- 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.
by jvanderbot
7 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.
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.
by 999900000999
7 subcomments
- It's ok.
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.
- MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
by softwaredoug
6 subcomments
- 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
by quantgenius
11 subcomments
- I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.
- 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.
by sashank_1509
2 subcomments
- “Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.
by JumpCrisscross
1 subcomments
- > “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.)
- 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".
- So the current USA administration defunds Science everywhere it can (NOAA, FDA , etc) and even at it's roots (MIT , etc).
Meanwhile in China ...
by mrhottakes
7 subcomments
- 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.
- Any other institutions outside of academia that has a 20+ billion endowment that earns 4 billion a year?
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?
- "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.
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".
by jrochkind1
1 subcomments
- > Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone.
Sounds ironically like "DEI".
by contubernio
1 subcomments
- I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.
by schnitzelstoat
1 subcomments
- Education (and research like this example) seem to be one of the highest ROI things you can invest in.
It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.
- American science is at risk not because of budget cuts, but because of executive interference
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tiE93b-jT-E&t=60s
by amirhirsch
0 subcomment
- MIT should spin up MIT.ai for-profit, raise 100B @ 1T, then go buy big computer.
- > MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students
This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
- 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%.
by photochemsyn
0 subcomment
- Here’s one problem - the DOE’s Genesis Mission referenced in the transcript has nothing earmarked in its 20 line-items for solar/wind/batteries/UHV grids! You want to work in that area, you have to leave the USA. Looks like fluff, but that’s been DOE for many years - captured by entrenched finance and industry, not looking to upset the apple cart.
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
- Maybe it's time to lighten the load at the top. Certainly there are some bureaucratic efficiencies to be had.
- all because some cry baby in the White House.
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.
- My partner recently applied to quite a few extremely prestigious graduate programs. We're not married and she made $16,000 dollars last year. She's won several national competitions in her field. The main deciding factor for her final choice was the price. It's just not worth it to go into six figures or more worth of debt for a degree.
- when an entity as powerful as the federal government sets an agenda to purposely destroy academia
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
- Great time to remember that Elon gutted the Department of Education
by hereme888
1 subcomments
- Only a 10% budget cut? Should have been way more. I hear victimization throughout the article. It was the school's choice to focus on politicizing and prioritizing foreigners, and looking as "accepting" as possible, rather than educating and funding our citizens which is what matters.
- 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.
- "Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone." DEI by another name?
- 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…
- > "new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%."
Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants?
The article does not seem to say.
- I work in a large public university system and we are also seeing enrollment drops across campuses. We are also seeing declines in enrollment in the K-12 education too.
by NoImmatureAdHom
0 subcomment
- Fewer graduate students is a good thing. Academia produces WAY too many graduate students relative to the jobs available (in aggregate, some fields it's more of a problem than others). It's good for the PIs (professors in charge of a group) to have lots of graduate students, but as a whole that means most of them will not get a job...
by kittikitti
0 subcomment
- As someone who is continuing graduate level education and explored programs from MIT, I find that the major deciding factor to be the administration's willingness to censor pro-Palestinian activity. I don't think it's worth all the time and money at that point. I'm not going to spend all those resources to get a zionist education.
- Speaking from the academic sector if they're all able to meet ALL of the admissions criteria there would be no justification their presence, they would be in demand.
The sad reality is given the unrealistic expansion of the education sector they were clearly admitting people who needed to justify being there...
- At least they seem happy with their MicroMasters program which may or may not be helping get more student in to the full grad programs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138590
- Other than that, with the current flow of opportunities outside from just graduating is a lot.
I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be
- For some reason it's hard for me to read one paragraph sentences and come away with an understanding of what was being communicated.
- 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.
by hmokiguess
0 subcomment
- 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.
by trunkiedozer
0 subcomment
- Nothing interesting coming out of MIT, well, since X11
- This woman knows nothing about the real world
by oliver66677
0 subcomment
- MIT is a rich private school. Plz stop relying on government money.
by mikelitoris
0 subcomment
- This is what a declining empire looks like
- Many PHD programs might best be described as cults:
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
... despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.It is ironic that some of the brightest people ignore the data.
by lostathome
0 subcomment
- I wonder who is dropping then. Lots of graduate students are from rich families, especially the international ones.
by B1FF_PSUVM
0 subcomment
- > Our Washington Office is working energetically, on both sides of the aisle,
Oh.
(bit curious, when did that sprout?)
by mattaustin
0 subcomment
- Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges.
by mattaustin
1 subcomments
- Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges
- 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...
by jobs_throwaway
0 subcomment
- > 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.
Well said
by lenerdenator
0 subcomment
- > For more than a year, we’ve all worked on responding to extraordinary new and sustained pressures on our budget (due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools)
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.
- 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.
Edit- sorry NZ and australia, forgot about you
- Can they not use their endowment to pay for the funding problem?
by jknoepfler
0 subcomment
- 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.
- > Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program ...
- 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.
by chaostheory
0 subcomment
- Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?
- Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs
by uutangohotel
1 subcomments
- f*** around and find out
- When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?
by ReptileMan
0 subcomment
- Fire 5/6th of your administrative staff and use the money for grants. MIT has atrocious staff to students ration. Many savings if they get rid of them
- Surprise
- wow that sounds scary. Good luck though
by clarkmoody
1 subcomments
- > heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns
Cry me a river.
by epsteingpt
0 subcomment
- MIT Grad - a few thoughts:
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.
by JamesLeonis
0 subcomment
- We are in the "Bust" phase of the STEM Crisis Myth[0]
> [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
by hyunwoo222
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by Rekindle8090
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Title is more generally: A message from MIT President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
by mugivarra69
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by arghandugh
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by hiverrbeyy
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- 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.
by FrustratedMonky
1 subcomments
- Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?
- And this is only the beginning.
I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?
by tsunamifury
0 subcomment
- 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)
- 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.
- Studying at MIT in the AI age is a complete waste of time and money. I'm surprised it's only 20%.
- 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.
by ArchieScrivener
1 subcomments
- [flagged]