| ▲ | jvanderbot 4 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | fastaguy88 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | selimthegrim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is simply not true towrards the end of time limits as well as lower-ranked programs. |
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| ▲ | willis936 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mcmcmc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own. |
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| ▲ | elteto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | loeg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That is how it usually works, but again, MIT has tens of billions of dollars. They could literally write their own grants. | | |
| ▲ | counters 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | loeg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. Especially if they can play on their lib donor heart-strings about how mean the current administration is being to them. | | |
| ▲ | c7b 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The vast majority of the endowment isn't money (dollars in bank accounts). University endowments work like private equity funds, most of the funds will be invested in assets, most of which hardly liquid enough to reasonably convert them into cash on short notice. They could try to borrow money against the valuations of those assets, but it's not sane to take on debt in order to sustain a level of expenditures that was adjusted to a much higher level of income (true more generally). Especially when the alternative of temporarily scaling back expenses is relatively easy. |
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| ▲ | spyckie2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this is a valid point, but if the talent pool shrinkage was truly a threat to your academic institution are you really going to just watch? And the argument is that research funding is coming back but just not to MIT. So I think it is a serious long term issue that they have to consider going forward, and not something that they can just hope goes away. |
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| ▲ | snark42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Much of those billions of dollars are contractually limited in how they can use both the principal and gains so it's really not that simple. |
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| ▲ | bongoman42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kjkjadksj 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Who do you think sits on these grant review boards? It isn’t
bureaucrats. These people are scientists in the field too. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | JoeNuts 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Universities get ~40-50% of their funding from the government. Private equity doesn't quite fit. | | |
| ▲ | dhosek 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is that across all universities? Because I would guess that, for example, University of Illinois gets a much larger portion of its funding from government sources than University of Chicago (which would be one of those well-endowed universities which, incidentally, just cut tuition to zero for undergrads from families making less than $250K). |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Precicely this 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 |
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| ▲ | pettycashstash2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | corygarms 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wow you just made me realize that Elon Musk net worth is roughly 30x the value of the entire MIT endowment fund. |
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| ▲ | dnnddidiej 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | pbhjpbhj an hour ago | parent [-] | | Presumably that you'd have to be white as driven snow and have a Confederate-flag carrying Jesus holding an assault rifle tattooed on you to avoid ending up in a detention center awaiting deportation to some foreign hellhole prison. |
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| ▲ | bensyverson 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sounds like everything is fine then |
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| ▲ | d00mScroll 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |
