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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

#431

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #391
jvanderbot wrote: post #31

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.

This beating aroud the bush doesn't help: > We’ve already seen clear signs that policy changes affecting international students and scholars are discouraging extremely talented individuals from applying to join our community. Whose policy? What policy?

Presumably that you'd have to be white as driven snow and have a Confederate-flag carrying Jesus holding an assault rifle tattooed on you to avoid ending up in a detention center awaiting deportation to some foreign hellhole prison.

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

#432

Post by Levitz »

Arodex wrote: post #242
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…

The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves. Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.) And don't you tell me it's a minority, when…

Calling out the GOP for imposing racism, sexism and ideology in a thread about US universities is certainly a choice.

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

#433

Post by [deleted] »

coryrc wrote: post #343
busterarm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raced over the key word in that sentence. Anything. Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.

No. A language with checked arrays can never have a buffer overrun like C arrays can. Some things are better. Game theory demonstrates this.

[deleted]

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

#434

Post by robotresearcher »

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…

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.

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

#435

Post by dekhn »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #318
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 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…

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.

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

#436

Post by andix »

amarilio wrote: post #408
frickinLasers wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks).

It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year. There is no shortage of money.

> There is no shortage of money

This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy.

I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it.

It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, airports, air traffic control). They even need a functioning academic ecosystem if they want their children to receive a real education, not just access to a few famous professors they can buy.

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

#437

Post by spyckie2 »

counters wrote: post #192
loeg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 superco…

I think this is a valid point, but if the talent pool shrinkage was truly a threat to your academic institution are you really going to just watch?

And the argument is that research funding is coming back but just not to MIT. So I think it is a serious long term issue that they have to consider going forward, and not something that they can just hope goes away.

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

#439

Post by mswphd »

krastanov wrote: post #319
wasabi991011 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.

It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever

it was illegal for private schools to have grad student unions until ~2016, as (private) graduate students were not classified as employees.

https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...

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

#440

Post by quantgenius »

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.
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