A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

chaostheory

Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?

htrp

MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international. https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/

neksn

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?

mrhottakes

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.

JumpCrisscross

> “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.)

FrustratedMonky

Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?

uutangohotel

f*** around and find out

softwaredoug

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

xhkkffbf

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.

jvanderbot

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.

elashri

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.

schnitzelstoat

Education (and research like this example) seem to be one of the highest ROI things you can invest in. It's a shame it's so often seen as an easy place to make cuts.

dangus

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.

Ifkaluva

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…

moussore

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...

chermi

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

xnx

> MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.

deepsun

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.

nsxwolf

When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?

jknoepfler

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.