At least they seem happy with their MicroMasters program which may or may not be helping get more student in to the full grad programs:
A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
401–410 of 756 posts
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
I am a programmer that comes from a family of coal miners. They don't actually consider that constituency, its just a game to win a swing state.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#403Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#404Earlier 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…
This isn’t just limited to ivy leagues, the same thing happens at state schools. Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
> Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
Curious take; do you think if there were a no-immigrant law on the books those professorial positions would have gone completely unfilled? You _GOT_ an education with the help of immigrants, but that does not imply you wouldn't have had they not been there.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#405Besides 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 isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. If they think 8% is heavy they should see how much in taxes their janitors are paying
Presumably 0% on their 401k returns, which is the more appropriate comparison point to an endowment.
Respectfully, comparing a janitor's 401k to a $27.4 billion endowment is (very) tone deaf.
But yes, the tax goes against "keeping sacred systems sacred" principles and is an opinionated policy against rich entities that the current administration dislikes.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#407Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs
Can you back that up with.... you know... evidence? "regulation bad" tends to be a political talking point more than a valid argument when you're this vague.
Edited: to add, this speech talks a lot about the reduction in research funding from the US government which arguably has nothing to do with the regulatory environment.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year.
There is no shortage of money.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
your friend should make a blog post about that. People like that should be exposed.
People like what? Bosses whose methods you disagree with?
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.
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