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.
I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense.
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
> 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.
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you look at most decent engineering universities, are they any different if you restrict to engineering/science departments? I don't have statistics, but when I was in grad school, the mini-institute I was part of (5-6 faculty members + students) had more than 50% foreigners. And I think all the non-foreigners were born abroad (whether Green Card or US citizen).
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 non-American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.
Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
It's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population.
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results:
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections.
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
I lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
no, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
This is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
Probably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing.
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
are there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
I think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
Brain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
They are saying the opposite. People have been coming to America for higher education and staying here and that has historically benefited the US. And that seems to be changing.
Every prestigious (STEM) college I’m aware of, a large ratio of graduate students and professors are foreign.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
Would be nice to see if this number dipped from before. International students typically end up paying out of station tuition and is a huge source of income for the univs.
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
That is much less true of grad programs in technical fields. Undergrad, international students are indeed more likely to pay full-boat--or at least larger boat--than US applicants.
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.
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
This was a relatively widespread opinion 20 years ago. I had Roy Blunt, Republican senator from Missouri at the time, come to talk to us, telling us that he thought a science Ph.D should come with a green card stapled to it. But the politics of immigration never let small bills through, as people wanted bigger ones, and the bigger ones always had things that would risk filibusters.
And we all know that the current US senate isn't anywhere near passing any reform, as nothing can hit 60, and if anything did, it would be immigration restrictions.
There was a time that the road was kind of easy: During the Clinton and early GW Bush years, the H1 limits were very high, so if you could find a job, you at least got on that train. It was a long wait if you didn't have a Ph.D, but it was extremely reliable. Not so much anymore.
Well the popular argument is that it takes so long to pass any kind of bill that smaller bills would just mean more bills and a bigger backlog. I don't really buy that.
The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to <their side> to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
> “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.)
What is editorialized? Those programs have not yet completed the admissions process for the upcoming year. Obviously any statistics about admissions for the upcoming year would not include them?
In STEM, federal grants pay for almost all US PhD students. And the tuition they would charge would never have covered the actual cost. It has always depended on research grants. Which makes sense, a PhD is mostly and apprenticeship in how to do cutting edge research.
The article mentions that a major factor in technical grad school is research funding. Most grad students in engineering, for example, don't pay tuition themselves. They work for a pittance and receive tuition as a benefit.
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.
> And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
I've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.
Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
Most of Europe is behind because the money there has dried up. (Except for Norway)
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.
Talent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.
And neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)
History is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.
I wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.
Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
No this is not good for the World in case you have forgotten America is part of the world and though I hate what is happening just as much as anyone I will work to make this nation better. We are in a tough time and I genuinely do not know if things will get better but we will try.
That's very funny because up until very recently there was very little competition because one nation was dominating research using talents from other countries. Consider it as a weakening of a monopoly
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%.
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.
Since this is the first comment that emphasizes research which most are conflating with graduate school in general. I think that is the salient effect of the funding cut, which affects research (PhDs) more than cash cow coursework programs such as Masters, MBAs, and JDs. Most are forgetting that US global position Post-WWII comes primarily from basic research -> applied research pipeline; Silicon Valley alone did not endow us with the internet, satellite, rockets, etc.
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...
The speech makes a lot of arguments. It argues against the endowment tax, which seems politically deaf. But it also cites research-funding cuts (both legal and illegal).
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.
"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.
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.
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…
It would actually be _more_ competitive, because what's driving the reduction in admissions is uncertainty in grant/funding availability.
That means fewer available slots overall. Kornbluth's comments don't explicitly state anything about _applications_, just _admissions_. Given the heightened economic uncertainty and poor job prospects for recent graduates, I'd expect more students to be looking for graduate school as a way to tide themselves over.
So a very, very bad picture for folks seeking graduate education and training.
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)
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.
Jm2c, but I really don't believe the "top educators" argument.
People keep mixing correlation with causation.
The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.
Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.
But that's about it.
There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.
There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.
Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.
You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.
The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.
And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.
And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.
And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.
While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is certainly true for 80% of universities and degrees. Even most bachelors degrees in my opinion. But if I’m being fair, maybe that’s not as true of places like MIT that teach tough and much more in-demand skills compared to universities where most students are studying things there is no demand for, and paying $150,000 or more for the privilege.
yeah are you saying society does not have a job for an MIT graduate ? this is mistaken let them learn don't worry they'll find a job thank you for thinking about the job prospects for them since you know better than someone who got admitted to graduate school.
this might be true, but certainly isn't/shouldn't be true for MIT graduates. if you own a business of any kind, hiring an MIT grad is basically never a bad decision.
Very few people are paying their way to MIT's graduate programs, so it's not as if it's a matter of AI scaring people into not paying for expensive education or anything. Graduate programs are full of international students that used them as ways to enter the US job market. With that road getting harder for a variety of policy decisions, there's just less reasons to consider it.
Now, if you want AI-influenced decisions, that might have to do with undergrads and expensive institutions. If you are a high school senior now, and you aren't getting major rebates, you have to consider whether a degree at an expensive college, which might be be a quarter million dollars sticker, is going to be all that wise of an investment. If AI really has a big effect on hiring knowledge workers, any bet you make can be quite wrong. But this isn't affecting MIT, Harvard or Yale, which could fill their freshmen classes 100 times over with very good students if they felt like it. It's just deadly for 2nd and 3rd rate liberal arts schools though, as high prices, the international student drought and fewer american children are just wrecking havoc.
But again, the AI bits just don't matter to top schools like MIT in the slightest. Too much demand of American students for undergrad.
Has this changed recently?
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
People might pick their preferred explanation, but there is little doubt that [things in the world] are successfully demoralizing academics.
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.
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.
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
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 non-American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!"
Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority.
Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them.
Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/
But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
I challenge this.
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
So, I'm not sure what your point was.
Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...
> Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad.
I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
However that's not what brain drain means. You would say "Iran had a brain drain in the 70s" not "America was brain draining Iran" makes no sense.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
MIT would always have more applicants than positions. The only thing that would drop total numbers of students should be fewer positions.
Which of course is just as much of an issue since it highlights a blatant attack on education in general.
And we all know that the current US senate isn't anywhere near passing any reform, as nothing can hit 60, and if anything did, it would be immigration restrictions.
There was a time that the road was kind of easy: During the Clinton and early GW Bush years, the H1 limits were very high, so if you could find a job, you at least got on that train. It was a long wait if you didn't have a Ph.D, but it was extremely reliable. Not so much anymore.
One thing, discuss, vote.
No "hey if we give you this, you give us this." just simple "do most of us agree on this?" level politics.
That's real democracy, not the crap we have today.
The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to <their side> to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
This will be goodhearted to hell in this day and age.
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.)
What is editorialized? Those programs have not yet completed the admissions process for the upcoming year. Obviously any statistics about admissions for the upcoming year would not include them?
This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
> For departments across the Institute, the funding uncertainty I talked about has made them cautious about admitting new graduate students.
And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
And with an aging population and stagnant/declining productivity that seems unlikely to improve in the future.
If anyone is going to overtake the US, it will be China.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.
There's really nothing good about it.
Meanwhile in China ...
It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.
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.
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".
That means fewer available slots overall. Kornbluth's comments don't explicitly state anything about _applications_, just _admissions_. Given the heightened economic uncertainty and poor job prospects for recent graduates, I'd expect more students to be looking for graduate school as a way to tide themselves over.
So a very, very bad picture for folks seeking graduate education and training.
This is a 20% drop in enrollment, not in applications.
If applications stayed the same, it would be more competitive, if they dropped more then 20%, it would be less competitive.
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)
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.
People keep mixing correlation with causation.
The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.
Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.
But that's about it.
There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.
There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.
Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.
You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.
The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.
And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.
And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.
And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.
While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.
Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.
Cry me a river.
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
I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?
Many foreigners stay away and some US students decide to study abroad.
Now, if you want AI-influenced decisions, that might have to do with undergrads and expensive institutions. If you are a high school senior now, and you aren't getting major rebates, you have to consider whether a degree at an expensive college, which might be be a quarter million dollars sticker, is going to be all that wise of an investment. If AI really has a big effect on hiring knowledge workers, any bet you make can be quite wrong. But this isn't affecting MIT, Harvard or Yale, which could fill their freshmen classes 100 times over with very good students if they felt like it. It's just deadly for 2nd and 3rd rate liberal arts schools though, as high prices, the international student drought and fewer american children are just wrecking havoc.
But again, the AI bits just don't matter to top schools like MIT in the slightest. Too much demand of American students for undergrad.