By KIM BELLARD
MIT is, most people would admit, a pretty good school. Even those who don’t know a lot about universities probably associate MIT with science, engineering, and math, and in fact, it is one of the leading universities in the world for those (and other) areas. E.g., the QS World University Rankings have named it the top university in the world the last 14 years, USN&WR Global Universities Ranking has it #2, as does The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There have been over 100 Nobel Laureate recipients associated with MIT. If you meet a Harvard grad you might think, oh, they may not actually be all that smart – they could be just a legacy admission, but if you meet an MIT grad you probably do expect that they must be smart, especially since MIT does not have legacy admissions. Even President Trump, who rails against “elite universities” and who has slashed science funding in his second administration (more on that later), can’t help but rave about his smart uncle who taught at MIT.
So when the President of MIT warns about reductions in research funding and in graduate school admissions, we’re not talking about the proverbial canaries in the coal mine dying. We’re talking about miners going down.
In a video message last week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of some startling losses: over 20% drops in federally funded research, in new federal research awards, and in graduate student enrollment. Overall, the school’s research enterprise has shrunk 10% in the last year.
Gulp.
“That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Dr. Kornbluth said. She added:
The fact is that we’re looking at a real drop in research being done by the people of MIT. It’s a loss of momentum for faculty and students 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.
Make no mistake: although MIT itself may be an outlier, what is happening to it is not. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told The Washington Post: “This is the first of many of these kinds of alarms that will be ringing,” Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University, also told WaPo that if MIT is scaling back how it does research, that means universities across the country should be thinking about scaling back and adjusting. The ripple effects will go far and wide, and will have bigger impacts than we realize.
I’ve written before about the Trump war on U.S. science, and while some of his attempted funding cuts have been halted by courts, no one should have their hopes up. The American Physical Society reports:
The National Science Foundation has awarded just 613 grants this fiscal year, at about 20% the level at this time in the year in each of fiscal years 2021 through 2024, according to the group Grant Witness. The amount of funding awarded is at similarly low levels, about one-third that of previous years. The trend is visible across each of NSF’s directorates. New and competitive award renewals, 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 about 10,000 awards this year compared to around 18,000 at this time in previous years; total award funding is also down by a similar amount. NSF and NIH are even lagging behind fiscal year 2025, during which thousands of grants were canceled and fewer grants were awarded than in previous years.
Meanwhile, of course, there was last month’s firing of the entire board that is supposed to oversee the National Science Foundation (NSF), which itself has been without a director for the last year. More than 2,500 scientists joined in a letter to Congress decrying the move, warning that the move “ramps up an alarming attack on the ability of the US 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 US.”
Dr. Kornbluth cited one threat to MIT’s financial well-being that most of us may not have realized: the excise tax on endowments. Harvard takes some grief for its $56b endowment fund, but Yale ($41b), Stanford ($38b), Princeton ($33b), MIT ($25b), and U Penn ($22b) also have large endowments. Congress during the first Trump Administration put a 1.4% excise tax on university endowments, but the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill introduced a sliding scale that gets up to 8% for the universities with the largest endowments – including MIT. It expects to pay $240 million annually for that tax, and that’s money not being spent on supporting research or educating exceptional students. Yale expects to pay $280 million annually.
Maurice McInnis, the 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 fuel life-saving medical breakthroughs, life-changing innovations, and economic growth in communities across the country and around the globe.”
It feels less focused on raising revenues and more focused on punishing elite universities, and damn the consequences.
Dr. Kornbluth also pointed out the Administration apparently antipathy towards international students. The U.S.-based international education nonprofit NAFSA recently issued a report estimated that foreign student enrollment fell 20% for this spring semester. Not all of them are brilliant, not all of them would have gone to MIT or another elite research university, and not all of them would have stayed in the U.S., but our track record of attracting and retaining the best & the brightest from all around the world is in danger.
This. Is. Not. Good.
I didn’t go to an elite college, and I know that not all scientific or technological breakthroughs come from people who do (or even who graduate from college at all). But I do know that America did not become what it is without those elite research institutes, and if we continue to try to kill the golden geese (to move away from the canary metaphor), we’re going to miss out on the gold they produce.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor
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