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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

#311

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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).…

> Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance)

MIT doesn't have a law school. MIT cutting grad spots means national research priorities being compromised.

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

#312

Post by sashank_1509 »

“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.

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

#313

Post by JumpCrisscross »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #220
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.

YouTube and Patreon have done wonders for rebooting the modern research gentleman field. I follow a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science. It is progressing beyond 'backyard science'.

> a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science

Evidence of something that's been impactful?

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

#314

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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…

That does not explain a 20% YoY drop

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

#315

Post by busterarm »

magicalist wrote: post #287
busterarm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections. What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people get…

> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem. If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and…

You raced over the key word in that sentence.

Anything.

Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.

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

#316

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #265
zamfi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got pas…

> nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves

Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.

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

#317

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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?

Almost none of that goes into research funding.

Researchers are funded largely by government grants.

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

#318

Post by tasty_freeze »

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 to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.

I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.

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

#319

Post by krastanov »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #303
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.

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

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

#320

Post by ijk »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #303
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.

It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s.

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

Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.

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