| ▲ | kenferry 2 hours ago |
| 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 2 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? |
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| ▲ | frickinLasers 2 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 36 minutes 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 20 minutes 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. |
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| ▲ | jpadkins 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | someone has to pay for administrators! | | |
| ▲ | trelane an hour 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 an hour 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 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost none of that goes into research funding. Researchers are funded largely by government grants. |
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| ▲ | cmiles8 2 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. |
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| ▲ | magicalist 2 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. | |
| ▲ | bilbo0s 2 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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