Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 756 posts

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

#231

Post by ModernMech »

arenaninja wrote: post #188
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…

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…

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).

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

#233

Post by [deleted] »

rfergie wrote: post #169
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 Has this changed recently?

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by dfedbeef »

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.

I certainly am

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

#235

Post by floren »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #161
bflesch wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I, Claudius does a solid fictionalization of the man. (Suetonius if you’re craving drier.)

Agreed, it's my 2026 book of the year despite being written in the 30s

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

#236

Post by malshe »

ggoo wrote: post #154
malshe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I guess they will be great at retractions at this rate

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

#237

Post by marcosdumay »

cmiles8 wrote: post #208
potbelly83 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A real shock to academia is that top research increasingly takes place outside universities. On many areas universities are now 5-10 years behind what’s happening in the private sector. That’s causing a lot of panic within the system and a growing stream of departures as PhDs favor the private sector over academic tracts.

That is how it should be, and how it has historically been.

There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end.

The institutions that teach researchers also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme.

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

#238

Post by jimt1234 »

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…

> 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.

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

#239

Post by layer8 »

potbelly83 wrote: post #199
gNucleusAI wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Research is usually a collaborative effort nowadays. You’d need a League of Research Gentlemen. Not to mention that an important number of research fields require expensive research labs/equipment.

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

#240

Post by slg »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #200
brianjlogan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
Post reply on HN