A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by Balgair » Thu, May 14, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

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…

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...

This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it.

TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions:

1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored.

2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral.

If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.

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

#602

Post by CamperBob2 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

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 thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.

The cost of encouraging the ones who fail can be heavy, but at least it's finite.

And it's not always obvious if "their performance already clearly shows they aren't going this route." The Nobel archives are full of acceptance speeches that describe how the recipient got off to a slow or unpromising start.

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

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Post by bluGill » Thu, May 14, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

cvwright wrote: post #534

nomadygnt wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. It is definitely what the PhD student signed up for. But like I said in a sibling reply I think if we are worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that we should be), then we may need to change the incentive structure surrounding the PhD programs to make it more worthwhile for people to invest the time and energy. Because how it is currently going it seems to me like fewer and fewer peop…

re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.

Football and other sports are marketing and their wages should be paid for by that department. Along with proof the marketing return on investment is there.

Grad students should be paid for their work as well.

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

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Post by turzmo » Thu, May 14, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

hereme888 wrote: post #330

Only a 10% budget cut? Should have been way more. I hear victimization throughout the article. It was the school's choice to focus on politicizing and prioritizing foreigners, and looking as "accepting" as possible, rather than educating and funding our citizens which is what matters.

How do you mean politicizing and prioritizing foreigners?

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

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Post by jrk » Thu, May 14, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

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.

To make "next to nothing" concrete: MIT EECS PhD students are currently paid about $4700/mo. This is substantially less than they'd make in industry, but it's around the US median personal income across all working-age adults, and well above the average 24 year-old. They frequently make a substantial extra at summer internships, putting them well above US median in the years when they do.

Also: it is school, not just a job. They are developing deep expertise and specialized skills. As a result, among other things, their earning potential tends to be significantly higher coming out of the PhD than out of undergrad.

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

#606

Post by epolanski » Thu, May 14, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

j_maffe wrote: post #518

Levitz wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if talent was kidnapped and dragged against their will. People go to the US because of an abundance of infrastructure and money. Which now goes down. It's a loss.

Those great minds will go to other nations where they're more appreciated.

I don't think you've ever worked in academia or research.

If you want to do cutting edge research you need money.

Try to do it in Italy, where an entire university has only one MRI working at 400 Mhz.

Then you go to EPFL, Switzerland, and a single lab has 15, I repeat, 15 .8 GHz MRIs.

Each of those instruments is in multi million $ range and requires expensive staffing and maintenance.

Then you need chemicals, you need an order for 6'000 $ worth of chemicals.

In Italy that's a lengthy and bureaucratic process.

When I was in EPFL, Switzerland, not even as a grad, but master's student, all it took was a half assed email and I would get everything I needed. No questions asked. Zero.

Need lab equipment? Every researcher and student had a "credit card", you'd go to the university shop and buy whatever you needed, no questions asked.

Hell, when I was in EPFL all it took me to get a GTX Titan X from Nvidia was to fill a form with my university email stating I needed it for research (I didn't, I used it for gaming), I had one one weeks later.

Do the same with the university email from Tor Vergata? When you truly need it for research? Laugh.

In US this abundance of resource is even higher, and it compounds.

Need some grad to help you? Her'es the budget. Need this? Have it. Need the most precise instrument of some kind on the planet? Book it.

I don't want to be harsh, but you're taking stances and having opinions on stuff you simply do not understand.

This isn't researchers being greedy, this is researchers understanding that if they want to do meaningful work, unconstrained, or less constrained, by budget reasons there is just a handful of places on the planet, half of them in the US.

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

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Post by shimman » Thu, May 14, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

andix wrote: post #584

lovich wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle. You don’t have to share the education time for your kids with the poor and think of how exclusive and how much status is advertises. As for everything else you said about it not being in the interest of the billionaires. Even if you are…

This is not true. Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports. They need police, so angry people don't buy rockets and shoot their planes down. They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting. They want to drive their sports cars somewhere. They don't want to live their life in a zombie apocalypse shelter. And how good wil…

No, what you are describing are billionaires using public money to subsidize their lifestyles.

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

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Post by coredog64 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

kenferry wrote: post #230

cmiles8 wrote: post #155

Academia is about to go through a generational reset. The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long. There are a ton of great things that come out of universities but it’s also clear that a model of charging folks well into the six-figures for a useless degree that doesn’t prepare them for the workforce is dead and a reckoning is underway. Many schools will fail and shut down. Of those…

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.

Do grad students make enough to live and make payments against the principal of their student loans? If not, then that's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

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

#609

Post by shimman » Thu, May 14, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

dhosek wrote: post #581

shimman wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea the on-going costs of physical things did not decrease over time, what an interesting thing to know. Here I thought that after you build the building and paid off the building, then for funsies also bought all the land surrounding the building, that at some point it would drastically cheaper to maintain it; but what you're saying makes so much sense!

You have clearly never owned a home. The older the building, the more maintenance it requires.

That absolutely does not justify in taking a 50% vig, good lord.

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

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Post by BeetleB » Thu, May 14, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

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.

Obvious disclaimer: At this point we are talking about outlier colleges/universities.

But to give some examples, I know colleges (both in US and abroad) where people did real analysis and abstract algebra in their first year (and why not - neither requires prerequisites other than maturity).

I know a college (in the US) where they did Jackson for E&M in the 3rd year (and some advanced students did in the 2nd year). In most US universities, people normally do Jackson in the first year of their PhD.

I think it's rare to do QM before 2nd year, but in principle, as long as you know calculus/diff eq, you can get going on it. The catch is that the interesting applications require other branches of physics (e.g. E&M). When I did QM, all those applications were part of QM II anyway.

But yes, again, these are outliers and I wouldn't want to say it's the norm in the whole country.