Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 756 posts

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

#591

Post by [deleted] »

garciasn wrote: post #550
xhevahir wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think. MDs and JDs are professional professional qualifications, which makes their situation a bit different from purely academic degrees. For example the ABA acts kind of like a cartel. I don't think I disagree with you, by the way. I'm just more unhappy about it. All of these sclerotic, even corrupt, institutions acting like aging vats for talented youth, all…

A JD is most definitely a terminal degree. If you need a source; here is one: https://fulbrightscholars.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/US...

[deleted]

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

#592

Post by canjobear »

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.

PhD students paying tuition would be highly unusual.

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

#593

Post by lowbloodsugar »

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #583
lordnacho wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common, most of the people I know from the UK system did their PhD in 3-4 years. In Europe you just study what it says as well. You happy to do a bachelor's in physics, your classes are all physics. You don't read shakespeare and learn french. You can also do this in high school, so you can from age 16 be studying just physics and math.

I did none of my degrees in US, and my physics degree was 95% math and physics. Physics degree is quite sequential anyway. You can't do QM in your first year or QFT in your second year. I've checked random people I know from oxford and none started after 3-year undergrad and those how did after 4 all did 4 year dphil (small sample size warning). 4+4 is reasonable.

Maybe things have changed. We did QM in our first year at Imperial. I suppose we have to make allowances for Oxford. Got to fit the poetry in somewhere. =)

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

#594

Post by 999900000999 »

drstewart wrote: post #566
999900000999 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking... Harvard is slipping and with the Republican war on education our top universities will continue to fall behind. This is 100% self imposed of course. >The list of canceled institutions includes Ivy League schools Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown and Princeton as well as other top universities like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins University’s School o…

Harvard is still the best along with many others, so no, you did make up the fact that Chinese universities are at the top and American ones aren't.

Best thing about the word "arguably" it's not a hard fact either way.

If Harvard can't recruit top international students they don't have a chance. The Republicans have decided to randomly suspend students visas, so there's not much Harvard can do.

How long do you think it's going to take the Republicans to ruin Harvard and the other schools they have vendettas against ?

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

#595

Post by Retric »

garciasn wrote: post #550
xhevahir wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think. MDs and JDs are professional professional qualifications, which makes their situation a bit different from purely academic degrees. For example the ABA acts kind of like a cartel. I don't think I disagree with you, by the way. I'm just more unhappy about it. All of these sclerotic, even corrupt, institutions acting like aging vats for talented youth, all…

A JD is most definitely a terminal degree. If you need a source; here is one: https://fulbrightscholars.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/US...

That’s arguable.

“LL.M. programs are usually only open to those students who have first obtained a degree in law, typically an LL.B. or J.D.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Laws

It’s generally for people who want to hyper focus on one area of law or switch countries.

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

#596

Post by CrazyStat »

caminante wrote: post #426
bragr wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it's not really good for your career Can you define that with more specificity? I find that academics have a major blind spot where good career means "the path I took" to the exclusion of all other paths. >Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science And your CV says another 6 dropped out. What was good for their careers?

He appears to be tunnel-visioning on academia. The vast majority (>75%) of Computer Science PhDs leave academia. [0] Becoming a "world expert in a specific topic" is overfitting skills for a sub-niche of a specific career. There certainly aren't enough jobs in academia. [0] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/213640/what-rat...

The goal of a PhD is to become a world expert in a specific topic, whether or not you’re planning on staying in academia.

This may or may not be in alignment with the student’s goals, and many students don’t really understand it going in.

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

#597

Post by nostrademons »

ModernMech wrote: post #545
dpe82 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about it as a system: If every university were subject to similar constraints, the average "quality" of research proposals would go down (everybody would have less time to spend on it) but since the pool of research dollars is assumed constant everyone would still get roughly their same slice - just with less overhead.

How it would actually work is only the best schools would keep their funding while lower tier schools would be shut out entirely and be forced to severely reduce their research agendas. There's a school near me that just went from College to University status because they grew their graduate program enough, they would probably not weather the storm the same as MIT.

On a system's level, that's probably the desired outcome in a world where total science funding is shrinking and fewer people can be employed as scientists.

In your example, I'd be more worried about the case where the specialized design reviewer knows what the available sources of grants are and procedure to apply to them, and the professor has since forgotten that knowledge, and so the department now cannot bring in any grants or revenue. That'd kill science even at established institutions like MIT or Yale or Harvard, even if they have very good researchers.

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

#598

Post by ModernMech »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #565
ModernMech wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that master's degree programs and professional degrees help subsidize undergraduate degrees, and that's a good thing for several reasons. First, it brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to local communities to help educate Americans. Second, it creates lasting bonds between America and the peoples of foreign nations; either the students learn and stay here to create value in America, or they go back ho…

I'm making factual statements not value judgements

"glorified immigration program" is not a factual statement, you'll have to back that up. The programs are in fact degree and certificate programs.

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

#599

Post by CrazyStat »

canjobear wrote: post #592
lovich wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PhD students paying tuition would be highly unusual.

In STEM fields, yes. In humanities it’s not uncommon.

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

#600

Post by mrlongroots »

nomadygnt wrote: post #366
jasonhong wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic. A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of…

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.

As someone who graduated with a 7.5 year long PhD last month,

I feel like PhD stipends are not a major problem. Like I got $40K in a low CoL area, but accounting for tuition and overheads I cost my advisor closer to $150K/year.

Now why are tuition and overheads that high is a reasonable question and it ties into inefficiencies in broader American administrative processes, but I cost society and taxpayers $150K/year, and that I'm doing it for societal benefit is honestly only partly true. The first 6 years was just me building real skills and letting myself be frustrated, and maybe in the last 1.5 years I did things that justify the $1M bill and more.

Even if I did eventually do things that justified the $1M bill, I think most students don't. The larger value IMO lies in a workforce trained in the failures and frustrations of grad school. While I could rattle of plenty of limitations of academia/grad school, I'm not entirely convinced that me being shortchanged/underpaid was one of those things.

Post reply on HN