| ▲ | cmiles8 4 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | kenferry 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | hamdingers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying? | | |
| ▲ | frickinLasers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks). | | |
| ▲ | amarilio 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year. There is no shortage of money. | | |
| ▲ | andix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There is no shortage of money This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it. It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, airports, air traffic control). They even need a functioning academic ecosystem if they want their children to receive a real education, not just access to a few famous professors they can buy. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death. There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system. You have to stop relying on their nonexistent "better angels" and actually start resisting and fighting back. Every single right or benefit that workers have gained was because they died fighting for it. We have to continue this fight going forward because we're finding out that no one will save us except ourselves. | |
| ▲ | lovich 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle. You don’t have to share the education time for your kids with the poor and think of how exclusive and how much status is advertises. As for everything else you said about it not being in the interest of the billionaires. Even if you are 100% correct they have enough money to pay someone else to deal with any frictions in life and not think about it. On top of that, if you look at their behavior, there’s a lot of similarities between the wealthiest in society and how they treat money, and how addicts treat heroin. Addicts frequently engage in self destructive behavior for the next hit. |
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| ▲ | jpadkins 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | someone has to pay for administrators! | | |
| ▲ | trelane 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > someone has to pay for administrators Turns out, this is also research grant money. Half or more of every grant usually goes straight to the university.as "overhead." The universities could change this so more finding went to researchers, but they have zero incentive to. | | |
| ▲ | dhosek 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc. |
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| ▲ | Ar-Curunir 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost none of that goes into research funding. Researchers are funded largely by government grants. |
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| ▲ | cmiles8 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Same issue with grad school… the value isn’t there for this to make sense. Folks are better off just going right into them private sector. | | |
| ▲ | magicalist 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The value absolutely is there. The NSF and NIH were both very cheap and have had huge ROI. The cuts to academic funding have been monumentally stupid. | | |
| ▲ | coffeemug an hour ago | parent [-] | | Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture. |
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| ▲ | bilbo0s 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors. I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT. The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump. |
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| ▲ | mohamedkoubaa 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | MSFT_Edging 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | finolex1 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | andrepd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | JimBlackwood 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > This is about research, science research in particular. "Preparing for the workforce" is not the point here (and arguably should not really be the point of education in general, but much can be said about that...). This is a bit short sighted. Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance). Some university studies need to work together with industry (again, law. or some physics studies). Next to that, even for studies that do fundamental research (mathematics), a lot of people attend university for it’s job prospects. For instance, if you want to become an actuary - having done mathematics as a degree will help. My point being, a large part of university studies and their students are there to “Prepare for the workforce”. I don’t think you can do without that. Fundamental research is not some fantasy world that can do without industry or other things developed by the outside world. | | |
| ▲ | biophysboy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Departments base grad school admissions on grant awards. The article states: grant awards for MIT went down more than 20%, then new MIT grad students went down 20%. The decrease in students has nothing to do with academia being detached from industry. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Not all university studies are for fundamental science (law, for instance) MIT doesn't have a law school. MIT cutting grad spots means national research priorities being compromised. |
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| ▲ | gNucleusAI 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| there are tons of alternative ways to get education , or do research |
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| ▲ | potbelly83 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Education yes, research unfortunately no. I'm not saying research outside of academia is not possible, I'm just saying it's not taken seriously and this needs to change. We really do need to go back to the 19th century model of the researcher gentleman. | | |
| ▲ | cmiles8 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A real shock to academia is that top research increasingly takes place outside universities. On many areas universities are now 5-10 years behind what’s happening in the private sector. That’s causing a lot of panic within the system and a growing stream of departures as PhDs favor the private sector over academic tracts. | | |
| ▲ | waterheater 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A few years ago, when I was actively involved with the academic world, I came to a similar realization. They're trying to do too many things at once. Universities need to acknowledge this reality and adjust. After thinking about it, I came up with a straightforward solution (at least in STEM): offer more than one type of of doctoral degree. Every program will have at least two doctoral programs: a Doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics/etc. The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program is academia at its core, where the students in this doctoral program are explicitly seeking an academic teaching or research position as their career path. The coursework and educational activities are explicitly aligned for this area. The Doctor of Science/Engineering/Mathematics is focused on creating a top-of-the-line researcher intended for industry or an FFRDC. Those students receive a different type of education which explicitly gives them the deeper research skills and connections needed to become an accomplished industry researcher. The two programs are equally rigorous but have different end goals in mind. This specialization is overdue, and most departments already have a fuzzy line separating the "academics" from the "practitioners." | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That is how it should be, and how it has historically been. There has been an unsustainable inflation of academic research on the last 150 years or so after governments decided to formalize research. But the thing about unsustainable stuff is that they always end. The institutions that teach researchers also doing the majority of it necessarily turn into a Ponzi scheme. | |
| ▲ | nukedindia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | GenerocUsername 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | YouTube and Patreon have done wonders for rebooting the modern research gentleman field. I follow a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science. It is progressing beyond 'backyard science'. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > a dozen YouTubers doing extremely niche, cutting edge, science Evidence of something that's been impactful? | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Care to share any that people here might like to follow? |
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| ▲ | layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Research is usually a collaborative effort nowadays. You’d need a League of Research Gentlemen. Not to mention that an important number of research fields require expensive research labs/equipment. | |
| ▲ | bregma 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I dunno. The single major qualification of being from money has not always made for the best research results. | |
| ▲ | kjkjadksj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The researcher gentleman cannot afford their own cryo em. We aren’t doing the science of 1890 anymore. |
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