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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

#481

Post by nostrademons »

quantgenius wrote: post #440

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…

It may be good but also can be very problematic.

Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest.

You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system."

Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.

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

#482

Post by noosphr »

Arodex wrote: post #469
noosphr wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French revolted because bread was too expensive then guillotined more than half of their best and brightest. I guess democracy was a mistake and we need to get back to inbread monarchy instead of the blood thirsty unwashed masses.

Democracy is a mistake, which is why we have Republics, with rules and constitutions. Not "anything you can get a slim majority to vote for, once".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_First_Republic

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

#483

Post by EvgeniyZh »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #460
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…

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure. There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willin…

There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty

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

#484

Post by YesBox »

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…

Just sharing another story:

A molecular biochemist PhD I know was forced to redo her advisor's experiment over and over again because it wasn't getting the results he wanted. She knew she was beating a dead horse over the several years she was directed to work on the experiment, and had no other choice but to continue marching forward.

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

#485

Post by crypto420 »

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…

My PhD advisor found out that my English writing skills are quite good and the rest of their lab were Chinese internationals, so they started making me write all of their research grants. 30 pages every 2 months, pre-ChatGPT days.

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

#486

Post by epolanski »

ModernMech wrote: post #307
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…

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 g…

You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.

E.g. while during the cold war US excelled in multiple chemical fields like photonics or organic chemistry, the Soviets smartly focused on less capital intensive ones like electrochemical chemistry and they excelled there.

But I hope you understand my perspective: I've graduated at a university nobody has ever heard about and at no point in my chemistry career I was anywhere behind in preparation to people from top tier colleges.

And the fact that this gets repeated endlessly and taken at face value is a gigantic distortion of what makes an individual prepared, because there's way too many variants.

I can easily stand by "on average ivy leagues produce better graduates", but there's no chance in hell I will ever buy the "top educators" argument. It's plain and simply false, with 0 hard data to back it up.

On top of that, this is repeated by the people that attended those very institutions but had no experience of how it is elsewhere.

If you've graduated like me, you know very well that each program has a wide variety of different educators. Hell, even the same university from year to year may change who holds what, with dramatic differences in the quality of teaching or difficulty and requirements to pass an exam.

I had an easy time doing Organic Chemistry 2, but those who enrolled just an year prior had to scale the Everest just to pass the exam. The reverse was true in calculus. And this is the same all over the world.

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

#487

Post by JuniperMesos »

SkyBelow wrote: post #453
robotresearcher wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art? Not the person you were asking, but I think we need to double down on disillusionment in these. I've spoken to too many kids who dreamed of careers in this well into high school, often at cost to other academic paths, when their performance already clearly showed they weren't going this route. Sadly, it is hard to be strong about correcting…

The Teacher's Argument, Fame, 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OVfOJ4Oi0c

Some kids who try to compete in a winner-take-most market, whether that's being a famous artist, performer, or academic, will succeed; most won't. No one who doesn't try will succeed. Someone is going to succeed. (Who wrote The Teacher's Argument? People who by definition made a famous musical, that's who.)

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

#488

Post by rangestransform »

nkoren wrote: post #149
busterarm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?

There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results: 1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive…

re:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist

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

#489

Post by seanmcdirmid »

busyant wrote: post #284
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because…

> Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. These places aren't homogeneous in their political tastes. I live in a northeast blue state, but there are rural pockets that are still heavily MAGA. And I'm sure Mississippi has liberal enclaves. That being said, I don't know what the "solution" to this problem is.

There will still be liberals in a new confederacy, and there will still be conservatives in a new union, we are only really talking about changing 50/50 into 60/40 on either side. BUT let's face it, our current equilibrium is not sustainable, this country can't survive another Trump, let alone the current one. Trump is talking about disenfranchising voters in blue states (because we must be cheating or we are illegal immigrants or something), I feel like that if we continue to union with these states, I will just wake up with a knife in my back someday.

Democracy works, we just have bad partners right now.

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

#490

Post by nomadygnt »

garciasn wrote: post #451
nomadygnt wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a longer time to graduate to become the “world expert” in their field is fine if grad students weren’t paid next to nothing for the 60+ hours a week that they are expected to work. As it is now it’s better to finish as quickly as possible so they can have a real life.

Isn’t this sort of how all terminal degrees work? MDs, JDs, etc are all putting the candidates through the wringer, for relatively low wages, until they’re “experienced”. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s common knowledge it’s the way things work if you want to have those magic letters of a terminal degree next to your name in your email signature. Don’t want to deal with the machinations required? Opt for the mast…

Yes, but I think as time goes on, fewer and fewer people are going to consider those letters next to their name worth it for the years that they need to invest. So, I am just saying that if MIT or whoever else is worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that they/we should be), then maybe it's time to change how it works.
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