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 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.

This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.

So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.

Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.

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.

https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/

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.

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.)

Meanwhile in China ...

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?

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".

Sounds ironically like "DEI".

It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.

This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.

1. Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity 2. Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution 3. Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply 4. Delivering Nuclear Energy that is Faster, Safer, Cheaper 5. Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy 6. Transforming Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization 7. Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI 8. Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery 9. Recentering Microelectronics in America 10. Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers 11. Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories 12. Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality 13. Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery 14. Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos 15. Predicting U.S. Water for Energy 16. Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy 17. Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets 18. HPC Code Curation, Translation, and Development for Accelerated Scientific Discoveries 19. AI for Scientific Reasoning 20. Cybersecurity for AI-driven Science Workflows 21. Artificial Intelligence in Fluid Flow for Energy Components and Technologies

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.

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

Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants? The article does not seem to say.

The sad reality is given the unrealistic expansion of the education sector they were clearly admitting people who needed to justify being there...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138590

I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be

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.

Most of the people in charge (faculty) are true believers and the acolytes (grad students) are as well.

They believe that a PHD and the years spent in pursuit of it will:

  1. get the student a college or university professorship in the USA; and/or
  2. allow for future opportunities that will outweigh the cost in time and money spent in pursuit of the PHD; and/or
  3. advance the state of science/research/knowledge that will justify (in feel-good vibes/emotions?) the lost years

It is ironic that some of the brightest people ignore the data.

Oh.

(bit curious, when did that sprout?)

Well said

Oh, no. Eight percent of returns on $27.4 billion.

How will they go on?

Maybe this is just the cranky Millennial in me, but seeing how so many people of my generation were told they absolutely, positively had to get at least bachelors degree to be anyone in society, and accordingly took out high-five/low-six-figures in debt at the age of 18, only to get the shaft over the next decade or two of their lives as wages stagnated and more and more jobs (even knowledge jobs) moved overseas in search of higher returns by the same people making major gifts to those endowments...

I don't have a problem with the tax.

Hell, there were times a few years back when the MIT media page on Facebook did nothing but post stories about all of the tech and engineering going on in China. This is also the same institution that hosts a media lab that continued to associate with Epstein after his sex offense conviction because his cash was as green as anyone else's.

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.

1. MIT is one of the 'better' run institutions.

2. Most academic institutions are hilariously lean compared to most companies. The problem is the administrative burden associated with record-keeping, compliance, and 'student experience.' All 3 of these could reasonably be automated or cut.

3. On record-keeping: AI should help reduce that eventually.

4. On compliance, professors and universities need to restore academic freedom, period. Students have been pushing for 'all views' and the university model just doesn't support that. Different viewpoints will diverge, and some students will need to be threatened. Imagine a communist yelling at a business school about the principles of capitalism; an atheist yelling that God doesn't exist at Harvard's divinity school. Senseless.

5. On student experience: this is the shot in the foot. Students obviously want to choose the best social experiences, but getting gourmet food, shuttles, and super-designed buildings is nice to have. The competitive admissions process is competitive, but the cuts are probably stepping down the arms race. One $30M building can fund a lot of grad students. Which is more important to the institution?

On the tax itself, given most University's objectively socialist leanings, they should be proud to take an 8% tax on the GAINS of the Endowment, which is over $2M per student.

The breathless "let's go to Washington" on - again - a lower tax rate than nearly any graduate pays on their income on their massive per student endowment while they and their students preach and promote socialist policies across the board is beyond parody.

Where do they think the federal "funding" comes from?

All to say I find the response mostly spineless - unwilling to tackle the real issues facing universities today. For an engineering school to say 'let's beg for funding on Washington' suggests a wrongheaded institutional approach, regardless of politics.

> [Anxiety over the STEM Crisis] has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." [...]

> The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

> Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

EDIT: I forgot about the sidebar. This isn't the first time the MIT President has spoken about the STEM Crisis. Here's a quote from the article and compare it to the 2026 quote from Kornbluth.

> "Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence." James Killian, president of MIT, 1954

> "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." - Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, 2026

I don't mean to pick in MIT specifically, and I do think they are right to call out this administration for its disruptive behavior. They are hardly alone, and undoubtedly more will speak up. However we must rethink how we handle STEM education and employment because the current relationship is untenable. At the very least we should invest in repatriating existing STEM workers who aren't in the field. Otherwise the cycle will repeat to everybody's detriment.

[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?

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)