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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

#631

Post by lovich »

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…

> Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports.

> They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.

If you weren’t aware the first car capable roads were laid by the rich to go racing around in their new technology called the “automobile”

> They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting.

We already have evidence of Zuckerberg buying up multiple houses to make a ring of privacy, or Bezos leaving his hedgerows higher than allowed around his property and just paying a fine. Or musks baby mama compound to handle his breeding fetish. For the physical security they already pay for armed guards.

> And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?

Who cares how they are produced if there are millions of people around the world who could be classified as professors and they could just hire the best?

To be clear I’m not saying these viewpoints are viable, but they fit the behaviors we are seeing from the ultra wealthy and I already said, addicts don’t always act rationally.

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

#632

Post by darkwizard42 »

chongli wrote: post #625
jrk wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that $4700/mo net pay? Or do they have to pay tuition fees out of that?

Generally speaking PhD students do not pay tuition, they are given a stipend and so there are no tuition fees.

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

#633

Post by matternous »

chongli wrote: post #625
jrk wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that $4700/mo net pay? Or do they have to pay tuition fees out of that?

If you're paying tuition for your PhD, you're getting scammed.

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

#634

Post by sysreq_ »

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…

My favorite idea is to tie student loans and grants not to the individual per say, but rather their choice of institution and study. For example, a student going to MIT for a hard, well-paying science career should be able to access more capital at a better rate than someone attending a party school to major in a lower-paying humanities field. Some have taken the current state of things to imply a failure of capitalism - when in fact what we are seeing is a distortion by non-capitalist principals. When you subsidize without regard for investment risk you skew the incentive structure. As it stands the optimum result is generated by maximizing enrollment and changing whatever additional sum a student can pay on top of what the government provides. Since it doesn't matter what they major in, or what the institutional quality is, the market adapts accordingly. By attaching student loan quantities and qualities to both the major and institution, we ensure equal access to the individual but leave market incentives to ensure quality. The break down in academic quality and corresponding labor market corrections is entirely predicated on institutional optimization through misalignments in subsidization. You can still make the system fair to individuals from non-traditional backgrounds without making it equal. I would argue that you can even do more to increase equitability to historically marginalized groups once you decouple from the 'flat rate' approach. The system is broken because we broke it. The solution is not to continue down the path of misaligned incentives but rather make sure the incentives are properly considered.

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

#635

Post by DANmode »

waterheater wrote: post #368
gedy wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes similar, some time back I was in a grad program that I was really interested in and decent at, but by then married and child on the way. My Master's adviser was honest that it's better to just work somewhere vs go down PhD path as I was doing this for the job prospects. The folks who stayed with this were "family-funded" and well to do in their home countries. They basically were doing it for various reasons asid…

I knew a foreign student like that. He was a great guy and a friend, and we worked in the same building. One day, I told him that I purchased a condo to save money during the doctoral program (in my unique situation, my mortgage was less than basically all other grad student's rent, at least those I knew). A little while later, he told me that he also purchased a condo. I asked him about his mortgage rate, and he gav…

> it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.

Where are you seeing remaining constructive academic culture, which parts of which institutions? Thanks.

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

#636

Post by daedrdev »

biophysboy wrote: post #246
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…

It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.

There is plenty of research, it is all kept as trade secrets because they are in a competitive business environment

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

#637

Post by mrlongroots »

caminante wrote: post #622
CrazyStat wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout. Given the attrition, I really question if PhD programs are honest with incoming prospects. Law schools and business schools are similarly "guilty" of pimping outcomes. ITT: it's people complaining about being overworked and mislead in their PhD programs.

> Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout.

I think there's some misinterpretation here. Not staying on in academia after PhD (common/modal) is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare).

In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K in the industry. I don't think there's any misleading going on.

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

#638

Post by daedrdev »

andix wrote: post #436
amarilio wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year. There is no shortage of money.

> There is no shortage of money This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it. It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, ai…

Until last year, the share of wealth by the 1% had been basically flat at 31% for a decade

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

Your expectations aren't matching reality

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

#639

Post by fc417fc802 »

mrlongroots wrote: post #637
caminante wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout. Given the attrition, I really question if PhD programs are honest with incoming prospects. Law schools and business schools are similarly "guilty" of pimping outcomes. ITT: it's people complaining about being overworked and mislead in their PhD programs.

> Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout. I think there's some misinterpretation here. Not staying on in academia after PhD (common/modal) is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare). In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K in the industry. I don't think there's any misleading going on.

PhD programs have remarkably high attrition rates prior to graduation (ie dropout). I don't know that it's 50% and obviously it varies by institution and field but it's quite large.

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

#640

Post by djoldman »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #602
SkyBelow wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 rec…

> 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.

Assuming that every kid has a non-zero chance of being the "right kid," then discouraging only one child results in infinite cost and so every child should be encouraged to try to cure cancer...

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