Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is this true for arts and letters as well (non-STEM)?
A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
741–750 of 756 posts
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#742Earlier 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…
It's 56k a year for 6 years? I don't think the entire US matters for this point your trying to make. What are college educated people making in a city like Boston.
> What are college educated people making in a city like Boston?
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#743Earlier 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…
What's the cost of living in that area?
High inside Boston city limits, but not as crazy as Manhattan (NYC).
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be how many PhD programs go. Almost all want to quit in the last couple years despite the time invested already. Few want to stay in academia, because they have been abused and used and realize that the same would happened if they try to earn tenure.
R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis was a fun look at the hell that is graduate school told through a fantasy lens. That paired with the McSweeney’s snake fight article should be essential reading for all would-be grad students.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#745[flagged]
Can you please not post ragey fulmination like this on HN? This is exactly what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to be careful. These student-to-resident visa programs end up being used by "students" who really just want a visa. And then the "educators" turn into toll collectors who are accepting "tuition" in exchange for visa access. See for example "Graduate work visas: a disaster we were warned about" here: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-deliveroo-visa-scandal
student-to-resident and working-while-student are two completely different types of visas.
Not sure this distinction matters in practice. Either way you're creating an economic incentive to go through the motions of "studying" at a university.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism handles this problem well because a dysfunctional company can be replaced by a nimble startup. There's not really an equivalent in the education world, because of how the university prestige economy works. Prestige is sort of like a natural monopoly: The more prestigious your university, the more talent you attract in terms of students and professors. The more talent you attract, the more prestige you gene…
Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations. The solution for the prestige economy is as Paul Graham wrote: > Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. https://paulgraham.com/love.html Basically people need to defect, ignore…
I think you're too cynical. One of the strengths of democracy as a form of government is that leaders get replaced regularly.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#748Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please not post ragey fulmination like this on HN? This is exactly what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
[flagged]
I don't know or care what your opinion is (but by now my eye-rolling muscles are becoming ripped from the ever-conflicting ideological epithets that get hurled at us by people who seem affronted that there are standards of conduct that apply to them regardless of their “side”).
What I see is a wall of text that starts with “This is hands down the most pathetic thing I have ever read”, followed by an allcaps sentence; that’s two clear guidelines breaches in the first two sentences.
Glancing over the rest I see more all-caps phrases, ragey words, exclamation marks, and a final line starting with “That letter was written by a hack who needs to lose their job...”. This is an unusually high density of guidelines breaches.
We work hard to make this a place where people with different perspectives and values can discuss interesting and difficult topics. The only reason anyone thinks this is a good place to come to discuss anything is that we have guidelines and others make the effort to respect them and uphold them.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations. The solution for the prestige economy is as Paul Graham wrote: > Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. https://paulgraham.com/love.html Basically people need to defect, ignore…
I think you're too cynical. One of the strengths of democracy as a form of government is that leaders get replaced regularly.
I'd agree with that.
The part that makes me concerned is efforts by leaders to change the structure of our democracy from rules explicitly laid out in the Constitution to rules implicitly laid out in party bylaws and customs. Gerrymandering in particular is bad news: instead of having voters choose their leaders, it lets leaders choose their voters. Also the increasing centralization of power within the executive branch and within the federal government, the increasing politicization of the courts, and the influence of money on politics and politics on money.
All of these make the system more brittle. Democratic capitalism is effective because it tolerates partial failures well; if you get a bad leader, vote them out at the next election. When people no longer believe that they can vote out the bad leader, or that voting out the leader will change anything, then that release valve disappears.