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  quantgenius
  I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.
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  jrflo
  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.
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  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.
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  cmiles8
  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.
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  htrp
  MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
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  999900000999
  It's ok.The top colleges are arguably now in China.China is providing free education in many poor African countries. Chinese is one of many subjects offered.Of course, a smart African college student will have no issue learning English, Chinese, as well her home countries language.The future belongs to China. We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords.China celebrates engineers.Then again.No country is perfect, China also has an over abundance of educated without enough meaningful work for them.I sorta think a UBI( needs to cover housing, food and at least a small amount of leisure activities) is the way to go.The end goal of automation is we only need a small percentage of people working after all.
• innis226
  I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.
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  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
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  Animats
  > "new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%."Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants? The article does not seem to say.
• dwa3592
  Granted that Academia is very exploitative. My wife is a Post-doc, so I hear these extremely heart breaking stories of how professors have all the power when it comes to graduate students and post docs. But this drop in graduate students is not because of that - this drop is purely because of funding cuts and the AI hype. Why would humans wanna go through a Phd when you have industry leaders harking about how AI is going to do original science, when the political leaders of the country wanna cut funding for basic science research. On a slightly different note, China increased funding for the basic science research. This is peak of "how to shoot yourself in the foot".
• hereme888
  Only a 10% budget cut? Should have been way more. I hear victimization throughout the article. It was the school's choice to focus on politicizing and prioritizing foreigners, and looking as "accepting" as possible, rather than educating and funding our citizens which is what matters.
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  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.)
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  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.
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  sashank_1509
  “Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.
• realo
  So the current USA administration defunds Science everywhere it can (NOAA, FDA , etc) and even at it's roots (MIT , etc).Meanwhile in China ...
• tty46
  "Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone." DEI by another name?
• jrochkind1
  > Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone.Sounds ironically like "DEI".
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  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.
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  spyckie2
  Any other institutions outside of academia that has a 20+ billion endowment that earns 4 billion a year?And 500 grad students at what 50k per year for funding is what 25 million?They really couldn’t hedge the risk with their own money if talent was truly that important?
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  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...
• nafizh
  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%.
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  contubernio
  I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.
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  xnx
  > MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate studentsThis is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.
• czscout
  My partner recently applied to quite a few extremely prestigious graduate programs. We're not married and she made $16,000 dollars last year. She's won several national competitions in her field. The main deciding factor for her final choice was the price. It's just not worth it to go into six figures or more worth of debt for a degree.
• photochemsyn
  Here’s one problem - the DOE’s Genesis Mission referenced in the transcript has nothing earmarked in its 20 line-items for solar/wind/batteries/UHV grids! You want to work in that area, you have to leave the USA. Looks like fluff, but that’s been DOE for many years - captured by entrenched finance and industry, not looking to upset the apple cart.1. Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity 2. Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution 3. Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply 4. Delivering Nuclear Energy that is Faster, Safer, Cheaper 5. Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy 6. Transforming Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization 7. Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI 8. Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery 9. Recentering Microelectronics in America 10. Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers 11. Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories 12. Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality 13. Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery 14. Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos 15. Predicting U.S. Water for Energy 16. Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy 17. Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets 18. HPC Code Curation, Translation, and Development for Accelerated Scientific Discoveries 19. AI for Scientific Reasoning 20. Cybersecurity for AI-driven Science Workflows 21. Artificial Intelligence in Fluid Flow for Energy Components and Technologies
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  simonw
  "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.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".
• briandoll
  Great time to remember that Elon gutted the Department of Education
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  dzonga
  all because some cry baby in the White House.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.
• vondur
  I work in a large public university system and we are also seeing enrollment drops across campuses. We are also seeing declines in enrollment in the K-12 education too.
• raybb
  At least they seem happy with their MicroMasters program which may or may not be helping get more student in to the full grad programs:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138590
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  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.
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  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…
• mikelitoris
  This is what a declining empire looks like
• amirhirsch
  MIT should spin up MIT.ai for-profit, raise 100B @ 1T, then go buy big computer.
• glitchc
  Maybe it's time to lighten the load at the top. Certainly there are some bureaucratic efficiencies to be had.
• anon
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• Jimidesuu
  Other than that, with the current flow of opportunities outside from just graduating is a lot.I'm a graduate myself but where I am right now is really different from where I expected it to be
• kittikitti
  As someone who is continuing graduate level education and explored programs from MIT, I find that the major deciding factor to be the administration's willingness to censor pro-Palestinian activity. I don't think it's worth all the time and money at that point. I'm not going to spend all those resources to get a zionist education.
• lostathome
  I wonder who is dropping then. Lots of graduate students are from rich families, especially the international ones.
• mlmonkey
  > Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program ...
• ptero
  In the last 25-50 years the universities pivoted from providing an education to focusing on research and viewing students as pesky legacy, whose education is delegated to grad students. Even at large public universities, very few tenured professors teach anything except grad and senior level undergrad classes. The contracts are scoped for minimal teaching load.This system needs a reset. It could (after a likely painful disruption) refocus on teaching, keeping current (exorbitant) prices but providing a better education. Or it could focus on costs (cutting off unnecessary expenses). Or do something else, but the current setup is not sustainable.
• hmokiguess
  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.
• anon
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• mattaustin
  Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges.
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  mattaustin
  Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges
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  erelong
  Education and many industries have been destroyed via regulation, effectively snuffing out competition which could make them produce better quality and quantity of outputs
• anon
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• rob_c
  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...
• jobs_throwaway
  > And frankly, it’s a loss for the nation: When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and you shrink the supply of future scientists.Well said
• trunkiedozer
  Nothing interesting coming out of MIT, well, since X11
• anon
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• g58892881
  Surprise
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  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.
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  uutangohotel
  f*** around and find out
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  ck2
  when an entity as powerful as the federal government sets an agenda to purposely destroy academiaacademia gets destroyedI just hope there is an attempt to recover from this after 2029 and not just a shrugother countries have not stopped their 10-20+ year plans for education researchotherwise 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
• chaostheory
  Would the drop be due to our immigration policies?
• 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
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  clarkmoody
  > heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returnsCry me a river.
• ChrisArchitect
  Title is more generally: A message from MIT President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
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  nsxwolf
  When did admissions start being referred to as the "talent pipeline"?
• kgwxd
  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.
• 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.
• anon
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• Rekindle8090
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• hiverrbeyy
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• mugivarra69
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• arghandugh
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  FrustratedMonky
  Drop in students, but wasn't there also a drop in open positions with the funding cuts?
• tsunamifury
  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)
• 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.
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  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.
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  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?
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  mono442
  Studying at MIT in the AI age is a complete waste of time and money. I'm surprised it's only 20%.
• loxodrome
  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.
• ArchieScrivener
  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.