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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

#571

Post by dekhn »

lovich wrote: post #536
dekhn wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD candidates in the US usually get somewhere between $25K and $50K stipend, also some level of benefits (typically health care). Sometimes there is a tuition waiver (student does not need to pay grad program tuition). In my case I was making $32K/year with a tuition waiver and health benefits around ~2000, in SF, which was barely enough to rent a shared apartment and eat food. The only way I could rationalize it is…

Wait, some PhD candidates are being paid near minimum wage and are still paying their university to do work for their university? That just sounds like indentured servitude with extra steps.

Yes, I suppose you could try to justify it as "this is the price you pay for having the freedom to build your own research plan in the future" ("maximizing your future freedom") but in reality, this just sets you up for more of the same- getting a faculty position (pre-tenure) with a low salary, and immense pressure to bring in funds via research grants/publish papers.

I eventually tired of the process and moved to industry because the struggle wasn't worth it.

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

#572

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

Fewer graduate students is a good thing. Academia produces WAY too many graduate students relative to the jobs available (in aggregate, some fields it's more of a problem than others). It's good for the PIs (professors in charge of a group) to have lots of graduate students, but as a whole that means most of them will not get a job...

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

#573

Post by intended »

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.

The article is politely calling out the effects of the current regime in Washington and indicating that the government is finding other ways to not give funding to schools they don’t like.

I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.

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

#574

Post by intended »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #216
bongoman42 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government is not great at picking up or creating ideas. Academia has to lead in that and then show government why it would be best for the nation to fund those. The government is good at long term funding for ideas that may not be the best for private sector right away but it should not be creating ideas themselves otherwise you would get things like Lysenkoism.

Who do you think sits on these grant review boards? It isn’t bureaucrats. These people are scientists in the field too.

That mattered for the America that was, not the America that is.

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

#575

Post by intended »

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?

Why? The point was made very clearly; everyone who is in academia or research knows. People who are unaware or uninterested will move on and not be affected.

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

#576

Post by dgellow »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #394
dgellow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s discussed in the linked article

Yes. Just think title is little misleading. Makes it sound like there are less students applying, but it is really less positions.

Fair, yeah

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

#577

Post by light_hue_1 »

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…

I've graduated many PhD students at a top tier university. That advisor was correct. What they were doing is teaching their PhD student.

You must learn to write good reviews. That doesn't happen without writing quite a few.

Of course grad students should generate the first draft of talks, collect data, and generate graphics. That's exactly the point of grad school. You need to learn how to organize and present knowledge. How to tell a story.

>My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.

The point of the PhD is to learn to think about hard problems that are vague, to find your way around them, and learn how to do something new. It's not to stuff as much as possible into a dissertation or anything else.

And 6 years for a PhD? That's about right. You need to go from 0 to being the go-to expert everywhere on a totally new problem.

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

#578

Post by [deleted] »

jancsika wrote: post #559
mcmcmc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.

Chancellor mcmcmc: We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. (Unrelated note: all freshman-level math courses have been moved to Temporary Building #17.) Chancellor mcmcmc, 2028: We have a $24.8 billion endowment. And congratulations to Chancellor Trump! (Note: all freshman humanities classes have…

[deleted]

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

#579

Post by mcmcmc »

jancsika wrote: post #559
mcmcmc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.

Chancellor mcmcmc: We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. (Unrelated note: all freshman-level math courses have been moved to Temporary Building #17.) Chancellor mcmcmc, 2028: We have a $24.8 billion endowment. And congratulations to Chancellor Trump! (Note: all freshman humanities classes have…

Are all your comments this abrasive and obtuse? Obviously chucking a million at every grad student every year to do whatever they feel like is poor financial decision making. If the university is funding the research, they can retain the IP and reap the financial benefits. It’s a private for-profit organization. Endowment aside, they have hundreds of millions in surplus operating income. What do they need public funds for?

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

#580

Post by lenerdenator »

> For more than a year, we’ve all worked on responding to extraordinary new and sustained pressures on our budget (due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools)

Oh, no. Eight percent of returns on $27.4 billion.

How will they go on?

Maybe this is just the cranky Millennial in me, but seeing how so many people of my generation were told they absolutely, positively had to get at least bachelors degree to be anyone in society, and accordingly took out high-five/low-six-figures in debt at the age of 18, only to get the shaft over the next decade or two of their lives as wages stagnated and more and more jobs (even knowledge jobs) moved overseas in search of higher returns by the same people making major gifts to those endowments...

I don't have a problem with the tax.

Hell, there were times a few years back when the MIT media page on Facebook did nothing but post stories about all of the tech and engineering going on in China. This is also the same institution that hosts a media lab that continued to associate with Epstein after his sex offense conviction because his cash was as green as anyone else's.

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