Kim Bellard
MIT is a pretty good school that most people agree with. Even people who don’t know much about the university are likely to associate MIT with science, engineering, and math. In fact, MIT is one of the world’s best universities in its field (and others). For example, the QS World University Rankings have ranked it as the best university in the world for the past 14 years, the USN&WR Global University Rankings have ranked it second, and so have The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There are more than 100 Nobel Prize winners associated with MIT. If you meet a Harvard graduate, they might actually not be that smart. It might just be legacy admissions, but when you meet an MIT graduate you probably expect them to be smart. Especially because MIT does not have legacy admissions. Even President Trump, who has railed against “elite universities” and cut science funding during his second administration (more on that later), can’t help but rave about his brilliant uncle who taught at MIT.
So when MIT’s president warns of declining research funding and graduate admissions, we’re not talking about the proverbial canary dying in a coal mine. We’re talking about miners going down.
In a video message last week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of some alarming losses. Federally funded research, new federal research awards, and graduate student enrollments have decreased by more than 20%. Overall, the school’s research business fell 10 percent last year.
Gulp.
““This is a tremendous loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” said Dr. Kornbluth. She added:
The fact is that the research being done by people at MIT is actually decreasing. This is a loss of momentum for our faculty and students, and frankly, a loss for the nation. Shrinking the pipeline of basic discovery research will block the flow of future solutions, innovations, and treatments and reduce the supply of future scientists.
Make no mistake. MIT itself may be an outlier, but what is happening there is not. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said: washington post: “This is the first of many types of alarms that will sound in the future.,” Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University, also said: Wapo If MIT scales back how it conducts research, that means universities across the country will have to think about downsizing and adjusting. The ripple effects will be far-reaching and have a greater impact than we think.
I’ve written before about Trump’s war on American science, and although some of his attempts to cut funding have been stopped by the courts, no one should get their hopes up. The American Physical Society reports:
The National Science Foundation awarded 613 grants this fiscal year, about 20% of current levels each year from 2021 to 2024, according to the Grant Witness group. The amount of funding provided is also similar, at one-third of the previous year. This trend can be seen across departments at NSF. Renewals of new, competitive awards that undergo full peer review are particularly low compared to previous years. The National Institutes of Health has seen a similar trend with regard to the number of awards it awards, giving out about 10,000 awards this year compared to about 18,000 at this time last year. Total award funding also decreased by a similar amount. NSF and NIH are even behind fiscal year 2025, with thousands of grants canceled and fewer grants awarded than in previous years.
Of course, the entire board of directors responsible for overseeing the National Science Foundation (NSF), which had been without a director for the past year, was fired last month. More than 2,500 scientists condemned the move in a letter to Congress, warning that “this move constitutes a stunning assault on America’s ability to engage in basic and applied research and be globally competitive, especially given that China currently invests more in R&D than the United States.”
Dr. Kornbluth mentioned one threat to MIT’s financial well-being that most of us are unaware of. This is a consumption tax on donations. Harvard is getting some grief over its $56 billion endowment, but Yale ($41 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($33 billion), MIT ($25 billion) and U Penn ($22 billion) also have large endowments. During the first Trump administration, Congress imposed a 1.4% excise tax on university endowments, but the so-called Big and Beautiful Act introduced a sliding scale of up to 8% for universities with the largest endowments, including MIT. Those taxes are expected to cost $240 million a year, money that isn’t used to support research or educate outstanding students. Yale expects to pay $280 million annually.
Yale President Maurice McInnis warned: “The impact of this tax will be felt far beyond our campuses and hometowns. Taxing universities undermines the education and research that saves lives, transforms innovations, and drives economic growth in communities across the country and around the world.”
Focus less on increasing revenue and more on punishing elite universities and ruining their results.
Dr. Kornbluth also pointed out the administration’s clear antipathy towards international students. NAFSA, a U.S.-based international education nonprofit, recently released a report estimating that international student enrollment was down 20% this spring semester. Not all of them are brilliant, not all of them go to MIT or other elite research universities, and not all of them will stay in the United States. But our record of attracting and retaining the brightest talent from around the world is at risk.
this. am. no. good.
I didn’t go to a prestigious university, and I know that not all scientific and technological innovations come from people who do (or even graduate from university). But I know that America would not be what it is without its elite research institutions, and if we continue to try to kill our golden goose (to escape the canary analogy), we will miss out on the gold they produce.
Kim is a former emarketing executive at Major Blues Plan and editor of the late & Mourned. Tincture.ioCurrently a regular THCB contributor.
