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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

#191

Post by pkaye »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #53
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US? To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry…

There has been a general downtrend in Chinese students studying internationally.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...

Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...

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

#192

Post by counters »

loeg wrote: post #140
elteto wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is how it usually works, but again, MIT has tens of billions of dollars. They could literally write their own grants.

A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.

It's also worth noting that the structural costs of research are far larger than what any single institution would be able to shoulder. For instance, MIT has extremely limited supercomputing resources under their own maintenance. Researchers would typically use such resources from centralized places funded by the NSF or DOE, where larger pools of money can be assembled.

And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.

You might as well argue that companies should never take venture capital - e.g. if they can't finance their growth through profits alone then they shouldn't raise any money. The whole point of grants or investment is to subsidize and incentive work which has payoffs on much longer timescales than what market dynamics can sustain alone.

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

#193

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ryandrake wrote: post #127
mcmcmc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Precicely this

Everything is a bank for the rich. The people who “invested” in the endowment would rather burn their money than let someone use it without getting a multiple return on it

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

#194

Post by jalapenoj »

slg wrote: post #96
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

[flagged]

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

#196

Post by seanmcdirmid »

r2_pilot wrote: post #141
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because…

Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.

I lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi.

Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.

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

#197

Post by andrepd »

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…

> 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

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

#198

Post by aleph_minus_one »

alberto467 wrote: post #23
mrhottakes wrote: post #8

Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.

Not at all, the US is still the world leader in research institutions. And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.

> 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.

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

#199

Post by potbelly83 »

gNucleusAI wrote: post #174
cmiles8 wrote: post #155

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…

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

Education yes, research unfortunately no. I'm not saying research outside of academia is not possible, I'm just saying it's not taken seriously and this needs to change. We really do need to go back to the 19th century model of the researcher gentleman.

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

#200

Post by ZeroGravitas »

brianjlogan wrote: post #133
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.

Lots of historical precedent for an intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk leading to an uprising. I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!" Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority. Coal miners don't care that international students aren't co…

Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.
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