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 for difficult job prospects given the current market. MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. I can see how undergrads may look at how AI can do most of their homework assignments, and see how miserable grad students are, and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.
I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense.
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
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 aside from "I need a job".
While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.
That may well be true but it's not the whole story. My department has been hiring continuously for 15 years, and there have been more than a few years we have not been able to hire anyone because the applicant pool was underqualified. So while it's true there aren't enough jobs for everyone, there are still jobs for those who want them enough to get the qualifications for them (your field may vary).
> 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.
I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.
My fiancee left a lovely stats PhD program at Maryland after two years and entered the workforce instead. She started the fall before the COVID-19 quarantine in the US, and while the shift to online only exacerbated her feelings, there was plenty worrying her to make the decision palpable. Her stiped was meager, her advisor was functionally absent and _would not_ use their computer, and the thought of coming out the other end six years later with debt from her undergrad and no job - or worse, a job she would need to spend more money to accept and move for than she had on hand - was terrifying. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think she regrets her decision. I'm sure she wishes the conditions were different, but the value of a PhD today has been dragged down so thoroughly that it only makes sense for a privileged few.
My dad got his PhD in the 1950s,and went straight to industry. He said it was always this way.
However there have been a couple of long term trends: Switch to gig economy for college teaching, and loss of manufacturing industry. My first job out of grad school was in a factory.
Not that I’m aware of? Most PhD grads not staying academia seems to be a long-running phenomenon. The number of permanent academic positions simply does not match up against the number of PhD grads.
Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to say would be very high by historical standards.
This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more.
Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...
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.
Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.
The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons:
1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions.
2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions.
3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again.
How to resolve?
1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members.
2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review.
3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.
> 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 for difficult job prospects given the current market.
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
So I’m not in academia but even I’ve known for 20+ years how horrendous the job prospects are. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where everybody sat down in 1972. Academia is full of baby boomers who refuse to retire or die. And the number of positions just isn’t growing anywhere near to the demand.
I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions.
Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal.
I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay ...
... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.
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 left they will be much smaller and with tremendous focus on bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
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.
This is about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
You speak of "market" and "cost-value" and economic darwinism. You seem to be confused: many things do not work based on next-quarter revenue optimisation, fundamental science research being one of them.
> This is about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...).
This is a bit short sighted. Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance). Some university studies need to work together with industry (again, law. or some physics studies).
Next to that, even for studies that do fundamental research (mathematics), a lot of people attend university for it’s job prospects. For instance, if you want to become an actuary - having done mathematics as a degree will help.
My point being, a large part of university studies and their students are there to “Prepare for the workforce”. I don’t think you can do without that. Fundamental research is not some fantasy world that can do without industry or other things developed by the outside world.
Not really relevant to this article, which is about graduate students in research programs, who get a stipend and don't pay anything. Of course, low stipends are also a big detractor for potential students
> bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
I firmly believe looking at academia through this lens is part of the reason why it has been so firmly exploited as a business.
To treat the school as a business in partnership with corporation treats the student as the customer and product. Like everything in our time, the push for profit leads to optimization and enshitification.
The student experience, student outcome, and quality of academia have all been sent through the enshitification wringer.
We can point to the lowering in quality of research to this, the reliance on poorly paid grad students, which end up producing worse work, worse research, and less effect on industry.
I firmly believe there needs to be a degree of separation between academia and corporate interests.
To optimize for profit finds local maxima and limits the ability of academia to do real research.
Education yes, research unfortunately no. I'm not saying research outside of academia is not possible, I'm just saying it's not taken seriously and this needs to change. We really do need to go back to the 19th century model of the researcher gentleman.
A real shock to academia is that top research increasingly takes place outside universities. On many areas universities are now 5-10 years behind what’s happening in the private sector. That’s causing a lot of panic within the system and a growing stream of departures as PhDs favor the private sector over academic tracts.
That is how it should be, and how it has historically been.
There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end.
The institutions that teach researchers to also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme.
Research is usually a collaborative effort nowadays. You’d need a League of Research Gentlemen. Not to mention that an important number of research fields require expensive research labs/equipment.
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.
There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.
Isn't that what the article is saying? Less research funding == Fewer admissions.
> The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding.
Minor quibble: It's not merely external funding. In many sciences (math, physics, chemistry), it's common for the department to promise funding through non-research means for a number of years. In my top school, I think physics students were guaranteed TA funding for 2 years (until they pass the qualifying exams and find a professor). Math students are almost always funded as TAs (the department guaranteed 6 years).
It's mostly engineering departments that don't do this.
I was recently shown a grad office door covered with home grown memes. There was a printout of a disassociating cartoon teddy bear taped on top in the center with the caption "unfortunately the vibe continues to deteriorate".
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
Fund them to do what exactly? Come up with their own research ideas?
You got the pipeline backwards. The government picks the research areas/priorities then allocates funding for those, and universities apply and compete to get grants. _Then_, once a grant is given to a school, is funding for labs and graduate students allocated.
If the government has no interest in doing research and provides no funding then schools don’t have projects to work on and no money to hire graduate students.
A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
It's also worth noting that the structural costs of research are far larger than what any single institution would be able to shoulder. For instance, MIT has extremely limited supercomputing resources under their own maintenance. Researchers would typically use such resources from centralized places funded by the NSF or DOE, where larger pools of money can be assembled.
And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
You might as well argue that companies should never take venture capital - e.g. if they can't finance their growth through profits alone then they shouldn't raise any money. The whole point of grants or investment is to subsidize and incentive work which has payoffs on much longer timescales than what market dynamics can sustain alone.
> A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.
Some of it has some restrictions, but money is fungible. I do not believe that MIT is actually limited (in practice) from writing their own grants because of donor restrictions (if they wanted to).
> And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
Somehow they spend $1.2B/year on administration, so, yeah. Don't do that. But they easily have enough principal to cover grant funding for the remaining years of this administration.
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.
At this point, these well-endowed universities are essentially Private Equity firms, each with a university hanging off the side as a minor, semi-profitable department within the firm.
Everything is a bank for the rich. The people who “invested” in the endowment would rather burn their money than let someone use it without getting a multiple return on it
The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.
Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)
And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.
We need to finish Reconstruction. That sounds idealistic, even pie in the sky unrealistic. But we could certainly measure progress in that direction: US incarceration rates are insanely high, and the prison industrial complex is modern slavery. We would know victory when we put fewer people in prison than China, for example.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
> Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves
Something I learned at The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston [1] is that Southern slaveowners were almost all terifically leveraged. Slaves were purchased predominantly with borrowed money (from, I might add, the North). And slaves were expensive, making up a significant if not dominating fraction of estates' assets.
For Southern elites, therefore, abolition was an existential question. It meant bankruptcy and poverty, with insult added to injury in their creditors being Northerners. To my knowledge (and I'm no expert in this) the question of abolition paired with debt forgiveness was never seriously discussed by the Union.
So yes, Confederate racism absolutely condemns its common folk. But even a moderately well-read Southern commoner would understand that abolition meant financial crisis, taking out their communities' largest tax payers, donors, consumers and employers in one swoop.
I didn't walk away from the Museum sympathetic to slavery. But I did become more sympathetic to the South; in particular, to their bewildering decisions to continue prosecuting a war they were so very obviously, from a history textbook's perspective, losing. (To be clear, slavery is wrong. The South seceding was stupid. Not suing for peace after Gettysburg and Vicksburg stupider still.)
The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
They might struggle understanding why the decision-makers were elected, though maybe not even that. It’s well-documented why the decisions are being made. Decisions being bad doesn’t mean that they aren’t perfectly explainable.
It seems pretty cut and dry to me: Boomers I know today still rave about Regan-era policies and how good they were for everyone, although I'm not sure what "everyone" they are referring to in that sentence. Regan-era deregulation, cutting of social spending, and favoring asset-based versus wage based economic growth certainly laid the groundwork for where we are with today's K-shaped economy.
Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.
Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
What if the electorate is so stupid that what appeals to them is ruinous?
What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc.
No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results:
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
Actually a much better and easier solution to gerrymandering would be to increase the number of House representatives to be the same proportion of population it was in 1776. There will be roughly 15,000 representatives in the House. Gerrymander that!!!
We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections.
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance.
You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.
If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.
Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
I lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
no, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.
So? How's that any different than everyone in Buffalo just having to bend over and take it because NYC and Albany want to do spreadsheets and services instead of factories?
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
It's a tempting thought but play it out. Now you live next to a belligerent fascist theocracy with nukes who likes to invade foreign countries and aspires to control the entire western hemisphere from Canada to Chile. How does that end?
> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
This is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
Probably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing.
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
It's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population.
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
are there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.
I think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
Brain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
It’s brain drain from other countries, especially China. The pipeline was simple: go to a mid tier Chinese university for undergraduate studies, get a masters or PhD from an American university, be advantaged in H1B due to this graduate degree, get a green card and settle permanently. That’s the brain drain. This pipeline has slowed down massively.
They are saying the opposite. People have been coming to America for higher education and staying here and that has historically benefited the US. And that seems to be changing.
Every prestigious (STEM) college I’m aware of, a large ratio of graduate students and professors are foreign.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
If you look at most decent engineering universities, are they any different if you restrict to engineering/science departments? I don't have statistics, but when I was in grad school, the mini-institute I was part of (5-6 faculty members + students) had more than 70% foreigners. And I think all the non-foreigners were born abroad (whether Green Card or US citizen).
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
I'm amazed at how many of the respondents in this HN thread aren't discussing the super-mega-seismic externalities laid upon universities by the current administration. Universities always have issues, but there's an orange elephant in the room.
Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.
Would be nice to see if this number dipped from before. International students typically end up paying out of station tuition and is a huge source of income for the univs.
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
That is much less true of grad programs in technical fields. Undergrad, international students are indeed more likely to pay full-boat--or at least larger boat--than US applicants.
The real problem is we make it too hard for international researchers to stay here. These high end student visas should have strong paths to permanent residence - maybe even an expectation
This was a relatively widespread opinion 20 years ago. I had Roy Blunt, Republican senator from Missouri at the time, come to talk to us, telling us that he thought a science Ph.D should come with a green card stapled to it. But the politics of immigration never let small bills through, as people wanted bigger ones, and the bigger ones always had things that would risk filibusters.
And we all know that the current US senate isn't anywhere near passing any reform, as nothing can hit 60, and if anything did, it would be immigration restrictions.
There was a time that the road was kind of easy: During the Clinton and early GW Bush years, the H1 limits were very high, so if you could find a job, you at least got on that train. It was a long wait if you didn't have a Ph.D, but it was extremely reliable. Not so much anymore.
Well the popular argument is that it takes so long to pass any kind of bill that smaller bills would just mean more bills and a bigger backlog. I don't really buy that.
The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to <their side> to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
Who? Maybe you mean Europe? After all, why aren't all those brilliant African students studying German or Italian? I assume you also mean that Europe has terrible universities and has completely ceded the future to glorious China?
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 of Advanced International Studies.
>That comes after the Pentagon chief said earlier this month that he would cancel professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard.
>In his memo, Hegseth also included a list of potential new partners schools: Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine, University ofTennessee, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, Clemson, and Baylor, among others.
Granted that Academia is very exploitative. My wife is a Post-doc, so I hear these extremely heart breaking stories of how professors have all the power when it comes to graduate students and post docs. But this drop in graduate students is not because of that - this drop is purely because of funding cuts and the AI hype. Why would humans wanna go through a Phd when you have industry leaders harking about how AI is going to do original science, when the political leaders of the country wanna cut funding for basic science research. On a slightly different note, China increased funding for the basic science research. This is peak of "how to shoot yourself in the foot".
No one needs a comp-sci degree. Ask Claude to give you learning timelines and challenges for LeetCode interviews. That'll trick those people who think fundamentals matter and can't be learnt on the job.
Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.
I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.
Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
> And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
Most of Europe is behind because the money there has dried up. (Except for Norway)
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.
Talent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.
And neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)
History is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.
I wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.
Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
No this is not good for the World in case you have forgotten America is part of the world and though I hate what is happening just as much as anyone I will work to make this nation better. We are in a tough time and I genuinely do not know if things will get better but we will try.
That's very funny because up until very recently there was very little competition because one nation was dominating research using talents from other countries. Consider it as a weakening of a monopoly
> “Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.
That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.”
Not sure the HN title meets the no-editorialised-titles rule. (EDIT: Nvm, misread or title may have changed.)
What is editorialized? Those programs have not yet completed the admissions process for the upcoming year. Obviously any statistics about admissions for the upcoming year would not include them?
destroying some of America's best institutions & best returns ROI wise - talent pipeline, R&D.
unfortunately the damage from these things take at least 10 years to be felt throughout the economy. & then blame will fall on someone that's not responsible.
In STEM, federal grants pay for almost all US PhD students. And the tuition they would charge would never have covered the actual cost. It has always depended on research grants. Which makes sense, a PhD is mostly and apprenticeship in how to do cutting edge research.
The article mentions that a major factor in technical grad school is research funding. Most grad students in engineering, for example, don't pay tuition themselves. They work for a pittance and receive tuition as a benefit.
Since this is the first comment that emphasizes research which most are conflating with graduate school in general. I think that is the salient effect of the funding cut, which affects research (PhDs) more than cash cow coursework programs such as Masters, MBAs, and JDs. Most are forgetting that US global position Post-WWII comes primarily from basic research -> applied research pipeline; Silicon Valley alone did not endow us with the internet, satellite, rockets, etc.
Did people even read the article? Endowment taxes make sense - 1.4% taxes on investment vehicles in the billions just do not make sense. Then the president masquerades enrollment by ignoring the ~4% bump for Sloan (and EECS). Grants / funding though is a different story and worth mentioning/discussing...
The speech makes a lot of arguments. It argues against the endowment tax, which seems politically deaf. But it also cites research-funding cuts (both legal and illegal).
It is mainly because of federal funding cuts that departments accept fewer students as written in the actual text. But I might add that the changes of immigration and the changes in foreign policy might played a rule. There are no mention of AI at all.
Schools like MIT pay PhD students barely above or sometimes below the poverty level of that particular state as monthly stipend. Yeah, research funding got slashed but if they had the will they could have come up with the money for that 20%.
This is what happens when you model education like factories and have it be a product rather than a basic human right, it needs to sell and it needs ROI for shareholders.
> And frankly, it’s a loss for the nation: When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and you shrink the supply of future scientists.
"due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools"
I went digging. Turns out that's a 2025 "Big Beautiful Bill" thing, which raised that from 1.4% to 8% but only for colleges where the endowment exceeds $2,000,000 per student. Which meant MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard.
I read this as saying that MIT is becoming less competitive? Means if you just finished your BS, applying to a PhD program at MIT may be a 20% better bet than before, especially with the job market in its current condition…
It would actually be _more_ competitive, because what's driving the reduction in admissions is uncertainty in grant/funding availability.
That means fewer available slots overall. Kornbluth's comments don't explicitly state anything about _applications_, just _admissions_. Given the heightened economic uncertainty and poor job prospects for recent graduates, I'd expect more students to be looking for graduate school as a way to tide themselves over.
So a very, very bad picture for folks seeking graduate education and training.
Except for 8% tax on endowment returns, that sounds fair to me, no?
US universities got it very cozy: federal subsidies, admission income, donations, AND investment income. Like Harvard buying very expensive vineyard land (in Napa valley California) using excess cash.
We have never seen a presidential administration misunderstand soft power so badly.
US universities were an incredible blessing to the “brand” of the USA. Foreign students come to the US, pay an inflated full sticker price, subsidizing US students, and learn from top educators who generally have a lens of Western values.
Many of these students pursue permanent citizenship and bring with them new ideas, businesses, and grow their families who all become new members of the American economy and social fabric.
I personally know people from other countries that I met in school who came to the US and came out of that experience with a much more pro-Western mentality.
Just look at the story of the CEO of Nvidia.
But now the United States is going to be the opposite. Jensen Huang resolved to move to the United States to escape the social unrest of Taiwan, now we see the best and brightest young Americans with options preferring to move elsewhere to escape the ever-growing regression of this country.
Jm2c, but I really don't believe the "top educators" argument.
People keep mixing correlation with causation.
The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.
Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.
But that's about it.
There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.
There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.
Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.
You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.
The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.
And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.
And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.
And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.
Obviously there is a selection effect that confounds any causal comparisons between those who do and do not get into MIT. But the better counterfactual is students who are accepted but do not attend. A diff-in-diff study with these two groups would be a better test. There are unique features of MIT: more money, elite network, etc. I do share your skepticism though - I've worked w/ MIT people before. I think they are very smart but also very lucky.
While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.
> Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world.
I did graduate in an Italian University I'm co-author of multiple high-impact papers.
Each and every one of my professors led advanced research in their field. Yes, they were limited in their budgets, had a handful of postdocs, not 50, in their labs, but that didn't make them any less good or prepared as scientists.
And I've also studied and worked in an American university, Ohio State, as did several of my peers.
I stand by my opinion: what makes some universities better is funding and the average quality of the student being impacted by the acceptance filtering.
The argument you bring up, if relevant, makes a difference when your education ends and your research career begins. Does not make you better at understanding organic chemistry or calculus.
You call them table stakes, and yet, I had peers coming from Harvard or MIT, not being able to explain basics like why large pools of water appear blue. And we're talking about photonics "experts", people that should be intimate with the interaction between light and matter. In fact, lack of very solid fundamentals is something I experienced often in ivy league students. And I hold my opinion on why's that: these institutions aggregate competitive people that are focused on results and votes, not understanding.
And the over abundance of multi choice tests in american universities does not promote that kind of intimate reasoning.
Yeah. It's called brain drain. Talent has options. It weighs pros and cons. When the relative attraction of a country and thus institutions within it drops, they choose to go there less.
To be clear, I would still choose to do my PhD in the US. But this is a marginal effect, people weigh many factors. If you think, for example, you're going to be constantly worried about visa issues, you may just choose Europe or China over the US.
If you're stuck in the US for practical reason, it might be time to start pretending to be dumb. When there's no more immigrants to threaten with deportation, if they don't help the government build the machines of control, they will start forcing anyone with a hint of intelligence to do the work.
Note that MIT carefully avoided identifying one of the root causes of this - the so called "Genesis" program that replaces all traditional, peer-reviewed national science funding programs with a half-baked GenAI drivel-fest with no clear application guidelines, a 6-week application timeline, and rules that funnel half of a now diminished national research funding pool to corporations that bribed the Trump administration.
Academia is fundamentally in for a long and unstoppable decline due to population changes and birth rates.
But I had assumed we’d end up with a bunching effect that would push up demand for MIT rather than down. (When there is an over decline in something, often remaining participants bunch harder into the most desirable remaining)
This is actually good news for society as a whole. There are way too many people who spend time in grad school only to discover that society doesn't have a job for them. Yes, it's not nice for the people who don't get in, but there's been way too much overproduction.
This is certainly true for 80% of universities and degrees. Even most bachelors degrees in my opinion. But if I’m being fair, maybe that’s not as true of places like MIT that teach tough and much more in-demand skills compared to universities where most students are studying things there is no demand for, and paying $150,000 or more for the privilege.
yeah are you saying society does not have a job for an MIT graduate ? this is mistaken let them learn don't worry they'll find a job thank you for thinking about the job prospects for them since you know better than someone who got admitted to graduate school.
this might be true, but certainly isn't/shouldn't be true for MIT graduates. if you own a business of any kind, hiring an MIT grad is basically never a bad decision.
Very few people are paying their way to MIT's graduate programs, so it's not as if it's a matter of AI scaring people into not paying for expensive education or anything. Graduate programs are full of international students that used them as ways to enter the US job market. With that road getting harder for a variety of policy decisions, there's just less reasons to consider it.
Now, if you want AI-influenced decisions, that might have to do with undergrads and expensive institutions. If you are a high school senior now, and you aren't getting major rebates, you have to consider whether a degree at an expensive college, which might be be a quarter million dollars sticker, is going to be all that wise of an investment. If AI really has a big effect on hiring knowledge workers, any bet you make can be quite wrong. But this isn't affecting MIT, Harvard or Yale, which could fill their freshmen classes 100 times over with very good students if they felt like it. It's just deadly for 2nd and 3rd rate liberal arts schools though, as high prices, the international student drought and fewer american children are just wrecking havoc.
But again, the AI bits just don't matter to top schools like MIT in the slightest. Too much demand of American students for undergrad.
The same as it was before AI. AI is a bubble which isn't going to fundamentally change anything about society, because the tech simply does not do what is promised. Eventually, CEOs will stop being able to deny reality and AI will crash and burn.
For the past decade or longer, top PhD programs in the US have systematically favored foreign applicants over Americans, particularly American men. It's high time for that to end.
In the last 25-50 years the universities pivoted from providing an education to focusing on research and viewing students as pesky legacy, whose education is delegated to grad students. Even at large public universities, very few tenured professors teach anything except grad and senior level undergrad classes. The contracts are scoped for minimal teaching load.
This system needs a reset. It could (after a likely painful disruption) refocus on teaching, keeping current (exorbitant) prices but providing a better education. Or it could focus on costs (cutting off unnecessary expenses). Or do something else, but the current setup is not sustainable.
Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.
Has this changed recently?
However there have been a couple of long term trends: Switch to gig economy for college teaching, and loss of manufacturing industry. My first job out of grad school was in a factory.
This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more.
Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)
University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...
Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions.
2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions.
3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again.
How to resolve?
1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members.
2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review.
3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions.
Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal.
I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?
... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.
Lol. Well you should introduce MIT to the concept of supply and demand. I am confident you can find people to pay MIT to work there.
Is the grass generally greener though?
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 left they will be much smaller and with tremendous focus on bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?
You speak of "market" and "cost-value" and economic darwinism. You seem to be confused: many things do not work based on next-quarter revenue optimisation, fundamental science research being one of them.
This is a bit short sighted. Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance). Some university studies need to work together with industry (again, law. or some physics studies).
Next to that, even for studies that do fundamental research (mathematics), a lot of people attend university for it’s job prospects. For instance, if you want to become an actuary - having done mathematics as a degree will help.
My point being, a large part of university studies and their students are there to “Prepare for the workforce”. I don’t think you can do without that. Fundamental research is not some fantasy world that can do without industry or other things developed by the outside world.
I firmly believe looking at academia through this lens is part of the reason why it has been so firmly exploited as a business.
To treat the school as a business in partnership with corporation treats the student as the customer and product. Like everything in our time, the push for profit leads to optimization and enshitification.
The student experience, student outcome, and quality of academia have all been sent through the enshitification wringer.
We can point to the lowering in quality of research to this, the reliance on poorly paid grad students, which end up producing worse work, worse research, and less effect on industry.
I firmly believe there needs to be a degree of separation between academia and corporate interests.
To optimize for profit finds local maxima and limits the ability of academia to do real research.
I follow a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science.
It is progressing beyond 'backyard science'.
There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end.
The institutions that teach researchers to also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme.
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 number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding.
Minor quibble: It's not merely external funding. In many sciences (math, physics, chemistry), it's common for the department to promise funding through non-research means for a number of years. In my top school, I think physics students were guaranteed TA funding for 2 years (until they pass the qualifying exams and find a professor). Math students are almost always funded as TAs (the department guaranteed 6 years).
It's mostly engineering departments that don't do this.
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
You got the pipeline backwards. The government picks the research areas/priorities then allocates funding for those, and universities apply and compete to get grants. _Then_, once a grant is given to a school, is funding for labs and graduate students allocated.
If the government has no interest in doing research and provides no funding then schools don’t have projects to work on and no money to hire graduate students.
It's also worth noting that the structural costs of research are far larger than what any single institution would be able to shoulder. For instance, MIT has extremely limited supercomputing resources under their own maintenance. Researchers would typically use such resources from centralized places funded by the NSF or DOE, where larger pools of money can be assembled.
And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
You might as well argue that companies should never take venture capital - e.g. if they can't finance their growth through profits alone then they shouldn't raise any money. The whole point of grants or investment is to subsidize and incentive work which has payoffs on much longer timescales than what market dynamics can sustain alone.
Some of it has some restrictions, but money is fungible. I do not believe that MIT is actually limited (in practice) from writing their own grants because of donor restrictions (if they wanted to).
> And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.
Somehow they spend $1.2B/year on administration, so, yeah. Don't do that. But they easily have enough principal to cover grant funding for the remaining years of this administration.
Everything is a bank for the rich. The people who “invested” in the endowment would rather burn their money than let someone use it without getting a multiple return on it
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!"
Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority.
Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them.
Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.
Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)
And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Something I learned at The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston [1] is that Southern slaveowners were almost all terifically leveraged. Slaves were purchased predominantly with borrowed money (from, I might add, the North). And slaves were expensive, making up a significant if not dominating fraction of estates' assets.
For Southern elites, therefore, abolition was an existential question. It meant bankruptcy and poverty, with insult added to injury in their creditors being Northerners. To my knowledge (and I'm no expert in this) the question of abolition paired with debt forgiveness was never seriously discussed by the Union.
So yes, Confederate racism absolutely condemns its common folk. But even a moderately well-read Southern commoner would understand that abolition meant financial crisis, taking out their communities' largest tax payers, donors, consumers and employers in one swoop.
I didn't walk away from the Museum sympathetic to slavery. But I did become more sympathetic to the South; in particular, to their bewildering decisions to continue prosecuting a war they were so very obviously, from a history textbook's perspective, losing. (To be clear, slavery is wrong. The South seceding was stupid. Not suing for peace after Gettysburg and Vicksburg stupider still.)
[1] https://theoldslavemartmuseum.org
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/
But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.
If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.
Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
These places aren't homogeneous in their political tastes.
I live in a northeast blue state, but there are rural pockets that are still heavily MAGA. And I'm sure Mississippi has liberal enclaves.
That being said, I don't know what the "solution" to this problem is.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
No state is a monolith.
I challenge this.
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
So, I'm not sure what your point was.
Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
> Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...
For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.
The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad.
I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
However that's not what brain drain means. You would say "Iran had a brain drain in the 70s" not "America was brain draining Iran" makes no sense.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.
MIT would always have more applicants than positions. The only thing that would drop total numbers of students should be fewer positions.
Which of course is just as much of an issue since it highlights a blatant attack on education in general.
And we all know that the current US senate isn't anywhere near passing any reform, as nothing can hit 60, and if anything did, it would be immigration restrictions.
There was a time that the road was kind of easy: During the Clinton and early GW Bush years, the H1 limits were very high, so if you could find a job, you at least got on that train. It was a long wait if you didn't have a Ph.D, but it was extremely reliable. Not so much anymore.
One thing, discuss, vote.
No "hey if we give you this, you give us this." just simple "do most of us agree on this?" level politics.
That's real democracy, not the crap we have today.
The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to <their side> to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
This will be goodhearted to hell in this day and age.
The top colleges are arguably now in China.
China is providing free education in many poor African countries. Chinese is one of many subjects offered.
Of course, a smart African college student will have no issue learning English, Chinese, as well her home countries language.
The future belongs to China. We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords.
China celebrates engineers.
Then again.
No country is perfect, China also has an over abundance of educated without enough meaningful work for them.
I sorta think a UBI( needs to cover housing, food and at least a small amount of leisure activities) is the way to go.
The end goal of automation is we only need a small percentage of people working after all.
Argued by who? Source?
>We're elevating fine institutions...
Who? Maybe you mean Europe? After all, why aren't all those brilliant African students studying German or Italian? I assume you also mean that Europe has terrible universities and has completely ceded the future to glorious China?
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 of Advanced International Studies.
>That comes after the Pentagon chief said earlier this month that he would cancel professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard.
>In his memo, Hegseth also included a list of potential new partners schools: Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine, University ofTennessee, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, Clemson, and Baylor, among others.
https://fortune.com/2026/02/28/pentagon-officer-education-iv...
I'm not making any of this up.
And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
And with an aging population and stagnant/declining productivity that seems unlikely to improve in the future.
If anyone is going to overtake the US, it will be China.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.
There's really nothing good about it.
That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.”
Not sure the HN title meets the no-editorialised-titles rule. (EDIT: Nvm, misread or title may have changed.)
What is editorialized? Those programs have not yet completed the admissions process for the upcoming year. Obviously any statistics about admissions for the upcoming year would not include them?
Meanwhile in China ...
I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be
destroying some of America's best institutions & best returns ROI wise - talent pipeline, R&D.
unfortunately the damage from these things take at least 10 years to be felt throughout the economy. & then blame will fall on someone that's not responsible.
This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
> For departments across the Institute, the funding uncertainty I talked about has made them cautious about admitting new graduate students.
It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.
And 500 grad students at what 50k per year for funding is what 25 million?
They really couldn’t hedge the risk with their own money if talent was truly that important?
Well said
I went digging. Turns out that's a 2025 "Big Beautiful Bill" thing, which raised that from 1.4% to 8% but only for colleges where the endowment exceeds $2,000,000 per student. Which meant MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard.
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/05/14/ways-and-means-vot... boasts that this "Holds woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations and other tax-exempt entities accountable".
That means fewer available slots overall. Kornbluth's comments don't explicitly state anything about _applications_, just _admissions_. Given the heightened economic uncertainty and poor job prospects for recent graduates, I'd expect more students to be looking for graduate school as a way to tide themselves over.
So a very, very bad picture for folks seeking graduate education and training.
This is a 20% drop in enrollment, not in applications.
If applications stayed the same, it would be more competitive, if they dropped more then 20%, it would be less competitive.
academia gets destroyed
I just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrug
other countries have not stopped their 10-20+ year plans for education research
otherwise in a decade the USA is just going to be known as the country that makes the deadliest weapons to sell to the world and little else
US universities were an incredible blessing to the “brand” of the USA. Foreign students come to the US, pay an inflated full sticker price, subsidizing US students, and learn from top educators who generally have a lens of Western values.
Many of these students pursue permanent citizenship and bring with them new ideas, businesses, and grow their families who all become new members of the American economy and social fabric.
I personally know people from other countries that I met in school who came to the US and came out of that experience with a much more pro-Western mentality.
Just look at the story of the CEO of Nvidia.
But now the United States is going to be the opposite. Jensen Huang resolved to move to the United States to escape the social unrest of Taiwan, now we see the best and brightest young Americans with options preferring to move elsewhere to escape the ever-growing regression of this country.
People keep mixing correlation with causation.
The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.
Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.
But that's about it.
There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.
There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.
Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.
You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.
The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.
And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.
And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.
And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.
While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.
I did graduate in an Italian University I'm co-author of multiple high-impact papers.
Each and every one of my professors led advanced research in their field. Yes, they were limited in their budgets, had a handful of postdocs, not 50, in their labs, but that didn't make them any less good or prepared as scientists.
And I've also studied and worked in an American university, Ohio State, as did several of my peers.
I stand by my opinion: what makes some universities better is funding and the average quality of the student being impacted by the acceptance filtering.
The argument you bring up, if relevant, makes a difference when your education ends and your research career begins. Does not make you better at understanding organic chemistry or calculus.
You call them table stakes, and yet, I had peers coming from Harvard or MIT, not being able to explain basics like why large pools of water appear blue. And we're talking about photonics "experts", people that should be intimate with the interaction between light and matter. In fact, lack of very solid fundamentals is something I experienced often in ivy league students. And I hold my opinion on why's that: these institutions aggregate competitive people that are focused on results and votes, not understanding.
And the over abundance of multi choice tests in american universities does not promote that kind of intimate reasoning.
Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
To be clear, I would still choose to do my PhD in the US. But this is a marginal effect, people weigh many factors. If you think, for example, you're going to be constantly worried about visa issues, you may just choose Europe or China over the US.
Edit- sorry NZ and australia, forgot about you
Cry me a river.
But I had assumed we’d end up with a bunching effect that would push up demand for MIT rather than down. (When there is an over decline in something, often remaining participants bunch harder into the most desirable remaining)
I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?
Many foreigners stay away and some US students decide to study abroad.
Now, if you want AI-influenced decisions, that might have to do with undergrads and expensive institutions. If you are a high school senior now, and you aren't getting major rebates, you have to consider whether a degree at an expensive college, which might be be a quarter million dollars sticker, is going to be all that wise of an investment. If AI really has a big effect on hiring knowledge workers, any bet you make can be quite wrong. But this isn't affecting MIT, Harvard or Yale, which could fill their freshmen classes 100 times over with very good students if they felt like it. It's just deadly for 2nd and 3rd rate liberal arts schools though, as high prices, the international student drought and fewer american children are just wrecking havoc.
But again, the AI bits just don't matter to top schools like MIT in the slightest. Too much demand of American students for undergrad.
This system needs a reset. It could (after a likely painful disruption) refocus on teaching, keeping current (exorbitant) prices but providing a better education. Or it could focus on costs (cutting off unnecessary expenses). Or do something else, but the current setup is not sustainable.