A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

https://president.mit.edu/writing-speeches/video-transcript-message-president-kornbluth-about-funding-and-talent-pipeline

by dmayo • 2 months ago

621 705 2 months ago

president.mit.edu

chaostheory• 2 months ago

Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?

htrp• 2 months ago

MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.

https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/

JumpCrisscross21• 2 months ago

Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.

andix7• 2 months ago

The people decided that this sucks and have spoken. Dear god, make America stupid again!

jryio3• 2 months ago

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

groundzeros20155• 2 months ago

Isn’t the brain drain people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?

slg3• 2 months ago

Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.

taf2• 2 months ago

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]

lumost• 2 months ago

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.

Tsarp• 2 months ago

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.

lokar4• 2 months ago

But not a factor for private universities

ghaff• 2 months ago

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.

fastaguy883• 2 months ago

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.

AnotherGoodName• 2 months ago

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.

lokar4• 2 months ago

I assume it is due to less federal support in the form of research grants that support PhD students, labs, etc.

armchairhacker2• 2 months ago

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.

gNucleusAI3• 2 months ago

ah did not now. 41%

ethagnawl2• 2 months ago

What point are you trying to make by sharing this?

BeetleB7• 2 months ago

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.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

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.

browningstreet• 2 months ago

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.

ErneX• 2 months ago

Agree, they pretty much chased or scared foreign students away. This is the result.

neksn• 2 months ago

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?

phainopepla2• 2 months ago

This is about Trump, not AI

goatlover• 2 months ago

This isn't because of AI. It's the current anti-immigration policies.

chvid2• 2 months ago

Applied computer science.

AndrewKemendo5• 2 months ago

Training RL policies on edge cases by using humans to collect and instrument previously closed data systems.

andix7• 2 months ago

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.

rco8786• 2 months ago

Nothing to do with AI here, it's about immigration.

hgoel2• 2 months ago

This isn't about AI, it's about research funding and what the guys in charge think about science and education.

xp842• 2 months ago

How big is MIT’s endowment? They really still need to be at the taxpayer trough?

bitmasher9• 2 months ago

Hide behind a heavy regulatory mote. Pharmacist, Lawyer, etc.

rvz2• 2 months ago

The robots need your help, until they don't.

hibikir2• 2 months ago

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.

bigstrat20032• 2 months ago

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.

mrhottakes4• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross21• 2 months ago

other research institutions will become the new leaders

Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.

mrhottakes4• 2 months ago

You sow, then you reap. That's how it goes.

shimman7• 2 months ago

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.

epistasis3• 2 months ago

No, everyone is worse off. There is nothing good that comes from this.

mrhottakes4• 2 months ago

If you live outside the US, there is.

alberto467• 2 months ago

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.

mrhottakes4• 2 months ago

That's exactly what's happening.

chvid2• 2 months ago

I think the highest ranked technical universities by the end of this decade will be Chinese. Things are accelerating more than I expected.

j_maffe8• 2 months ago

Yes but the trajectory is in free fall. With rise of research in China we'll have a more even playing field.

pavel_lishin• 2 months ago

Give us time.

schnitzelstoat2• 2 months ago

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.

rvz2• 2 months ago

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.

ridiculous_leke• 2 months ago

Me crying as a South Asian

shaky-carrousel• 2 months ago

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.

aleph_minus_one• 2 months ago

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.

chanux• 2 months ago

FWIW: https://theconversation.com/china-surpasses-us-in-research-s...

danaw• 2 months ago

americans right now: "hold my beer"

Gimpei• 2 months ago

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.

deepsun2• 2 months ago

It needs to "start pumping" more money everywhere. Defense, for one.

mainecoder2• 2 months ago

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.

j_maffe8• 2 months ago

America is part of the world

A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.

mrits• 2 months ago

The world will catch up around the same time research institutions become obsolete.

epolanski5• 2 months ago

When there's less competition and opportunities for talent the whole community, globally, is impacted.

There's really nothing good about it.

j_maffe8• 2 months ago

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

JumpCrisscross21• 2 months ago

“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.)

jubilanti• 2 months ago

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?

FrustratedMonky2• 2 months ago

Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?

dgellow2• 2 months ago

It’s discussed in the linked article

FrustratedMonky2• 2 months ago

Yes. Just think title is little misleading. Makes it sound like there are less students applying, but it is really less positions.

uutangohotel• 2 months ago

f*** around and find out

groundzeros20155• 2 months ago

This is expected behavior.

softwaredoug• 2 months ago

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

hibikir2• 2 months ago

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.

tns_admin• 2 months ago

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.

blobbers2• 2 months ago

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.

plutomeetsyou2• 2 months ago

Isn't that the entire incentive structure for international PhD graduates already (at least on the private industry front)?

layer83• 2 months ago

Maybe. But the fact is also that the US have become a less attractive country to live and raise your children in.

MrDresden• 2 months ago

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.

0xDEAFBEAD9• 2 months ago

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

handle584• 2 months ago

student-to-resident and working-while-student are two completely different types of visas.

xhkkffbf• 2 months ago

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.

xp842• 2 months ago

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.

mainecoder2• 2 months ago

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.

bonsai_spool• 2 months ago

How is it better for society that the research never be conducted than that the researchers make less money than they hope to?

keeganpoppen• 2 months ago

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.

jknoepfler3• 2 months ago

Right, all of those notoriously under-employed phds from MIT...

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

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.

mcmcmc5• 2 months ago

They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.

ryandrake• 2 months ago

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.

elteto2• 2 months ago

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.

corygarms• 2 months ago

Wow you just made me realize that Elon Musk net worth is roughly 30x the value of the entire MIT endowment fund.

jancsika• 2 months ago

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 :)

fastaguy883• 2 months ago

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.

BeetleB7• 2 months ago

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.

selimthegrim2• 2 months ago

This is simply not true towrards the end of time limits as well as lower-ranked programs.

bensyverson• 2 months ago

Sounds like everything is fine then

willis936• 2 months ago

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.

dnnddidiej• 2 months ago

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?

pbhjpbhj2• 2 months ago

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.

intended5• 2 months ago

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.

intended5• 2 months ago

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.

0xDEAFBEAD9• 2 months ago

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.

elashri• 2 months ago

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.

nomdep• 2 months ago

I don't think MIT has money problems

schnitzelstoat2• 2 months ago

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.

plutomeetsyou2• 2 months ago

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.

dangus3• 2 months ago

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.

epolanski5• 2 months ago

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.

dangus3• 2 months ago

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.

coryrc7• 2 months ago

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.

biophysboy5• 2 months ago

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.

ModernMech11• 2 months ago

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.

Ifkaluva2• 2 months ago

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…

mcmcmc5• 2 months ago

Not at all. Notice they said nothing about applications or acceptance rates. It is actually more competitive to get funding.

cortesoft• 2 months ago

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.

counters3• 2 months ago

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.

nickswalker• 2 months ago

If you're applying to MIT, there are 20% fewer assistanships and (depending on the department and program) something like 10% fewer applications.

moussore• 2 months ago

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...

JumpCrisscross21• 2 months ago

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).

chermi• 2 months ago

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

xnx• 2 months ago

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.

lokar4• 2 months ago

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.

postalrat• 2 months ago

Yes of course they could admit any person who didn't finish high school.

DaSHacka5• 2 months ago

...or the massive swath of 95% of students with degrees they already decline? [0]

[0] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/

nyeah2• 2 months ago

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.

loeg7• 2 months ago

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.

deepsun2• 2 months ago

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.

nsxwolf• 2 months ago

When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?

jknoepfler3• 2 months ago

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.

dzonga• 2 months ago

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.

ethagnawl2• 2 months ago

It's truly baffling. We're hurting ourselves and helping our fri/enemies with one stroke.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Title is more generally: A message from MIT President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

jrflo• 2 months ago

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.

paulmist• 2 months ago

Can you give some context the grad student union and how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia?

swiftcoder• 2 months ago

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.

SecretDreams3• 2 months ago

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.

rfergie• 2 months ago

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?

divbzero• 2 months ago

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.

spwa4• 2 months ago

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)

analog31• 2 months ago

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.

amelius• 2 months ago

I suppose the Trump administration didn't improve the situation.

gNucleusAI3• 2 months ago

80% is high!

arenaninja• 2 months ago

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.

gedy• 2 months ago

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".

ModernMech11• 2 months ago

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).

at-fates-hands• 2 months ago

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.

robotresearcher• 2 months ago

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.

andrepd2• 2 months ago

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

dfxm12• 2 months ago

grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market

Is the grass generally greener though?

buran77• 2 months ago

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.

exegete• 2 months ago

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.

jimt1234• 2 months ago

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.

biophysboy5• 2 months ago

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.

onetimeusename• 2 months ago

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.

ricksunny• 2 months ago

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.

daedrdev2• 2 months ago

There is plenty of research, it is all kept as trade secrets because they are in a competitive business environment

j2kun• 2 months ago

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...

dhosek6• 2 months ago

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.

ransom1538• 2 months ago

"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.

micromacrofoot• 2 months ago

This isn't really new, I've heard complaints about academia for decades. What is new is that grant funding has been completely eviscerated.

jmyeet• 2 months ago

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?

Shalomboy• 2 months ago

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.

computerdork• 2 months ago

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?

wasabi991011• 2 months ago

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.

krastanov• 2 months ago

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

ijk2• 2 months ago

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.

DaSHacka5• 2 months ago

My university apparently doesn't have one either, just a "graduate student government"

Ar-Curunir3• 2 months ago

That does not explain a 20% YoY drop

tasty_freeze• 2 months ago

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.

19skitsch• 2 months ago

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..

jasonhong• 2 months ago

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.

etempleton• 2 months ago

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.

pcurve• 2 months ago

your friend should make a blog post about that. People like that should be exposed.

dekhn3• 2 months ago

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.

tty456• 2 months ago

Sad to think of the kind of impact someone like that could have in private sector had they not pursued the phd.

YesBox• 2 months ago

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.

crypto420• 2 months ago

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.

mohamedkoubaa7• 2 months ago

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.

matthewdgreen• 2 months ago

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.

lowbloodsugar4• 2 months ago

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.

QuantumFunnel• 2 months ago

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.

light_hue_1• 2 months ago

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.

tamimio• 2 months ago

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.

vatsachak• 2 months ago

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

moregrist• 2 months ago

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.

dheera• 2 months ago

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.

throwawaypath2• 2 months ago

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.

whatever1• 2 months ago

If money is what you are after the PhD offers one of the worst (effort / probability of becoming rich) ratio .

noosphr5• 2 months ago

That isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.

fortran77• 2 months ago

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.

vonneumannstan• 2 months ago

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.

b00ty4breakfast2• 2 months ago

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.

EvgeniyZh5• 2 months ago

There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty

gowld2• 2 months ago

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?

ashivkum• 2 months ago

MIT is not close to one of the first universities with a grad student union, the UC has been unionized since the 90s.

NoImmatureAdHom4• 2 months ago

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.

Balgair2• 2 months ago

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.

mold_aid• 2 months ago

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

EthanHeilman• 2 months ago

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.

_carbyau_• 2 months ago

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...

kgwxd• 2 months ago

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.

simonw4• 2 months ago

"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".

IncreasePosts• 2 months ago

Wow. If they think 8% is heavy they should see how much in taxes their janitors are paying

simonw4• 2 months ago

Presumably 0% on their 401k returns, which is the more appropriate comparison point to an endowment.

cmiles83• 2 months ago

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.

gNucleusAI3• 2 months ago

there are tons of alternative ways to get education , or do research

potbelly83• 2 months ago

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.

finolex1• 2 months ago

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

andrepd2• 2 months ago

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.

JimBlackwood• 2 months ago

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.

kenferry2• 2 months ago

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.

cmiles83• 2 months ago

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.

hamdingers• 2 months ago

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?

coredog64• 2 months ago

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.

MSFT_Edging• 2 months ago

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.

mohamedkoubaa7• 2 months ago

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.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

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.

tevon2• 2 months ago

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.

kmicinski2• 2 months ago

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.

pastel87392• 2 months ago

When do you believe that changed?

sysreq_• 2 months ago

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.

tevon2• 2 months ago

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.

shantnutiwari• 2 months ago

> 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

clarkmoody• 2 months ago

heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns

Cry me a river.

jobs_throwaway3• 2 months ago

Our best universities have massive endowments is a national asset

hmokiguess• 2 months ago

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.

tsunamifury• 2 months ago

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)

nafizh• 2 months ago

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%.

NoImmatureAdHom4• 2 months ago

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...

realo• 2 months ago

So the current USA administration defunds Science everywhere it can (NOAA, FDA , etc) and even at it's roots (MIT , etc).

Meanwhile in China ...

loxodrome• 2 months ago

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.

ptero• 2 months ago

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.

9999000009994• 2 months ago

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.

drstewart2• 2 months ago

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?

9999000009994• 2 months ago

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.

codybontecou2• 2 months ago

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?

9999000009994• 2 months ago

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?

mswphd2• 2 months ago

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

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

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

amykhar• 2 months ago

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.

JuniperMesos3• 2 months ago

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.

shimman7• 2 months ago

That conventional wisdom is pretty racist bro, which neoliberal convinced you otherwise?

noosphr5• 2 months ago

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.

lotsofpulp2• 2 months ago

Not really an issue if China decides to go the Soylent Green route.

djeastm• 2 months ago

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

ugh123• 2 months ago

We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords. China celebrates engineers.

Most real comment today

glitchc• 2 months ago

Maybe it's time to lighten the load at the top. Certainly there are some bureaucratic efficiencies to be had.

spyckie23• 2 months ago

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?

efavdb• 2 months ago

Agree, and I think it's probably healthy that the large endowments are being taxed a modest amount.

mono442• 2 months ago

Studying at MIT in the AI age is a complete waste of time and money. I'm surprised it's only 20%.

jobs_throwaway3• 2 months ago

Laughably wrongheaded

DaSHacka5• 2 months ago

Care to explain why?

hawaiianbrah• 2 months ago

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?

jobs_throwaway3• 2 months ago

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

Jimidesuu• 2 months ago

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

dwa3592• 2 months ago

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".

ck2• 2 months ago

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

krapp• 2 months ago

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.

sashank_1509• 2 months ago

“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.

macleginn3• 2 months ago

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.

ifethereal• 2 months ago

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.

hereme888• 2 months ago

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.

turzmo• 2 months ago

How do you mean politicizing and prioritizing foreigners?

czscout• 2 months ago

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.

lostathome• 2 months ago

I wonder who is dropping then. Lots of graduate students are from rich families, especially the international ones.

amirhirsch• 2 months ago

MIT should spin up MIT.ai for-profit, raise 100B @ 1T, then go buy big computer.

mattaustin2• 2 months ago

Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges.

mattaustin2• 2 months ago

Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges

beanjuice• 2 months ago

That has a fresh new tax on it following the BBB on gains.

vondur• 2 months ago

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.

jrochkind12• 2 months ago

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".

NoImmatureAdHom4• 2 months ago

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.

jrochkind12• 2 months ago

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.

innis226• 2 months ago

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.

contubernio• 2 months ago

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.

strix_varius2• 2 months ago

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?

g58892881• 2 months ago

Surprise

briandoll• 2 months ago

Great time to remember that Elon gutted the Department of Education

erelong2• 2 months ago

Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs

iaw• 2 months ago

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.

erelong2• 2 months ago

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

trunkiedozer• 2 months ago

Nothing interesting coming out of MIT, well, since X11

raybb• 2 months ago

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

mlmonkey• 2 months ago

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program ...

rob_c• 2 months ago

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...

ArchieScrivener2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

tomhow2• 2 months ago

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.

ArchieScrivener2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

quantgenius• 2 months ago

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.

gowld2• 2 months ago

The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.

voncheese• 2 months ago

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

CryptoBanker• 2 months ago

Please use some line breaks. I find this extremely difficult to read

kakacik• 2 months ago

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.

nostrademons4• 2 months ago

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.

ModernMech11• 2 months ago

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"

0xDEAFBEAD9• 2 months ago

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.

strix_varius2• 2 months ago

Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.

ClarityJones• 2 months ago

It's relevant in that the article mentions "research" 13 times, but "education" only 3 times.

secabeen• 2 months ago

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...

ModernMech11• 2 months ago

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.

mohamedkoubaa7• 2 months ago

Most universities subsidize their undergraduate program using graduate and professional degrees. And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs. Yes, even at elite universities.

cbsmith• 2 months ago

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.

weichi• 2 months ago

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.

ckemere• 2 months ago

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?

argomo• 2 months ago

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.

mikelitoris• 2 months ago

This is what a declining empire looks like

tty46• 2 months ago

"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?

Animats2• 2 months ago

"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.

gekoxyz2• 2 months ago

From what I understood they admitted fewer people. The professors are worried about not having funds so they aren't hiring as much

Animats2• 2 months ago

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...

kittikitti• 2 months ago

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.

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

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

JamesLeonis• 2 months ago

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

NoImmatureAdHom4• 2 months ago

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...

lenerdenator• 2 months ago

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.

ReptileMan• 2 months ago

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

djoldman2• 2 months ago

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.

stogot• 2 months ago

Can they not use their endowment to pay for the funding problem?

vindin• 2 months ago

This woman knows nothing about the real world

al_hag• 2 months ago

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

B1FF_PSUVM2• 2 months ago

Our Washington Office is working energetically, on both sides of the aisle,

Oh.

(bit curious, when did that sprout?)

timcobb• 2 months ago

For some reason it's hard for me to read one paragraph sentences and come away with an understanding of what was being communicated.

epsteingpt• 2 months ago

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.

jabeer• 2 months ago

wow that sounds scary. Good luck though

oliver66677• 2 months ago

MIT is a rich private school. Plz stop relying on government money.

A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

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