years experience.
There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.
There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.
There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty
I'm not arguing against anything you have said, but there is an important connection here that I want to make between disillusionment and funding.
> 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.
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...
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.
2 is key. omg the number of students who are like "I want to be a professor" and can barely name a program they're targeting much less the people in it
undergrad or grad students?
This isn't really new, I've heard complaints about academia for decades. What is new is that grant funding has been completely eviscerated.
A professor has many more than 5 PhD students. Why would you be surprised to concerned that most PhDs go on to get jobs in industry?
>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.
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.
That isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.
Everyone in tech is uncertain about the future of software, engineering, and science jobs.
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.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
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.
It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s.
[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.
It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever
it was illegal for private schools to have grad student unions until ~2016, as (private) graduate students were not classified as employees.
https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...
Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.
My university apparently doesn't have one either, just a "graduate student government"
I love the work they do. I think it is vital for progressing humanity. They are not quite as important as sanitation workers and yet their career is about as enticing...
It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.
Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.
Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010.
Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
Transformers are an applied science: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en
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.
There is plenty of research, it is all kept as trade secrets because they are in a competitive business environment
MIT is not close to one of the first universities with a grad student union, the UC has been unionized since the 90s.
Can you give some context the grad student union and how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia?
> how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia
Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
Despite all the propaganda, unions work. In this case they got better pay and benefits.
I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons:
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.
What do you think about representative vs direct unions?
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.
I think you’re missing the point #1 reason people talk negatively about unions, they cost shareholders and management money.
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.
That I agree with. Rich people hate unions. But their reasoning is shit. They're only of consequence because they lobby hard against unions. The reasons I listed, however, are more valid (imo) and should be addressed. Addressing them would do a lot to diminish anti-union talking points.
That does not explain a 20% YoY drop
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay ...
... 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.
So I’m not in academia but even I’ve known for 20+ years how horrendous the job prospects are. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where everybody sat down in 1972. Academia is full of baby boomers who refuse to retire or die. And the number of positions just isn’t growing anywhere near to the demand.
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?
"get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia"
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.
grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market
Is the grass generally greener though?
> 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.
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.
80% is high!
What a Rorschach blot. Comments range from AI to immigration to doomsday results for USA.
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.
There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.
Isn't that what the article is saying? Less research funding == Fewer admissions.
> 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.
While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs from grants) or their own indirect costs. And they will not be admitting students if they do not see a clear path for them to be externally funded after their first year or two.
Oh yes. As I said, the math department guaranteed 6 years. If they can't guarantee it, they won't admit the student.
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.
This is simply not true towrards the end of time limits as well as lower-ranked programs.
I was recently shown a grad office door covered with home grown memes. There was a printout of a disassociating cartoon teddy bear taped on top in the center with the caption "unfortunately the vibe continues to deteriorate".
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.
Fund them to do what exactly? Come up with their own research ideas?
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.
That is how it usually works, but again, MIT has tens of billions of dollars. They could literally write their own grants.
A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
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.
> A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
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.
The vast majority of the endowment isn't money (dollars in bank accounts). University endowments work like private equity funds, most of the funds will be invested in assets, most of which hardly liquid enough to reasonably convert them into cash on short notice. They could try to borrow money against the valuations of those assets, but it's not sane to take on debt in order to sustain a level of expenditures that was adjusted to a much higher level of income (true more generally). Especially when the alternative of temporarily scaling back expenses is relatively easy.
I am very skeptical that endowment funds are as illiquid as you claim. We're talking about amounts less than 10% of the total portfolio size annually.
Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.
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.
>practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.
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.
A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused.
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.
> 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?
I think this is a valid point, but if the talent pool shrinkage was truly a threat to your academic institution are you really going to just watch?
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.
Much of those billions of dollars are contractually limited in how they can use both the principal and gains so it's really not that simple.
You have no idea how endowments work.
That would be a conflict of interest.
Government is not great at picking up or creating ideas. Academia has to lead in that and then show government why it would be best for the nation to fund those. The government is good at long term funding for ideas that may not be the best for private sector right away but it should not be creating ideas themselves otherwise you would get things like Lysenkoism.
Allow me to disagree while I look back at the last 80 years of US government-funded research.
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.
Who do you think sits on these grant review boards? It isn’t bureaucrats. These people are scientists in the field too.
That mattered for the America that was, not the America that is.
At this point, these well-endowed universities are essentially Private Equity firms, each with a university hanging off the side as a minor, semi-profitable department within the firm.
Universities get ~40-50% of their funding from the government. Private equity doesn't quite fit.
Is that across all universities? Because I would guess that, for example, University of Illinois gets a much larger portion of its funding from government sources than University of Chicago (which would be one of those well-endowed universities which, incidentally, just cut tuition to zero for undergrads from families making less than $250K).
This study estimates that government spending is 40% of public university revenue, ~10% for private schools. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cud/postsecondary...
University of Illinois is also a public school. University of Chicago is private, as is MIT.
Which is precisely why I made that comparison.
Precicely this
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
Chancellor mcmcmc: We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions.
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 :)
> We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. > Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment.
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.
Are all your comments this abrasive and obtuse? Obviously chucking a million at every grad student every year to do whatever they feel like is poor financial decision making. If the university is funding the research, they can retain the IP and reap the financial benefits. It’s a private for-profit organization. Endowment aside, they have hundreds of millions in surplus operating income. What do they need public funds for?
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Wow you just made me realize that Elon Musk net worth is roughly 30x the value of the entire MIT endowment fund.
The article is politely calling out the effects of the current regime in Washington and indicating that the government is finding other ways to not give funding to schools they don’t like.
I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.
MIT started it. They cancelled Dorian Abbot in 2021.
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.
Thank you, I needed that. It is a great reminder that eventually these talking points will always swamp any communication channel.
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.
I'm not part of an organized group.
>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!
See, you are in “not even wrong” territory. This is like someone planning a green cheese mining mission to the moon.
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.
>people choose not to engage
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.
Sounds like everything is fine then
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This beating aroud the bush doesn't help:
> 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?
Presumably that you'd have to be white as driven snow and have a Confederate-flag carrying Jesus holding an assault rifle tattooed on you to avoid ending up in a detention center awaiting deportation to some foreign hellhole prison.
Why? The point was made very clearly; everyone who is in academia or research knows. People who are unaware or uninterested will move on and not be affected.
Academia is about to go through a generational reset. The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long.
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.
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.
> The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students
What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?
Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks).
It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year.
There is no shortage of money.
> 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.
Until last year, the share of wealth by the 1% had been basically flat at 31% for a decade
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
Your expectations aren't matching reality
I am looking at your link and thinking I took crazy pills.
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%)
True, but GP had scoped their original post to the last decade, and if you look just there (2016-2026) it does appear flat.
I don't see why a shift from 23% to 34% should produce a qualitatively different result.
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’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle.
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.
This is not true. Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports. They need police, so angry people don't buy rockets and shoot their planes down.
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?
No, what you are describing are billionaires using public money to subsidize their lifestyles.
The idea is that everyone pays taxes. Those things are paid by tax money.
> Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports.
> 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.
Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death.
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.
Perhaps you could clarify your view. Here is my understanding:
* 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?
I agree with you to some point. I just wouldn't frame it in a Marxist way, working class vs. everyone else. It concerns nearly everyone, not just the working class. Limiting it to the working class, excludes many influential people who are more wealthy, far away from being billionaires, but still suffer from the current developments.
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.
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Almost none of that goes into research funding.
Researchers are funded largely by government grants.
someone has to pay for administrators!
> someone has to pay for administrators
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.
Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc.
I had no idea the on-going costs of physical things did not decrease over time, what an interesting thing to know. Here I thought that after you build the building and paid off the building, then for funsies also bought all the land surrounding the building, that at some point it would drastically cheaper to maintain it; but what you're saying makes so much sense!
You have clearly never owned a home. The older the building, the more maintenance it requires.
That absolutely does not justify in taking a 50% vig, good lord.
However is maintenance($) > demolishing and building new($)?
Same issue with grad school… the value isn’t there for this to make sense. Folks are better off just going right into them private sector.
The value absolutely is there. The NSF and NIH were both very cheap and have had huge ROI. The cuts to academic funding have been monumentally stupid.
Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.
What fantasy world do you live in? I want to be there, the world I'm everything granted to the public is always under constant attack and threatened to be destroyed and their proponents destroy and their benefactors humiliated.
How do you do this when belief in science, which is important to academic institutions, is unpopular with one faction?
When it no longer becomes science and becomes social. There are MANY examples, even in this thread, of this happening.
When and where did this happen before a year and half ago?
Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.
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.
Do grad students make enough to live and make payments against the principal of their student loans? If not, then that's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
This is about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
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 about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
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.
> Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance)
MIT doesn't have a law school. MIT cutting grad spots means national research priorities being compromised.
Departments base grad school admissions on grant awards. The article states: grant awards for MIT went down more than 20%, then new MIT grad students went down 20%. The decrease in students has nothing to do with academia being detached from industry.
Ok, but that's not at all what this article is about.
It's simple. The US used to be the most desirable place for immigrants and the US higher education system used to be the envy of the world and now for both of these it is not any more. A reset was always inevitable.
> The US used to be the most desirable place for immigrants and the US higher education system used to be the envy of the world and now for both of these it is not any more.
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.
We used to build great big crazy things too, lots via research universities due to vast federal and defense research.
That has changed. It should be reinstated. Cut red tape, get back into the business of taking (literal) moonshots as a government.
I don’t know what you’re talking about but both of those are definitely still true. It’s just that this administration is trying to stop the first from happening.
And the second.
When do you believe that changed?
> bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
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.
>> The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long.
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
My favorite idea is to tie student loans and grants not to the individual per say, but rather their choice of institution and study. For example, a student going to MIT for a hard, well-paying science career should be able to access more capital at a better rate than someone attending a party school to major in a lower-paying humanities field. Some have taken the current state of things to imply a failure of capitalism - when in fact what we are seeing is a distortion by non-capitalist principals. When you subsidize without regard for investment risk you skew the incentive structure. As it stands the optimum result is generated by maximizing enrollment and changing whatever additional sum a student can pay on top of what the government provides. Since it doesn't matter what they major in, or what the institutional quality is, the market adapts accordingly. By attaching student loan quantities and qualities to both the major and institution, we ensure equal access to the individual but leave market incentives to ensure quality. The break down in academic quality and corresponding labor market corrections is entirely predicated on institutional optimization through misalignments in subsidization. You can still make the system fair to individuals from non-traditional backgrounds without making it equal. I would argue that you can even do more to increase equitability to historically marginalized groups once you decouple from the 'flat rate' approach. The system is broken because we broke it. The solution is not to continue down the path of misaligned incentives but rather make sure the incentives are properly considered.
This has been tried multiple times actually via ISAs and other instruments. Immediately inverts to adverse selection - eg the students who are going for a more lucrative option don't want to participate.
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.
Not really relevant to this article, which is about graduate students in research programs, who get a stipend and don't pay anything. Of course, low stipends are also a big detractor for potential students
there are tons of alternative ways to get education , or do research
Education yes, research unfortunately no. I'm not saying research outside of academia is not possible, I'm just saying it's not taken seriously and this needs to change. We really do need to go back to the 19th century model of the researcher gentleman.
A real shock to academia is that top research increasingly takes place outside universities. On many areas universities are now 5-10 years behind what’s happening in the private sector. That’s causing a lot of panic within the system and a growing stream of departures as PhDs favor the private sector over academic tracts.
A few years ago, when I was actively involved with the academic world, I came to a similar realization. They're trying to do too many things at once. Universities need to acknowledge this reality and adjust.
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."
This just kind of sounds like a random idea that sounds good in your head but not based in reality; the point of a PhD has always been one thing, and one thing alone: train someone who can publish influential papers in top-tier venues.
Anyone who says otherwise is just either uninformed or selling a dream.
I've seen the ins-and-outs of academia within an R1 research institution from about as top-level as one can while remaining a student, and my idea is based on extensive interface with the reality of academia.
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.
That is how it should be, and how it has historically been.
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.
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YouTube and Patreon have done wonders for rebooting the modern research gentleman field.
I follow a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science.
It is progressing beyond 'backyard science'.
> a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science
Evidence of something that's been impactful?
Care to share any that people here might like to follow?
Research is usually a collaborative effort nowadays. You’d need a League of Research Gentlemen. Not to mention that an important number of research fields require expensive research labs/equipment.
I dunno. The single major qualification of being from money has not always made for the best research results.
The researcher gentleman cannot afford their own cryo em. We aren’t doing the science of 1890 anymore.
I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.
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.
It's ok.
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.
China does have some top-tier unis but only a handful: Tsinghua, Beida (Peking), Fudan, Zhejiang, Renmin (humanities mostly), Hangzhou -- maybe a couple of others if you squint hard enough
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
>The future belongs to China.
China's population pyramid is worse than the USAs. The present belongs to China. This is as good as it gets.
That might be the reason for the investment in education in Africa. Start opening up the gates for more immigration to replace their aging workforce
Not really an issue if China decides to go the Soylent Green route.
Conventional wisdom always used to be that China would never compete with the US because they were rote learners and we were more creative. I'd say that is no longer the case. China has been doing a LOT of interesting things. I joke with my son that given the state of the US lately, I'd almost rather move to China.
Whereas in China, and in a lot of other countries around the world, when they talk about moving to the US they are completely serious about it. They are actually highly concerned with what specific options they have for getting some kind of visa to the United States, they are genuinely upset with the recent US policy changes that have made it harder for foreigners to get such visas.
That conventional wisdom is pretty racist bro, which neoliberal convinced you otherwise?
>The top colleges are arguably now in China.
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?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking...
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.
Harvard is still the best along with many others, so no, you did make up the fact that Chinese universities are at the top and American ones aren't.
Best thing about the word "arguably" it's not a hard fact either way.
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 ?
>We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords. China celebrates engineers.
Most real comment today
What are some of the Chinese colleges worth paying attention to? Is most of the AI research coming from these colleges or are they primarily from private labs?
Zhejiang University appears to be doing a lot of work in AI.
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?
At least the Liberty grad will be prepared for when AIesus comes down from the Clown.
CSrankings.org is a (flawed for sure, but still) ranking of the research output of various graduate institutions. China has 3 of the top 10 ranked universities according to this ranking.
https://csrankings.org/#/index?all&world
Oh this is neat. Thank you.
MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.
Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.
Lots of historical precedent for an intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk leading to an uprising.
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.
The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.
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.
> Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves
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.)
[1] https://theoldslavemartmuseum.org
And yet once the South lost and slavery was banned, the financial crisis didn't happen...
It also doesn't explain what happened after the civil war: the KKK and Jim Crow. The only possible explanation for these is...
We need to finish Reconstruction. That sounds idealistic, even pie in the sky unrealistic. But we could certainly measure progress in that direction: US incarceration rates are insanely high, and the prison industrial complex is modern slavery. We would know victory when we put fewer people in prison than China, for example.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Calling out the GOP for imposing racism, sexism and ideology in a thread about US universities is certainly a choice.
Are you equating sone teenage students shouting during a conference by some bozo on tour with every middle-aged political representatives from a single party rewriting the law to kneecap the fundamental civil rights of a third of their population?
No, because I don't misrepresent reality to an absurd degree nor do I bring up unrelated stuff.
That seems all too nonsensical.
I was puzzled if I was the only one wondering what in the world any of this had to do with MIT enrollment rates. Haha.
The French revolted because bread was too expensive then guillotined more than half of their best and brightest.
I guess democracy was a mistake and we need to get back to inbread monarchy instead of the blood thirsty unwashed masses.
Democracy is a mistake, which is why we have Republics, with rules and constitutions. Not "anything you can get a slim majority to vote for, once".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_First_Republic
Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.
The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
I am a programmer that comes from a family of coal miners. They don't actually consider that constituency, its just a game to win a swing state.
But supporting industry of coal mining/coal power plants gets money to tilt or buy senators and their votes - college students are too sparsely distributed to have an equivalent effect in USA. It only took one senator to give us an completely unregulated supplements industry.
> yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering
The Clines, Justices and even Manchins have money. The miners are almost irrelevant.
The professors, graduate students, and staff (not admins) are all working class. They are not some kind of elite in society.
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.
Yeah, I agree:
"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.
There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.
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.
> intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk
Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
They might struggle understanding why the decision-makers were elected, though maybe not even that. It’s well-documented why the decisions are being made. Decisions being bad doesn’t mean that they aren’t perfectly explainable.
Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.
Or they'll just say "History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes."[1]
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/
There will be no more historians. Their jobs will be lost to AI.
I don't think they're going to struggle at all. It's quite clear.
Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate.
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".
Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
What if the electorate is so stupid that what appeals to them is ruinous?
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?
Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc.
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.
> 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"
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.
I think there is a shortage of would-be leaders like that though, that's the problem. Or at least would be leaders that gained any real traction. The only other one in the past decade was Bernie.
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 other candidates were doing this? How many of them had wall-to-wall 24/7 free exposure on every cable news channel for a whole campaign season?
> 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
Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.
Maybe Athens and Alcibiades is a better example? Or the Carthaginians being Carthiginians.
Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]:
> 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
I, Claudius does a solid fictionalization of the man. (Suetonius if you’re craving drier.)
Agreed, it's my 2026 book of the year despite being written in the 30s
I certainly am
Did you not consider the 5 second dopamine hit I got from owning the libs?
It seems pretty cut and dry to me: Boomers I know today still rave about Regan-era policies and how good they were for everyone, although I'm not sure what "everyone" they are referring to in that sentence. Regan-era deregulation, cutting of social spending, and favoring asset-based versus wage based economic growth certainly laid the groundwork for where we are with today's K-shaped economy.
On the contrary, populism and its effects are well understood by historians. This is just another wave.
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Or finding out that he was just the tip of a giant iceberg that corrupted every square inch of our government.
The people decided that this sucks and have spoken. Dear god, make America stupid again!
So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then?
Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results:
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.
re:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist
Except that they can hold your coalition government hostage by making you concede on their pet issue or leave the coalition and force an election.
Our systems need to be MORE democratic!
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".
Actually a much better and easier solution to gerrymandering would be to increase the number of House representatives to be the same proportion of population it was in 1776. There will be roughly 15,000 representatives in the House. Gerrymander that!!!
1. That doesn't solve the Senate problem. The Supreme Court has failed to uphold the 10th amendment and we should stop pretending we're actually 55 mini countries.
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.
We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections.
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.
> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance.
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.
You raced over the key word in that sentence.
Anything.
Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.
No. A language with checked arrays can never have a buffer overrun like C arrays can.
Some things are better. Game theory demonstrates this.
Some things are better but in the case of political systems, you typically can't prove that ahead of time.
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.
There's already a revolution going on and we're losing. They stacked the courts. The blood of innocents in the streets and ICE prisons.
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.
Our systems are highly undemocratic. A vote in Wyoming is at least an order-of-magnitude more impactful than one in California.
> 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.
Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
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.
It's First Pass the Post that causes that. We have maybe 30% is the population that wants guns highly restricted and a different 30% that wants abortions highly restricted. We have something like 52% that want Medicare4All. But we just seesaw between gun grabber and pussy grabber because those M4A aren't the majority of either party primary.
MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
I lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi.
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, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.
> then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more
Because blaming a foreign country for your woes just doesn't happen.
You know, we can blame China (another country I've lived in) all we want for our problems, and China definitely blames the US for a lot of its problems...but at the end of the day, the Chinese and the USA don't really have to care what the others think about them.
i'm from there and there are so many people trying to fix it. somehow you lived there so long and didn't realize this fact, bless your heart. (this is helping prove my point btw)
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.
How is it condescending to say that Mississippi should just do its own thing and we don't have to bother ourselves with their choices? I feel like we are in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. Whatever we say, or even if we say nothing, will be seen in Mississippi as being condescended to. Just us existing is seen as condescended. This is why we should just give up, we do our thing and they do their thing, if Mississippi is still offended by our existence, we can just ignore them.
So? How's that any different than everyone in Buffalo just having to bend over and take it because NYC and Albany want to do spreadsheets and services instead of factories?
No state is a monolith.
That's exactly the point. It makes no sense to say maybe if New York went off and was its own country it'll finally not be so divided.
I mean it'd be less divided insofar as the minority would be more thoroughly subjugated by the state. No pesky federal government getting in the way. Though that's probably not a good thing.
If there’s a “collective will” then why isn’t the population forcing its collective will on those power structures?
as if the civil rights movement didn't have very significant events take place in mississippi https://bookshop.org/p/books/local-people-the-struggle-for-c...
Right so what’s stopping people from doing it now?
i guess you haven't been seeing the news of all the southerners fighting the redistricting efforts after they gutted the VRA
You mean Southerners like me in Virginia who are actually doing that “fighting” and it’s making absolutely no difference whatsoever
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
You can move, trading places with a conservative stuck in a blue state, with assistance because many other people are moving.
> Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington.
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.
further, California is a big state. For the concept to work you'd have to split California lengthwise, the Western 1/3 would align politically how the op is assuming but the Eastern 2/3 would not. If the counter argument is majority rule then you're pretty much back to where you started with a divided population and 2 wolves + 1 lamb voting on lunch.
There will still be liberals in a new confederacy, and there will still be conservatives in a new union, we are only really talking about changing 50/50 into 60/40 on either side. BUT let's face it, our current equilibrium is not sustainable, this country can't survive another Trump, let alone the current one. Trump is talking about disenfranchising voters in blue states (because we must be cheating or we are illegal immigrants or something), I feel like that if we continue to union with these states, I will just wake up with a knife in my back someday.
Democracy works, we just have bad partners right now.
> we are just too divided
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.
It's a tempting thought but play it out. Now you live next to a belligerent fascist theocracy with nukes who likes to invade foreign countries and aspires to control the entire western hemisphere from Canada to Chile. How does that end?
E pluribus duam?
You're confusing neo-feudalist oligarchical propaganda with the will of the people.
> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic
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.
This is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three.
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.
I'm just stating an observation.
Are you trolling?
Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.
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> So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then?
Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
Probably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing.
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.
No one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism," cut the hyperbole.
Stop freaking out at thought experiments.
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?
To clarify, you agree that the Trump admin / MAGA political movement isn't fascism and his election wasn't an overthrow of democracy? Your earlier remarks were just a thought experiment? That isn't really the sense I've gotten from your historical comments.
I don't agree; it's simply irrelevant here.
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.
Isn't that basically what a constitution is for? A constitutional monarchy limits the power of the king, and a constitutional democracy limits the power of the elected government?
The constitution isn't static. Amendments can be repealed. An elected government could appoint judges to overturn any previous precedents
> No one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism,"
Most Trump voters didn't. A sizeable fraction have openly agitated for, and supported, violently overthrowing our elected government.
It's mostly inaccurate to characterize large groups by their minority fringe members. (I don't like Trump, MAGA, or January 6ers either, FWIW. But it's important to speak about this stuff truthfully.)
> It's mostly inaccurate to characterize large groups by their minority fringe members.
Less so when they elect/appoint them to national-level leadership.
It's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population.
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.
> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population
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.
are there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
Isn’t the brain drain people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
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.
Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
Thanks! Really appreciate the recommendation!
> 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.
That’s not remotely similar.
Similar to what? Von Neumann was part of Europe's elite scientific brain drain to the US in the 20th century, that's all.
Whether to help an existing accomplished researcher change address because their home country is not an option, is not similar to the question of whether to educate chinese students who plan to return home.
There has been a general downtrend in Chinese students studying internationally.
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...
> A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry
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.
A123 also owned the IP to lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, which is now BYD’s claim to fame
Those were productive researchers already working in the field who simply moved their address.
Whether to educate young Chinese nationals in the US who plan to return to their home nation isn’t a similar situation.
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A brain drain means the intelligent population emigrates to other countries.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
I think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
If you "drain" something the subject of the verb is what is being drained not where it is draining to.
Brain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
Monopolizing talent is a zero sum game. If your tally is in the negative, you're experiencing brain drain.
No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.
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.
It’s brain drain from other countries, especially China. The pipeline was simple: go to a mid tier Chinese university for undergraduate studies, get a masters or PhD from an American university, be advantaged in H1B due to this graduate degree, get a green card and settle permanently. That’s the brain drain. This pipeline has slowed down massively.
They are saying the opposite. People have been coming to America for higher education and staying here and that has historically benefited the US. And that seems to be changing.
I am also saying the same thing. They are commenting that the flight of human capital was coming from abroad and is no longer.
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.
I would say there was a brain drain from Iran to the US but I've also heard it used as a transitive verb. I think if there is a clear place talent is moving it's useful to specify it (and fwiw it doesn't sound weird to my ear).
I think they meant that in the past every other nation had a brain drain towards American research universities.
I took the previous comment to mean that the US has benefited from brain drain so far. If we turned off that benefit, that could handicap the US.
I mean, brain drains work TOWARDS the US as well, word meanings are not an American centric thing.
Every prestigious (STEM) college I’m aware of, a large ratio of graduate students and professors are foreign.
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.
Might be the only thing keeping America great. We lose the Chinese, Indians and Russians and we’re going to be a scientific backwater in a decade.
I'm amazed at how many of the respondents in this HN thread aren't discussing the super-mega-seismic externalities laid upon universities by the current administration. Universities always have issues, but there's an orange elephant in the room.
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.
Agree, they pretty much chased or scared foreign students away. This is the result.
If you look at most decent engineering universities, are they any different if you restrict to engineering/science departments? I don't have statistics, but when I was in grad school, the mini-institute I was part of (5-6 faculty members + students) had more than 70% foreigners. And I think all the non-foreigners were born abroad (whether Green Card or US citizen).
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
What point are you trying to make by sharing this?
It’s due to fewer positions mentioned in the link though right?
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.
I assume it is due to less federal support in the form of research grants that support PhD students, labs, etc.
ah did not now. 41%
Would be nice to see if this number dipped from before. International students typically end up paying out of station tuition and is a huge source of income for the univs.
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
That is much less true of grad programs in technical fields. Undergrad, international students are indeed more likely to pay full-boat--or at least larger boat--than US applicants.
But not a factor for private universities
Yes, it still is. State/federal aid is still available to students at private universities.
The real problem is we make it too hard for international researchers to stay here. These high end student visas should have strong paths to permanent residence - maybe even an expectation
This was a relatively widespread opinion 20 years ago. I had Roy Blunt, Republican senator from Missouri at the time, come to talk to us, telling us that he thought a science Ph.D should come with a green card stapled to it. But the politics of immigration never let small bills through, as people wanted bigger ones, and the bigger ones always had things that would risk filibusters.
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.
> he thought a science Ph.D should come with a green card stapled to it
This will be goodhearted to hell in this day and age.
It's sad that our government can't pass a bill without it being a katamari ball.
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.
Well the popular argument is that it takes so long to pass any kind of bill that smaller bills would just mean more bills and a bigger backlog. I don't really buy that.
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.
Yes; it wouldn't take so long if bills were simple, straightforward and easy to understand. Instead they're rubberband balls of horse traded, full of items that as you said someone has tried to 'sneak' in.
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.
The nature of a congress is that every bill gets balanced with the interests of a majority of the people there.
Maybe. But the fact is also that the US have become a less attractive country to live and raise your children in.
You have to be careful. These student-to-resident visa programs end up being used by "students" who really just want a visa. And then the "educators" turn into toll collectors who are accepting "tuition" in exchange for visa access.
See for example "Graduate work visas: a disaster we were warned about" here: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-deliveroo-visa-scandal
student-to-resident and working-while-student are two completely different types of visas.
Not sure this distinction matters in practice. Either way you're creating an economic incentive to go through the motions of "studying" at a university.
This is the case. A friend, born outside of the US, who is a researcher at Harvard is now looking at options outside of the US due to their visa being about to expire and it not looking like it will get extended.
They are looking at alternatives in Europe instead.
Isn't that the entire incentive structure for international PhD graduates already (at least on the private industry front)?
I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.
I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly.
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...
I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading.
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.
He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.
It may be good but also can be very problematic.
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.
I'll give a real example.
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"
Thinking about it as a system:
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.
How it would actually work is only the best schools would keep their funding while lower tier schools would be shut out entirely and be forced to severely reduce their research agendas. There's a school near me that just went from College to University status because they grew their graduate program enough, they would probably not weather the storm the same as MIT.
On a system's level, that's probably the desired outcome in a world where total science funding is shrinking and fewer people can be employed as scientists.
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.
Capitalism handles this problem well because a dysfunctional company can be replaced by a nimble startup.
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.
Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations.
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.
I think you're too cynical. One of the strengths of democracy as a form of government is that leaders get replaced regularly.
I'd agree with that.
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.
Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.
It's relevant in that the article mentions "research" 13 times, but "education" only 3 times.
Cause the article is about research. It is actually fully OK to have speech or message focusing on research.
Please use some line breaks. I find this extremely difficult to read
Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?
I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete.
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.
Most universities subsidize their undergraduate program using graduate and professional degrees. And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs. Yes, even at elite universities.
It's true that master's degree programs and professional degrees help subsidize undergraduate degrees, and that's a good thing for several reasons. First, it brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to local communities to help educate Americans. Second, it creates lasting bonds between America and the peoples of foreign nations; either the students learn and stay here to create value in America, or they go back home and bring with them American values and (hopefully if the program did their job right) a good view of Americans and America. If the only things we export are bombs and war, that reflects poorly on us as a country. Third, it means that when the world's top talent aspires to come to America rather than some other country for their education. Fourth, their presence in a local community creates demand for services and goods, and the fact there is constant churn creates enough sustained demand to support local economies in remote areas.
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'm making factual statements not value judgements
"glorified immigration program" is not a factual statement, you'll have to back that up. The programs are in fact degree and certificate programs.
The purpose of a system is what it does and how it's used in practice, my friend.
That's an interpretation, not a fact. And “glorified immigration program” is not a neutral factual label because it implies the educational function is mostly pretextual. I can understand your perspective, but please stop pretending to me that you're simply making factual statements and not a value judgement.
It is pretextual for a lot of foreign students, I don't know how anyone can deny that in good faith. Its definitely not a value judgements because I never said whether it's a good or bad thing on net. Sometimes good things have to be smuggled through a pretext.
"pretextual for a lot of foreign students" means something very different from "these degrees are often glorified immigration programs", which is how you entered the discussion. Can you at least admit that if you're here in good faith?
Yes I'll admit that these statements imply different things. But I maintain that advanced degrees at American universities are functionally an immigration program and that this is unspoken yet by design
The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.
Unless I'm missing something, the linked article from MIT is about more than graduate students. That article talks about how changes introduced in 2025 are causing taxation on budgets that (as far as I can tell) affect all students.
The prior poster is making the case that might not be a bad thing, but its not just graduate students
Investing in educated population in future is investment in given society itself. Triple that for US where most folks remain in adulthood, so brain drain aint an issue. State/society would get those money 10x back easily.
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.
Unfortunately, when you try to starve the beast, it's the essential functions that get slashed instead of the leadership and adminstrative apparatus. The animal is harmed further while the parasite intercepts the generated value.
We have never seen a presidential administration misunderstand soft power so badly.
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.
Jm2c, but I really don't believe the "top educators" argument.
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.
Learning calculus is table stakes.
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.
> Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world.
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.
That's really interesting, so why is Caltech losing student cross-admits to MIT and the Ivies/Stanford?
Yes and no, it depends on the program. I definitely agree when you get to choose your students it's a lot easier. But as far as course content, maybe not chemistry or calculus, but for capital-intense programs like robotics definitely. At CMU, there was a class students could take where each group gets to use a $15k humanoid robot (Aldebaran Nao) for the semester. When you take a class on super computing there, you get terminal access to a super computing cluster for your homework assignments. That's just not something you get at every school.
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.
You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.
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.
This isn’t just limited to ivy leagues, the same thing happens at state schools.
Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
> 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.
If we are talking about a no-immigrant law, the whole United States would be deeply impacted. The US would have a negative net population growth without immigration. That would mean institutions of all types are going to contract in size and start closing down and consolidating. Your local schools, libraries, police stations, road maintenance departments, etc.
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.
Obviously there is a selection effect that confounds any causal comparisons between those who do and do not get into MIT. But the better counterfactual is students who are accepted but do not attend. A diff-in-diff study with these two groups would be a better test. There are unique features of MIT: more money, elite network, etc. I do share your skepticism though - I've worked w/ MIT people before. I think they are very smart but also very lucky.
“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.
There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.
Master's programs in Europe are commonly the pathway/requirement to applying for a PhD position. This supports why they might be commonplace there, but it also means the same reason would not justify the master's only programs in the US in the same way.
In many places, there is a distinction between "master's through research" (a gateway to PhD) and "master's through study" (more coursework, less independent research, a gateway to r-n-d-level positions in the industry).
Yeah but as a European I think we took the wrong route. I am from Italy, and until 2001 we had 5 years undergraduate programs only. We then chose to do 3 + 2, but we should have gone with 4 + 1 years instead.
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
But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).
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.
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> “Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.
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.)
> still in the midst of admissions
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?
Granted that Academia is very exploitative. My wife is a Post-doc, so I hear these extremely heart breaking stories of how professors have all the power when it comes to graduate students and post docs. But this drop in graduate students is not because of that - this drop is purely because of funding cuts and the AI hype. Why would humans wanna go through a Phd when you have industry leaders harking about how AI is going to do original science, when the political leaders of the country wanna cut funding for basic science research. On a slightly different note, China increased funding for the basic science research. This is peak of "how to shoot yourself in the foot".
So the current USA administration defunds Science everywhere it can (NOAA, FDA , etc) and even at it's roots (MIT , etc).
Meanwhile in China ...
Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.
Not at all, the US is still the world leader in research institutions.
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 think the highest ranked technical universities by the end of this decade will be Chinese. Things are accelerating more than I expected.
I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
One of the best ways to get better at something difficult is to do it a lot.
I guess they will be great at retractions at this rate
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
Exactly this, it's hilarious seeing the reasoning ITT and elsewhere that we need unlimited foreign immigration to possibly keep stride with China, a country with extremely strict immigration opportunities and as a result, much better cultural cohesion.
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.
Some people would argue they’ve already taken the lead
Making America great again, again.
> And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really.
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.
Yeah, in Europe we simply don't have the money.
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.
Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.
Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.
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.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
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.
That's exactly what's happening.
Most of Europe is behind because the money there has dried up. (Except for Norway)
> 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.
FWIW: https://theconversation.com/china-surpasses-us-in-research-s...
Yes but the trajectory is in free fall. With rise of research in China we'll have a more even playing field.
The US is the world leader in lists compiled by who? I'm pretty sure China is the world leader in lists compiled by them.
Me crying as a South Asian
Give us time.
americans right now: "hold my beer"
If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.
It needs to "start pumping" more money everywhere. Defense, for one.
No, everyone is worse off. There is nothing good that comes from this.
If you live outside the US, there is.
Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.
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.
This is exactly right, the massive benefits of sticking a bunch of people with very abstruse interests close together is basically impossible to replicate. Labs, where people interact with each other daily and every week, where there's in-person exchange and chance encounters, is pretty difficult to simulate even with chat like IRC or forums or social media.
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.
If everyone loses but you lose less than the people you don’t like, does that make you a winner?
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When an aggressor loses their weapons, everyone else is a winner, yes.
Is open research a weapon? I think there are many more things the US spends its money on that could be argued to be weapons, much more convincingly than publicly accessible research.
MIT is not a weapon. The scientific community is not an aggressor.
The US is an aggressor. The research conducted in MIT and elsewhere in the US is literally used for weapons.
> other research institutions will become the new leaders
Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
Talent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.
Elite human capital isn't normally distributed.
And neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)
You sow, then you reap. That's how it goes.
History is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.
I wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.
When there's less competition and opportunities for talent the whole community, globally, is impacted.
There's really nothing good about it.
That's very funny because up until very recently there was very little competition because one nation was dominating research using talents from other countries. Consider it as a weakening of a monopoly
You say that as if talent was kidnapped and dragged against their will.
People go to the US because of an abundance of infrastructure and money. Which now goes down.
It's a loss.
Those great minds will go to other nations where they're more appreciated.
I don't think you've ever worked in academia or research.
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 don't think you've ever worked in academia or research.
I'm doing a PhD in STEM in a major Western European university.
I wish them all the success love and rainbows can provide. They're better off with money though.
No this is not good for the World in case you have forgotten America is part of the world and though I hate what is happening just as much as anyone I will work to make this nation better. We are in a tough time and I genuinely do not know if things will get better but we will try.
> America is part of the world
A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.
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Yeah well I hope those other parts improve as well in their conduct. We live in a non-zero sum game, after all.
The world will catch up around the same time research institutions become obsolete.
Any other institutions outside of academia that has a 20+ billion endowment that earns 4 billion a year?
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?
Agree, and I think it's probably healthy that the large endowments are being taxed a modest amount.
"due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools"
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".
Wow. If they think 8% is heavy they should see how much in taxes their janitors are paying
Presumably 0% on their 401k returns, which is the more appropriate comparison point to an endowment.
Respectfully, comparing a janitor's 401k to a $27.4 billion endowment is (very) tone deaf.
But yes, the tax goes against "keeping sacred systems sacred" principles and is an opinionated policy against rich entities that the current administration dislikes.
US federal government taxation policy shouldn't treat university endowments as sacred systems.
And it shouldn't treat them as levers to exact vengeance either.
Yes, it's tone deaf. And comparing tax on an endowment to "tax a janitor pays" is arguing in bad faith.
> Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone.
Sounds ironically like "DEI".
No, it doesn't.
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.
Having polities to look at promoting regional diversity, equity between regions, and making sure all regions are included, instead of only one axis of "merit", in awarding research funds, is literally DEI.
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.
I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.
But you and I and everyone else here knows about MIT and can probably list a few major breakthroughs that came out of MIT... what's the name of your major public research university?
Education (and research like this example) seem to be one of the highest ROI things you can invest in.
It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.
Since this is the first comment that emphasizes research which most are conflating with graduate school in general. I think that is the salient effect of the funding cut, which affects research (PhDs) more than cash cow coursework programs such as Masters, MBAs, and JDs. Most are forgetting that US global position Post-WWII comes primarily from basic research -> applied research pipeline; Silicon Valley alone did not endow us with the internet, satellite, rockets, etc.
MIT should spin up MIT.ai for-profit, raise 100B @ 1T, then go buy big computer.
American science is at risk not because of budget cuts, but because of executive interference https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tiE93b-jT-E&t=60s
> MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students
This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
In STEM, federal grants pay for almost all US PhD students. And the tuition they would charge would never have covered the actual cost. It has always depended on research grants. Which makes sense, a PhD is mostly and apprenticeship in how to do cutting edge research.
The article mentions that a major factor in technical grad school is research funding. Most grad students in engineering, for example, don't pay tuition themselves. They work for a pittance and receive tuition as a benefit.
Yes, and it's even spelled out explicitly earlier in the letter.
> For departments across the Institute, the funding uncertainty I talked about has made them cautious about admitting new graduate students.
Yes of course they could admit any person who didn't finish high school.
...or the massive swath of 95% of students with degrees they already decline? [0]
[0] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/
Schools like MIT pay PhD students barely above or sometimes below the poverty level of that particular state as monthly stipend. Yeah, research funding got slashed but if they had the will they could have come up with the money for that 20%.
My spouse was a PhD student at MIT, graduated in 2022. He was getting paid $58k a year when he left. Not an extravagant living in the Boston area, but not bad. On top of that is amazing benefits.
I'm sure it varies by department? Well I'm not sure, I assume...
Here’s one problem - the DOE’s Genesis Mission referenced in the transcript has nothing earmarked in its 20 line-items for solar/wind/batteries/UHV grids! You want to work in that area, you have to leave the USA. Looks like fluff, but that’s been DOE for many years - captured by entrenched finance and industry, not looking to upset the apple cart.
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
Maybe it's time to lighten the load at the top. Certainly there are some bureaucratic efficiencies to be had.
all because some cry baby in the White House.
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.
It's truly baffling. We're hurting ourselves and helping our fri/enemies with one stroke.
My partner recently applied to quite a few extremely prestigious graduate programs. We're not married and she made $16,000 dollars last year. She's won several national competitions in her field. The main deciding factor for her final choice was the price. It's just not worth it to go into six figures or more worth of debt for a degree.
when an entity as powerful as the federal government sets an agenda to purposely destroy academia
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
>I just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrug
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.
Great time to remember that Elon gutted the Department of Education
Only a 10% budget cut? Should have been way more. I hear victimization throughout the article. It was the school's choice to focus on politicizing and prioritizing foreigners, and looking as "accepting" as possible, rather than educating and funding our citizens which is what matters.
How do you mean politicizing and prioritizing foreigners?
It is mainly because of federal funding cuts that departments accept fewer students as written in the actual text. But I might add that the changes of immigration and the changes in foreign policy might played a rule. There are no mention of AI at all.
I don't think MIT has money problems
"Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone." DEI by another name?
I read this as saying that MIT is becoming less competitive? Means if you just finished your BS, applying to a PhD program at MIT may be a 20% better bet than before, especially with the job market in its current condition…
It would actually be _more_ competitive, because what's driving the reduction in admissions is uncertainty in grant/funding availability.
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.
No, it doesn't tell us anything about how competitive it is.
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.
If you're applying to MIT, there are 20% fewer assistanships and (depending on the department and program) something like 10% fewer applications.
Not at all. Notice they said nothing about applications or acceptance rates. It is actually more competitive to get funding.
> "new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%."
Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants? The article does not seem to say.
From what I understood they admitted fewer people. The professors are worried about not having funds so they aren't hiring as much
Thanks.
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...
I work in a large public university system and we are also seeing enrollment drops across campuses. We are also seeing declines in enrollment in the K-12 education too.
Fewer graduate students is a good thing. Academia produces WAY too many graduate students relative to the jobs available (in aggregate, some fields it's more of a problem than others). It's good for the PIs (professors in charge of a group) to have lots of graduate students, but as a whole that means most of them will not get a job...
As someone who is continuing graduate level education and explored programs from MIT, I find that the major deciding factor to be the administration's willingness to censor pro-Palestinian activity. I don't think it's worth all the time and money at that point. I'm not going to spend all those resources to get a zionist education.
Speaking from the academic sector if they're all able to meet ALL of the admissions criteria there would be no justification their presence, they would be in demand.
The sad reality is given the unrealistic expansion of the education sector they were clearly admitting people who needed to justify being there...
At least they seem happy with their MicroMasters program which may or may not be helping get more student in to the full grad programs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138590
Other than that, with the current flow of opportunities outside from just graduating is a lot.
I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be
In the last 25-50 years the universities pivoted from providing an education to focusing on research and viewing students as pesky legacy, whose education is delegated to grad students. Even at large public universities, very few tenured professors teach anything except grad and senior level undergrad classes. The contracts are scoped for minimal teaching load.
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.
This is what happens when you model education like factories and have it be a product rather than a basic human right, it needs to sell and it needs ROI for shareholders.
For some reason it's hard for me to read one paragraph sentences and come away with an understanding of what was being communicated.
Nothing interesting coming out of MIT, well, since X11
This woman knows nothing about the real world
MIT is a rich private school. Plz stop relying on government money.
This is what a declining empire looks like
Many PHD programs might best be described as cults:
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:
... despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.It is ironic that some of the brightest people ignore the data.
I wonder who is dropping then. Lots of graduate students are from rich families, especially the international ones.
> Our Washington Office is working energetically, on both sides of the aisle,
Oh.
(bit curious, when did that sprout?)
Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges.
Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges
That has a fresh new tax on it following the BBB on gains.
Did people even read the article? Endowment taxes make sense - 1.4% taxes on investment vehicles in the billions just do not make sense. Then the president masquerades enrollment by ignoring the ~4% bump for Sloan (and EECS). Grants / funding though is a different story and worth mentioning/discussing...
The speech makes a lot of arguments. It argues against the endowment tax, which seems politically deaf. But it also cites research-funding cuts (both legal and illegal).
> 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.
Well said
> For more than a year, we’ve all worked on responding to extraordinary new and sustained pressures on our budget (due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools)
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.
Yeah. It's called brain drain. Talent has options. It weighs pros and cons. When the relative attraction of a country and thus institutions within it drops, they choose to go there less.
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
Can they not use their endowment to pay for the funding problem?
Note that MIT carefully avoided identifying one of the root causes of this - the so called "Genesis" program that replaces all traditional, peer-reviewed national science funding programs with a half-baked GenAI drivel-fest with no clear application guidelines, a 6-week application timeline, and rules that funnel half of a now diminished national research funding pool to corporations that bribed the Trump administration.
> Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program ...
If you're stuck in the US for practical reason, it might be time to start pretending to be dumb. When there's no more immigrants to threaten with deportation, if they don't help the government build the machines of control, they will start forcing anyone with a hint of intelligence to do the work.
Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?
Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs
Can you back that up with.... you know... evidence? "regulation bad" tends to be a political talking point more than a valid argument when you're this vague.
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.
You should be able to open up shop as a doctor or lawyer or engineer without any degree (!) in a free market, or spin up a school if you want
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
f*** around and find out
This is expected behavior.
When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?
Fire 5/6th of your administrative staff and use the money for grants. MIT has atrocious staff to students ration. Many savings if they get rid of them
Surprise
wow that sounds scary. Good luck though
> heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns
Cry me a river.
Our best universities have massive endowments is a national asset
MIT Grad - a few thoughts:
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.
We are in the "Bust" phase of the STEM Crisis Myth[0]
> [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.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
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Title is more generally: A message from MIT President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
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Except for 8% tax on endowment returns, that sounds fair to me, no? US universities got it very cozy: federal subsidies, admission income, donations, AND investment income. Like Harvard buying very expensive vineyard land (in Napa valley California) using excess cash.
Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?
It’s discussed in the linked article
Yes. Just think title is little misleading. Makes it sound like there are less students applying, but it is really less positions.
Fair, yeah
And this is only the beginning.
I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?
It's probably mostly not about AI, but because of US foreign politics.
Many foreigners stay away and some US students decide to study abroad.
Very few people are paying their way to MIT's graduate programs, so it's not as if it's a matter of AI scaring people into not paying for expensive education or anything. Graduate programs are full of international students that used them as ways to enter the US job market. With that road getting harder for a variety of policy decisions, there's just less reasons to consider it.
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.
This isn't about AI, it's about research funding and what the guys in charge think about science and education.
How big is MIT’s endowment? They really still need to be at the taxpayer trough?
Nothing to do with AI here, it's about immigration.
Applied computer science.
Training RL policies on edge cases by using humans to collect and instrument previously closed data systems.
This isn't because of AI. It's the current anti-immigration policies.
Hide behind a heavy regulatory mote. Pharmacist, Lawyer, etc.
The robots need your help, until they don't.
The same as it was before AI. AI is a bubble which isn't going to fundamentally change anything about society, because the tech simply does not do what is promised. Eventually, CEOs will stop being able to deny reality and AI will crash and burn.
This is about Trump, not AI
Academia is fundamentally in for a long and unstoppable decline due to population changes and birth rates.
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)
For the past decade or longer, top PhD programs in the US have systematically favored foreign applicants over Americans, particularly American men. It's high time for that to end.
Studying at MIT in the AI age is a complete waste of time and money. I'm surprised it's only 20%.
I’m not so sure about it being a waste of money. I got an almost full ride 15 years ago because of their generous financial aid program, that had only expanded. And time? Are all college programs a waste of time in your opinion, because of AI?
Laughably wrongheaded
Care to explain why?
Training/practice/collaboration matters. Eating won't make you a chef, watching movies won't make you a director, etc.
This is actually good news for society as a whole. There are way too many people who spend time in grad school only to discover that society doesn't have a job for them. Yes, it's not nice for the people who don't get in, but there's been way too much overproduction.
Right, all of those notoriously under-employed phds from MIT...
This is certainly true for 80% of universities and degrees. Even most bachelors degrees in my opinion. But if I’m being fair, maybe that’s not as true of places like MIT that teach tough and much more in-demand skills compared to universities where most students are studying things there is no demand for, and paying $150,000 or more for the privilege.
How is it better for society that the research never be conducted than that the researchers make less money than they hope to?
this might be true, but certainly isn't/shouldn't be true for MIT graduates. if you own a business of any kind, hiring an MIT grad is basically never a bad decision.
yeah are you saying society does not have a job for an MIT graduate ? this is mistaken let them learn don't worry they'll find a job thank you for thinking about the job prospects for them since you know better than someone who got admitted to graduate school.
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Can you please not post ragey fulmination like this on HN? This is exactly what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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I don't know or care what your opinion is (but by now my eye-rolling muscles are becoming ripped from the ever-conflicting ideological epithets that get hurled at us by people who seem affronted that there are standards of conduct that apply to them regardless of their “side”).
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.