alt Hacker NewsA message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
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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.
Nothing interesting coming out of MIT, well, since X11
Surprise
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
Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?
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
> heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns
Cry me a river.
Title is more generally: A message from MIT President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?
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.
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.
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Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?
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)
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.
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.
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?
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 hands down the most pathetic thing I have ever read. A PARAGRAPH IS 5-7 SENTENCES AND GRAMMAR MATTERS. Especially, when it comes from a supposed elite institution of higher learning. This is the kind of email post I'd expect to see on X from a narcissist CEO attempting to blame everyone else for their own bloated ecosystem of Big Daddy Gomment handouts.
Oh no! The government stopped funding our hack political machine masquerading as a college. Private research, innovation and discovery has advanced technology FAR MORE than the modern 20th century paradigm of higher learning research. Your religion of inherited prestige will die the same death as old nobility. 170+ formal letters of funding requests IS NOT A WIN!
My god, tone deaf. The 'talent business' he loves to claim they are in is the same model as the 'sports business' college athletics programs are in - go figure! "The Buffalo Bills are now working closely with University of Texas to bring the best strategies and tactics to professional sports as is possible for unpaid 20-somethings." That's what the IBM partnership sounds like to ears that aren't full of rose colored cotton.
That letter was written by a hack who needs to lose their job ASAP and be replaced with someone who doesn't require government nepotism to properly lead.
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...