I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD?

Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.

I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.

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.

> 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.

> 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

Has this changed recently?

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.

I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time

My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.

> 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...

The idea of a union for graduate students seems silly to me (and I was one for six years). The idea that you're exchanging labor for money is insane: any grad student at MIT could 10x their $/hr by taking a job in the private sector. And they could get those jobs easily. They're students, they're getting training.

Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.

There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.

MIT is not close to one of the first universities with a grad student union, the UC has been unionized since the 90s.

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union

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.

That isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.

Can you give some context the grad student union and how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia?

A professor has many more than 5 PhD students. Why would you be surprised to concerned that most PhDs go on to get jobs in industry?

That does not explain a 20% YoY drop

>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.

Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.

This isn't really new, I've heard complaints about academia for decades. What is new is that grant funding has been completely eviscerated.

I saw those videos of horrible people at MIT disrupting classes last year, with the school doing nothing. I'd rather spend the first two years cheaply at a local community college and then finish my undergrad degree at a nice State school than suffer through all that.

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.

The squeeze is not worth the juice. The pay is bad, the sector is heavily regulated that you could lose your job for a post you made online, dealing with student is pain (I have been there), expensive tuition, the titles are saturated too, the other day I saw a 24yo a “phd student”, plus the AI making education less valuable in general, at least from average person view. All that plus other factors just make it useless to waste time in anything beyond bachelor, even in engineering, a master degree is usually substituted by few years experience.

> 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

Everyone in tech is uncertain about the future of software, engineering, and science jobs.

I'm deep in the weeds and literally everyone around me has a "make as much money as you can while it lasts and maybe you'll have enough to retire in some remote village if the job market goes to shit" attitude.

So yeah I can imagine people taking that $150-250K entry level silicon valley job over the $30K/year PhD and risking having nearly zero savings and no job prospects at graduation time.

> 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.

"get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia"

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.

grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market

Is the grass generally greener though?

> 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.

This is not disconnected. It is also not new. People have been disillusioned with academia since there were students.

> 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.

It’s very hard to make a sweeping statement like this. PhDs are segmented by field and subfield.

Almost everyone entering a Ph.D. program does it to have the option of going to academia. It’s a _research_ degree. Unlike a JD or an MD it doesn’t lead to a licensed profession. Or even a job.

But in some fields (eg: chemistry and many areas of biology), 80% of grads have ended up in industry for decades. There’s also a long tradition of Nobel Prizes going to people in industry, so it’s not viewed as a second-rate choice.

> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.

It’s true that the pay is (relatively) bad. I liked to think of it as an incentive to graduate, but then I did a postdoc for similarly bad pay before leaving for industry, so maybe it wasn’t enough of an incentive.

But the length has been 6ish years in a good portion of the physical and biological sciences for a couple of decades.

I wouldn’t call the work “grueling.” In most fields you’re doing lab work or desk work, not manual labor, and while the hours can be long, at the end of the day it’s driven a lot by the a startup-like mentality: this is your career and you get what you put into it.

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia.

MIT is not a thought leader here. Unions have been a thing since at least the mid 2010s at a number of Ivy’s, and various University of California schools have had a union since the early-to-mid 2000s.

> I can see how undergrads may look <things> and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.

It’s a valid choice. It’s been a valid choice. This has nothing to do with AI. You start a PhD to pursue original research (fsvo original), and that’s _hard_. It’s always been hard. It didn’t get hard last year.

Depending on the field, the job market has been bad for decades, too. Humanities fields are always a bear market. There used to be blogs about leaving for industry in history in the 2000s. In the 90s you’d hear cautionary tales about someone’s uncle had a PhD in physics and was now managing an Arby’s.

Departments could do a much better job with prepping graduates for industry. Successfully completing a PhD comes with a lot of hard-won skills that transfer to industry. And it would help if faculty didn’t view it as “giving up.”

But this is a long-running problem. I don’t think the undergrad zeitgeist has changed. I think the current administration has cut funding and closed off the immigration pipeline. We’ll be feeling those effects for a long time.

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?

80% is high!

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.

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.

The article is politely calling out the effects of the current regime in Washington and indicating that the government is finding other ways to not give funding to schools they don’t like.

I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.

They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.

This beating aroud the bush doesn't help:

> We’ve already seen clear signs that policy changes affecting international students and scholars are discouraging extremely talented individuals from applying to join our community.

Whose policy? What policy?

Sounds like everything is fine then

I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly.

Do you have any sources or citations to support the broad claims about increases in administrators or broad surplus revenue? As non-profits, if tuition is going up and all other fund sources are flat, then expenditures have to go up as well, there is no owner's profit to absorb excess revenue.

The best data I has is from the Education department, see the last part of this chart (Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant 2022-23 dollars):

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...

I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading.

I don't know about Brown specifically, but schools like MIT receive large amounts of federal funding to do research. Administrating that funding requires staffing (paperwork for proposals, contracting, accounting, invoicing, etc). MIT probably also has non-teaching research staff that are entirely grant-funded. I'd be surprised if undergrad tuition is paying for any of this.

He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.

Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.

It may be good but also can be very problematic.

Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest.

You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system."

Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.

Please use some line breaks. I find this extremely difficult to read

Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?

I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete.

At universities like MIT, Stanford and others, many undergraduates do not pay anything close to sticker price. Students from lower and middle income families often receive major aid, and in some cases pay no tuition at all. Full tuition is paid mostly by wealthy families and international students. I myself went to the most expensive university in the country circa 2005, but paid less than state school because they gave me a bunch of grants (not mere loans). For this reason, undergraduate education is mostly break even or a loss leader at many institutions.

Tuition inflation is also tied to inequality. If very wealthy families can pay $60k-$90k a year out of pocket, elite universities can set prices at that level, acting as upward price pressure in the broader market. That's just the magic of the market dynamics at work.

> I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff.

Some bureaucracy may be wasteful, but some exists because modern research universities are genuinely complex institutions. Yes, fewer administrators are tied to teaching, but a professor's job is only about 30% teaching, and classes are not in session 25% of the year. I never understand this idea that all or most of the administrative staff at a university must go toward teaching or else something is wrong / broken.

Large universities are small research communities verging on city status, not mere schools. If you want mere schools we have those in various forms (SLACs, community colleges, trade schools, etc.), but it seems to me people also want all the advanced stuff coming out of the research output these universities produce. The higher the tower of knowledge, the more it's going to cost to build on and maintain it, and the costs don't go up linearly.

> And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR.

Research is also and expensive loss leader. Labs, buildings, equipment, safety systems, compliance, grant administration all cost a lot of money, to the point that research is also a loss leader. At my institution we charge about 65% overhead on research grants, but for every research dollar we bring in, it costs 70 more cents for the university to support said research.

The upside is that these universities produce enormous value in the form of scientific discoveries, medical advances, new startups, an educated workforce, and regional economic growth. They bring in foreign and nonlocal money and spend much of it locally. Many of them are economic engines in places that otherwise would be considered "flyover country", acting as an anchor for educators and their families, students, and that attracts hospitals, other schools, restaurants, and suddenly a local economy is formed. You think there would be any economic activity at State College, PA if it weren't for Penn State University? It'd just be another part of Pennsyltucky. Instead there's a whole thriving town there; per capita, State College is in the top 5 economic regions in PA, and Penn State as a whole accounts for 10% of employment in PA (it's not a coincidence the other top 4 economic regions in PA are full of colleges and universities).

https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-stat...

So yes, universities should control costs, reduce administrative excess, and protect students from bad debt like you said. But simply starving them of funding risks damaging one of America’s most productive assets. The better goal is a funding model that reduces student debt, preserves world-class research, demands accountability, and recognizes that valuable institutions are not cheap to run. But that's not what's happening, not even close.

The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.

Investing in educated population in future is investment in given society itself. Triple that for US where most folks remain in adulthood, so brain drain aint an issue. State/society would get those money 10x back easily.

But then who could push through some redneck agenda that is actively harmful to future of given society, but with apropriate emotional charge to ruffle feathers and get people into voting against themselves. You need simple people that can easily believe the dumbest shit you can cone up with. Smart educated folks usually know better, definitely on average.

I dont claim there is some big conspiracy around this, that would be too convenient copout when human greed and stupidity is enough, but it would make a typical Bond villain chess move.

Really, there is no good excuse for public education to not be accessible to whole public. Unless you want class based society, which US in many regards is and will be for foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, when you try to starve the beast, it's the essential functions that get slashed instead of the leadership and adminstrative apparatus. The animal is harmed further while the parasite intercepts the generated value.

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.

It's simple. The US used to be the most desirable place for immigrants and the US higher education system used to be the envy of the world and now for both of these it is not any more. A reset was always inevitable.

> 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.

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

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.

there are tons of alternative ways to get education , or do research

Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.

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.

What point are you trying to make by sharing this?

It’s due to fewer positions mentioned in the link though right?

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.

Might be the only thing keeping America great. We lose the Chinese, Indians and Russians and we’re going to be a scientific backwater in a decade.

ah did not now. 41%

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.

>The future belongs to China.

China's population pyramid is worse than the USAs. The present belongs to China. This is as good as it gets.

Conventional wisdom always used to be that China would never compete with the US because they were rote learners and we were more creative. I'd say that is no longer the case. China has been doing a LOT of interesting things. I joke with my son that given the state of the US lately, I'd almost rather move to China.

China does have some top-tier unis but only a handful: Tsinghua, Beida (Peking), Fudan, Zhejiang, Renmin (humanities mostly), Hangzhou -- maybe a couple of others if you squint hard enough

Still a far cry from the number of top-tier unis in the US/Europe.

Chinese unis pump out tons of engineers and tons of papers but the quality of most of those papers is quite low.

But I agree that China, very smartly, is very active in Africa where the US used to be -- the US stupidly dropped the ball in Africa first with its endless "war on terror" and now with its even more stupid "america first (except when we bomb Iran)" policies

What are some of the Chinese colleges worth paying attention to? Is most of the AI research coming from these colleges or are they primarily from private labs?

>The top colleges are arguably now in China.

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?

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.

Maybe. But the fact is also that the US have become a less attractive country to live and raise your children in.

Isn't that the entire incentive structure for international PhD graduates already (at least on the private industry front)?

There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.

> still in the midst of admissions

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?

Not at all, the US is still the world leader in research institutions.

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.

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.

No, everyone is worse off. There is nothing good that comes from this.

> other research institutions will become the new leaders

Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.

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.

When there's less competition and opportunities for talent the whole community, globally, is impacted.

There's really nothing good about it.

The world will catch up around the same time research institutions become obsolete.

But you and I and everyone else here knows about MIT and can probably list a few major breakthroughs that came out of MIT... what's the name of your major public research university?

Agree, and I think it's probably healthy that the large endowments are being taxed a modest amount.

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.

From what I understood they admitted fewer people. The professors are worried about not having funds so they aren't hiring as much

Wow. If they think 8% is heavy they should see how much in taxes their janitors are paying

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.

Yes, and it's even spelled out explicitly earlier in the letter.

> For departments across the Institute, the funding uncertainty I talked about has made them cautious about admitting new graduate students.

Yes of course they could admit any person who didn't finish high school.

It's truly baffling. We're hurting ourselves and helping our fri/enemies with one stroke.

I don't think MIT has money problems

No, it doesn't tell us anything about how competitive it is.

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.

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.

If you're applying to MIT, there are 20% fewer assistanships and (depending on the department and program) something like 10% fewer applications.

Not at all. Notice they said nothing about applications or acceptance rates. It is actually more competitive to get funding.

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).

That has a fresh new tax on it following the BBB on gains.

Can you back that up with.... you know... evidence? "regulation bad" tends to be a political talking point more than a valid argument when you're this vague.

Edited: to add, this speech talks a lot about the reduction in research funding from the US government which arguably has nothing to do with the regulatory environment.

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.

This is expected behavior.

>I just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrug

Unfortunately this isn't something we can just vote our way out of. The people who support the destruction of America's science and research infrastructure will still be there, and will still be voting. Trumpism will survive Trump as more competent fascists take power. Rebuilding the knowledge base, infrastructure and trust destroyed will take years, with half the country steadfastly working against any attempt to reverse course.

I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it's going to require massive cultural changes and a complete redesign and decoupling of the federal system. Not secession - I think that would be a disaster - but a repeal of the Constitution's Compact Clause allowing states to enter into agreements with foreign governments without Congressional approval. Let the MAGA states retreat into their own Christian nationalist Juche hellhole while everyone else remains a part of the modern global community. It would be a win-win for everyone.

Our best universities have massive endowments is a national asset

It’s discussed in the linked article

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.

Right, all of those notoriously under-employed phds from MIT...

How is it better for society that the research never be conducted than that the researchers make less money than they hope to?

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.

It's probably mostly not about AI, but because of US foreign politics.

Many foreigners stay away and some US students decide to study abroad.

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.

Nothing to do with AI here, it's about immigration.

This isn't about AI, it's about research funding and what the guys in charge think about science and education.

Applied computer science.

Hide behind a heavy regulatory mote. Pharmacist, Lawyer, etc.

The robots need your help, until they don't.

Training RL policies on edge cases by using humans to collect and instrument previously closed data systems.

This isn't because of AI. It's the current anti-immigration policies.

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.

This is about Trump, not AI

I’m not so sure about it being a waste of money. I got an almost full ride 15 years ago because of their generous financial aid program, that had only expanded. And time? Are all college programs a waste of time in your opinion, because of AI?

Laughably wrongheaded