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.

While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs from grants) or their own indirect costs. And they will not be admitting students if they do not see a clear path for them to be externally funded after their first year or two.

Oh yes. As I said, the math department guaranteed 6 years. If they can't guarantee it, they won't admit the student.

The engineering departments, however, admitted students regardless of funding as long as they met the bar. On the application they'd ask the candidate if they wanted the admission to be contingent on funding.

Universities like MIT that admit only if they have funding for engineering are the outliers. Usually they're private universities.

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.

They have $27 billion in their endowment. They are choosing not to fund those positions when they easily could on their own.

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.

That is how it usually works, but again, MIT has tens of billions of dollars. They could literally write their own grants.

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.

> 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.

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.

I am very skeptical that endowment funds are as illiquid as you claim. We're talking about amounts less than 10% of the total portfolio size annually.

Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.

MIT's endowment is ~80% earmarked to whatever purposes the donors considered important. The remaining ~20% is unrestricted, but unrestricted does not mean unallocated. Everything has already been allocated to some purpose, at least implictly. If you want to allocate more money towards something, you need to take that money from somewhere else. And then you get politics.

>practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.

Isn't that the responsibility of the dean to fix? I think a lot of us have no idea how this actually works, but do understand the difference between impossible and hard. This seems more like it's on the hard side than impossible.

A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused.

Many things are possible in the same sense as rewriting the US constitution. The mechanism for it exists, but using it in practice would require widespread agreement on the specifics. When there are many people making independent decisions, it's best to see the situation in statistical terms. Outcomes that are too many standard deviations away from the expected are effectively impossible.

> Especially if they can play on their lib donor heart-strings about how mean the current administration is being to them.

Yes, like those famous liberals the Koch family who paid for prime real estate across from Stata.

It's just not as simple as you lay it out to be. Do you _seriously_ think that if hunkering down and paying out of the endowment to sustain nominal operations for a few short years was a viable strategy that they wouldn't be doing just that?

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.

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.

You have no idea how endowments work.

That would be a conflict of interest.

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.

Allow me to disagree while I look back at the last 80 years of US government-funded research.

The government isn’t “picking” the research topics. It’s the scientists in places like the NSF that are. No system is perfect but some system is better than nothing, which is where we are going.

Who do you think sits on these grant review boards? It isn’t bureaucrats. These people are scientists in the field too.

That mattered for the America that was, not the America that is.

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.

Universities get ~40-50% of their funding from the government. Private equity doesn't quite fit.

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).

This study estimates that government spending is 40% of public university revenue, ~10% for private schools. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cud/postsecondary...

University of Illinois is also a public school. University of Chicago is private, as is MIT.

Which is precisely why I made that comparison.

> We have a $27 billion endowment. We can easily fund these positions. > Chancellor mcmcmc, 2027: We have a $26 billion endowment.

With that much capital, even conservative management should exceed $100M in interest annually, meaning they could have a $100M+ budget indefinitely. That's enough money to give a couple thousand employees a six figure salary while reserving 2x the salary amount for overhead like benefits, facilities and research efforts.

Are all your comments this abrasive and obtuse? Obviously chucking a million at every grad student every year to do whatever they feel like is poor financial decision making. If the university is funding the research, they can retain the IP and reap the financial benefits. It’s a private for-profit organization. Endowment aside, they have hundreds of millions in surplus operating income. What do they need public funds for?

Wow you just made me realize that Elon Musk net worth is roughly 30x the value of the entire MIT endowment fund.

The article is politely calling out the effects of the current regime in Washington and indicating that the government is finding other ways to not give funding to schools they don’t like.

I am kinda surprised this wasn’t a prominent conversation point.

Thank you, I needed that. It is a great reminder that eventually these talking points will always swamp any communication channel.

These talking points are such a great example of the effectiveness of organized groups versus individuals in the market place of ideas.

It makes me appreciate the early days of the internet even more, and the good fortune to be alive in that moment.

I'm not part of an organized group.

>It is a great reminder that eventually these talking points will always swamp any communication channel.

I notice that some people will respond to arguments by saying: "Oh, that argument. I've heard it many times before."

What's interesting to me is that they seem to think simply saying "I've heard that many times before" should suffice as a counterargument.

Really, it should be the opposite: If you've heard it many times before, you've had plenty of time to think about it. If the argument is invalid, you ought to have a very good counterargument by now. So where's your incredible counterargument? Seems rather suspicious that you're unwilling to share it!

See, you are in “not even wrong” territory. This is like someone planning a green cheese mining mission to the moon.

So when people choose not to engage, you assume that is simply a sign of the fitness of your argument. Not that the argument has fundamental divergences from reality.

Having done my tour of duty in the moderation trenches, the only people I would spend the incredible effort to communicate in their terms, with their model of reality, are people I love dearly.

When I encounter commenters and nodes of the tree you are a part of, I use it now as a chance to be greatful of what I have. That way at least one of us is better off.

>people choose not to engage

You've now written 7 smug paragraphs, yet you claim you are "not engaging". This is annoying.

I could literally copy/paste paragraphs like yours into any HN thread on any topic, if I wanted to be insufferable.

Please just save yourself the effort next time. If you don't want to engage, then don't engage.

Sounds like everything is fine then

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?

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.

Why? The point was made very clearly; everyone who is in academia or research knows. People who are unaware or uninterested will move on and not be affected.