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A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

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Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#151

Post by bflesch »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99
slg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.

Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]:

> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]

> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]

> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#152

Post by simonw »

"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".

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#153

Post by JumpCrisscross »

slg wrote: post #143
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.

An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.

Maybe Athens and Alcibiades is a better example? Or the Carthaginians being Carthiginians.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#154

Post by ggoo »

malshe wrote: post #116
chvid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1

One of the best ways to get better at something difficult is to do it a lot.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#155

Post by cmiles8 »

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.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#156

Post by lumost »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16
htrp wrote: post #5

MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international. https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/

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

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.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#157

Post by zamfi »

notahacker wrote: post #138
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.

We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...

On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate.

But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#158

Post by jknoepfler »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #29

This is actually good news for society as a whole. There are way too many people who spend time in grad school only to discover that society doesn't have a job for them. Yes, it's not nice for the people who don't get in, but there's been way too much overproduction.

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

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#159

Post by paulmist »

jrflo wrote: post #147

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…

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

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#160

Post by coryrc »

epolanski wrote: post #90
dangus wrote: post #47

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, an…

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…

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.

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