By KIM BELLARD
MIT is, as most people would admit, a pretty good school. Even those who don’t know much about universities probably associate MIT with science, engineering, and mathematics, and in fact, it is one of the world’s leading universities in those (and other) areas. For example, the QS World University Rankings has named it the best university in the world for the last 14 years, the USN&WR Global Universities Ranking has it at number 2, as does the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There have been more than 100 Nobel laureates associated with MIT. If you meet a Harvard graduate you might think, oh, maybe they’re actually not that smart; It could just be a legacy admission, but if you know an MIT grad you probably expect them to be smart, especially since MIT doesn’t have legacy admissions. Even President Trump, who criticizes “elite universities” and has cut science funding in his second administration (more on this later), can’t help but praise his smart uncle who taught at MIT.
So when the president of MIT warns of reductions in research funding and graduate school admissions, we’re not talking about the death of the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. We are talking about miners falling.
In a video message last week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of some early losses: drops of more than 20% in federally funded research, in new federal research awards, and in graduate student enrollment. Overall, the school’s research activity has dropped by 10% in the last year.
Fly.
““This is a surprising loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” said Dr. Kornbluth, adding:
The fact is that we are facing a real decline in the research done by the people at MIT. It’s a loss of momentum for teachers and students and, frankly, it’s a loss for the nation. When the flow of basic discovery research is reduced, the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures is choked, and the supply of future scientists is reduced.
Make no mistake: While MIT itself may be an outlier, what is happening to it is not. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said Washington Post: “This is the first of many of these types of alarms that will be ringing” Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University, also said wapo That if MIT is scaling back the way it does research, that means universities across the country should think about scaling back and adapting. The ripple effects will be very broad and will have greater impacts than we realize.
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 has awarded just 613 grants this fiscal year, about 20% of the level at this time of year in each of fiscal years 2021 through 2024, according to the group Grant Witness. The amount of funding granted is at similarly low levels, around a third of that of previous years. The trend is visible in each of the NSF addresses. Renewals for new and competitive awards, which undergo full peer review, are particularly low compared to previous years. The National Institutes of Health has seen a similar trend regarding its number of awards, having given out around 10,000 awards this year compared to around 18,000 at this time in previous years; Total grant funding has also been reduced by a similar amount. NSF and NIH are even behind fiscal year 2025, during which thousands of grants were canceled and fewer grants were awarded than in previous years.
Meanwhile, of course, last month saw the firing of the entire board of directors that is supposed to oversee the National Science Foundation (NSF), which itself has been without a director for the past year. More than 2,500 scientists joined a letter to Congress condemning the move, warning that the move “intensifies an alarming attack on the United States’ ability to engage in basic and applied research, and to be competitive globally, particularly given that China is now investing more in R&D than the United States.”
Dr. Kornbluth cited a threat to MIT’s financial well-being that most of us may not have realized: the endowment excise tax. Harvard feels some shame about its $56 billion endowment fund, 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 Bill introduced a sliding scale that goes up to 8% for universities with the largest endowments, including MIT. It expects to pay $240 million a year for that tax, and that money is not spent on supporting research or educating exceptional students. Yale expects to pay $280 million a year.
Maurice McInnis, president of Yale, warned: “The impact of this tax will also be felt far beyond our campus and our hometown. Taxing universities undermines the education and research that drive life-saving medical advances, life-changing innovations, and economic growth in communities across the country and around the world.”
It feels less focused on raising revenue and more focused on punishing elite universities, and consequences be damned.
Dr. Kornbluth also highlighted the administration’s apparent antipathy toward international students. The US-based international education nonprofit NAFSA recently released a report estimating that foreign student enrollment fell by 20% this spring semester. Not everyone is brilliant, not everyone would have gone to MIT or another elite research university, and not everyone would have stayed in the United States, but our record of attracting and retaining the best and brightest from around the world is in jeopardy.
This. It’s. No. Good.
I didn’t go to an elite university and I know that not all scientific or technological advances come from people who do (or even who don’t graduate from university). But I do know that the United States did not become what it is without those elite research institutes, and if we keep trying to kill the golden geese (to get away from the canary metaphor), we will miss out on the gold they produce.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at a major Blues scheme, publisher of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular THCB contributor