A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #241

chirau wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures. America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.

It’s brain drain from other countries, especially China. The pipeline was simple: go to a mid tier Chinese university for undergraduate studies, get a masters or PhD from an American university, be advantaged in H1B due to this graduate degree, get a green card and settle permanently. That’s the brain drain. This pipeline has slowed down massively.

[deleted]

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

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Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

greenie_beans wrote: post #205

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw…

Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.

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

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Post by wasabi991011 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

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

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Post by jpadkins » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #294

kenferry wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

someone has to pay for administrators!

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

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Post by epolanski » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #160

epolanski wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world.

I did graduate in an Italian University I'm co-author of multiple high-impact papers.

Each and every one of my professors led advanced research in their field. Yes, they were limited in their budgets, had a handful of postdocs, not 50, in their labs, but that didn't make them any less good or prepared as scientists.

And I've also studied and worked in an American university, Ohio State in my case, as did several of my peers that went to ivy league ones.

I stand by my opinion: what makes some universities better is funding and the average quality of the student being impacted by the acceptance filtering.

The argument you bring up, if relevant, makes a difference when your education ends and your research career begins. Does not make you better at understanding organic chemistry or calculus.

You call them table stakes, yet, lack of fundamentals is widespread even among ivy league graduates in my experience.

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

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Post by bilbo0s » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

cmiles8 wrote: post #247

kenferry wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.

I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT.

The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump.

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

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Post by ModernMech » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

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Post by biophysboy » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

JimBlackwood wrote: post #254

andrepd wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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).…

Departments base grad school admissions on grant awards. The article states: grant awards for MIT went down more than 20%, then new MIT grad students went down 20%. The decrease in students has nothing to do with academia being detached from industry.

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

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Post by scarecrowbob » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #231

arenaninja wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So, question from the peanut gallery:

how is this different than saying if folks don't get a job it's just because they "weren't qualified"?

And isn't that just a tautology?

Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?

I mean, "I'm not too poor to eat, I just can't find anyone to sell me food at a price I can afford" is -a- take, but maybe not a helpful one.

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

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Post by frickinLasers » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #294

kenferry wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

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).