The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.

Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.

This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.

"HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Using Peer-Enhanced Blockchain-Based Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement and Retention"

"Blockchain-Based Learning Environments". That's my WTF of the day.

I guess I was wrong.

But let’s ignore the idea that random commenter or random politico has a deeper understanding of what makes good research than the highly effective bodies with experts setup to do this. Let’s click the link for the study you actually complained about.

So here’s the first thing I see.

Start Date: Sep 1, 2019 End Date: Aug 31, 2025 Termination Date: May 9, 2025

Assuming equal outlays, you’re saving 4/60 * 2.8mm, so less than about $200k. Well, I guess 200k is a tiny fraction of $2.8mm but I guess that’s still a saving.

Oh wait, what’s this…there’s a link to USASpending.gov which is an official govt site that shows the actual outlays. Thats cool! And I can use the grant ID to see exactly what was done here. Nice!

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_1906595_4900

Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:

Aug 31, 2024!

That was last year!

I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.

But what’s this. It gives actual amounts.

> Outlayed Amount $1,795,710.00 Obligated Amount $2,821,709.00

Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.

But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.

Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.

It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.

Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.

There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.

Why do you think so? Have you read the details? Do you think that collaboration on creating science museums and similar experiences that target kids from specific areas/culture are not important? Or you think that $2.8M (which is basically a few months of funds for the team of 7 in this project) does not convert into higher economic growth down the line from more STEM engagement? Or some other reason?

So far the downvotes were quick, but elaborations on the topic not so much...

Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.

Look at the NIH grants listed, which by dollar value far outweigh the NSF grants listed: https://grant-watch.us/nih-data.html

Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?

Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?

I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?

And I dunno if you're being pollyannish or what but HIV research is often very tied up in left wing politics. It may or may not be in this case. For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-california-law-r...

“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”

“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”

“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”

“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”

“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”

“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”

It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.

>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it

Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.

One of my friends designed a toy that was called a "Thesis Generator" and whenever it was activated, it selected various words from a list to create a ridiculous word-salad Master's Thesis title. Honestly, most of its output was more or less believable and less absurd than some of the real theses I've seen, written by real students, and probably even passed peer review.

It seems like the pressure is on both ends, for academics to produce something really novel and tightly-scoped, and so they're going out of their way to find the perfect niche to research, and the academic review team wants to read something really Impressive and Scholarly, and those incentives tend to disconnect them from things like reality and sanity.

I am also sure people here can relate to learning about how skin care research is improving for other skin types, now.

Does this mean I think DEI is a magic bullet? no. It isn’t a bogey man to be afraid of either.

From that list, things like “ George Mason University Quantum Education Research Postdoctoral Fellowship” have been nuked.

Having conference posters removed because they use the word “diversity” when discussing human auditory systems, is a level of anti-intellectualism that has torpedoed America’s credibility.

—-

Girls go from being bright, to losing that spark in their eyes around high school.

Amazingly, things aren’t all rosy for men either. Nihilism is the emotion of the era.

These are just infuriating losses of inspiration, talent and motivation in the populace.

ON HN, we’ve talked about UBI. Giving education grants to increase diversity, and to increase the variance of random career walks US children can visualize, is a huge boon. It’s what we expect people to spend their time on if they had the freedom to do so.

I support the argument that more people should go into the trades. They should!

But you are gutting investment into science, and education. You are killing off your future pipeline of experts, and the pain will be felt in 5-10 years, and constantly compound.

Europe is already rolling out the red carpet for experts. They have better labor laws, which will make it even more attractive to set up shop there and have a great life to lead.

American firms will have to find reasons to attract people back, and with a gutted bureaucracy - the US state wont be an attractive factor, it would be something that has to be worked around.

I mean, the people who put money into Theranos later should have done better due diligence, but I don't fault the initial investment.

As a society, we decided that academics must get funding outside of their department. We also chose that funding bodies liked blockchain for reasons unknown. There is probably a professor somewhere who is working on peer incentives to support education, and realized the work would get funded if they stored the incentives in a blockchain rather than a database. If this professor had stronger professional ethics - someone else would have the same realization.

Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?

Like so many things that are being turned upside down nowadays, I think the author already answers it:

> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about […] ideologies.

The author did not give arguments for this claim.

55% of academia left-wing and/or marketing to left wing bureaucrats? is that even not possible? that was true in the Reagan era before the Clinton era put it on steroids.

1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases

That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.

Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...

Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.

Responsibilities:

- Develops and executes a research program, in collaboration with other fellows; and

- Builds research knowledge and skills through coursework, self-study, and work on existing projects in quantum education research.

Required Qualifications:

- Terminal degree in a related field;

- Must have a PhD & experience with education and/or workforce development programs;

- Must be a US citizen, national, or permanent resident

- Knowledge of data analysis techniques in at least one discipline;

- Excellent written and oral communication skills;

- Ability to work in a collaborative team environment; and

- Ability to work independently.

Preferred Qualifications:

- PhDs can be in STEM disciplines, education, or a field of social science with application to increasing equity and inclusion in STEM education and workforce development;

- Knowledge of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data analysis as applies to education research data; and

- Knowledge of social science and/or STEM education research methods and how they apply to understanding barriers to success for underrepresented groups in STEM disciplines.

Google: George Mason University is known for its strong programs in economics, computer science, law, public policy, and business.

This is not financial aid, it’s a PHD fellowship. Good lord. On the one side people bemoan the lack of people getting into the hard sciences and the research being done abroad. On the other efforts to increase and understand the issues at home and create actual solutions that bridge exactly these types of conversations, is DEI.

This is a society ensuring it’s getting people to be interested in advanced science. I think thats some of the most noble things a country can do.

There's lots of "resources and collaboration" entries as well which are a part of people meeting and talking about what they do. Don't expect the title to spell out "Cancer" on any of them.

In the last few years, you had to say something about underrepresented minorities. If your university is in an urban environment where it so happens that the local elementary school is full of URMs, then you don't even need to change anything about your plan.

"Always look for the hidden agenda."

The scientists are not to blame for the appalling incentives of the grant system here.

Wait a few years and we'll get the same thing again except the titles of the bad science will be:

* An economic analysis of rehoming manufacturing to underepresented states

* a study of price inelasticity of Greenlander's real estate?

* benefits of the politically disenfranchised attacking the senate as compared to archaic senate law making.

The previous administration wanted many of the same keywords, resulting in projects getting stuffed with them — I saw the same myself 20 years ago, where scientists working with satellite observations of ocean chlorophyll needed to justify their work with e.g. "this will help protect us from terrorists trying to cause an algal bloom".

If the latter is propaganda, the former is censorship.

And what you're using as an example is, essentially, "Huh, this group is acting different. Why?"

--

Meta:

2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.

Also: Do American really say "whopping"? I thought that was a UK tabloid thing.

First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?

Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.

If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...

2) if you don't like the process, change the process. But have a democratically determined process. This is political fiat and the plan is to set up political thought police boards that control final funding decisions based on what the president personally likes.

3) if you like "basic research" and "important research", you must vehemently oppose what is being done to the NIH and NSF. Top researchers are already looking to flee the country, Canada and Europe are offering very nice incentive packages. In weeks, USA went from attracting the best talent around the world, to being radioactive for international researchers. Budgets slashed, the pipeline is being decimated.

4) the point is to crush universities, because that is where dissent is largest, damage to science and research is considered an acceptable side effect.

5) and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.

The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.

It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.

I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.

First, a majority of the grants listed there are in the EDU Directorate, i.e. devoted to EDU Programs - Directorate for STEM Education (EDU), which many of the commenters have no clue about.

Second, I looked at the MPS section (mathematical and physical sciences) that I did get grants from in the past:

And here are the cancelled grants. In my opinion these are all sensible topics to be funded (especially since it is probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total budget):

Mathematical Connectivity through Research and Equity for Women

Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice

Equity Beyond the Algorithm: A Mathematical Quest for Fairer-ness in Machine Learning

Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative

Advancing Inclusive Leaders in Astronomy

Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative

Pathways to a Diverse STEM Workforce: GEM Underrepresented Minority Internships in STEM Program

CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge

Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative

Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice

Quantum Noir: A conference series focused on Faculty, Researchers, and Students of Color(+) in the Quantum Sciences

Minnesota Partnership to Foster Native American Participation in Astrophysics

Conference: Gender Equity in the Mathematical Study (GEMS) of Commutative Algebra

Conference: 2025 Stochastic Physics in Biology GRC

Conference in Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics: Celebrating the Work of Diverse Mathematicians

Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative

Postdoctoral Fellowship: MPS-Ascend: Probing Secondary Structure and Hydration in Nucleic Acids Using Chiral

Selective Vibrational Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy PRIMES: Researching and Teaching Mathematics of Fairness and Equity

Collaborative Research: ATD: Hawkes Process-Based Causal Relationship Discovery For Complex Threat Detection and Forecasting

Preparation of Stimuli-Responsive Materials with Directed Photophysical Behavior

If you wanna believe government rationales for their actions until proven otherwise, you go ahead with that.

Sucker.

My second thought was let me sort by a different directorate ahh the stories changes but maybe that's me getting lucky because the biology directorate does hard science. But there is a lot of DEI stuff here why? Because its the grant cancelation statistics after the admin defunded anything with a DEI term. It doesn't represent the totality of NSF funding but an extremely bias sample of it.

The solution to you don't like DEI is to pass laws not just eliminate science research as a whole. Give the NSF time to publish all the canceled programs. Its easier to say you don't like "that research" but than fire your congress person who give the NSF to do "that exact type of research". Not a huge plurality of scientists who did what our nation asked them to do.

Yes, and most of it would go to support grad student stipends which are sky high in SF due to COL. If you really look at where this money would flow, it would be to Bay Area landlords.

This is how it usually works:

You want public money so you can research your pet interest. But the public wants to know how your research will benefit the public before they will give you public money to do your research. But for some (many) academics, they are loathe to think of anything aside from their direct special interest research topic that they can't even articulate how their research can benefit the public. So they go with the lowest effort idea "I will teach local kids about my subject in a creative way".

Frankly I'm concerned so many people here want to give money to researchers without them having to articulate how it will benefit society. That's what "broader impact" statements are all about.

Hispanic people don't like being called "latinx" so anything with that word in it is pretty much automatically invalidated as being credulent, especially if it is purporting to be helping people when they're colonizing their language.

The person you're responding to is way overplaying their case, though, most of the funding that was cut wasn't DEI related, but let's also be serious people here.

  Program Manager: Alicia Santiago Gonzalez
  Veronica Garcia-Luis (Principal Investigator)

It's language colonization. The correct term, if there is even a need for an alternative for "latino" is "latine", which has existed in Spanish for thousands of years.

I thought we were going back to a meritocracy, where people are judged on the merits of their ideas. You read a word and concluded a lot.

It's interesting -- I was in a thread with someone else lamenting it's so hard to get funding if you go against the establishment. Now you're telling me this research shouldn't have been funded because it uses a term that goes against the established term. I think that really highlights the challenges in science funding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic-Serving_Institution

Note that consent/support is partially result of this wedge being based on a real problems.

Note: I am not claiming that what is happening is a good idea. But there are multiple reasons why many people actually support this or see no reason to spend their energy on opposing it. And some of them are quite valid.

I think that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w... mostly matches my viewpoint

> It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!

> Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.

That’s how advanced an economy it is.

And this is being thrown away.

Role models blaze pathways for others to follow. The create alternatives to ‘traditional’ examples of roles and jobs.

The "ideas" are bad when they start from forcing something on a people that doesn't align to their linguistic or cultural experience coming from an outsider using their wealth and power to directly influence outcomes for those people. The use of the word "latinx" is a perfect example of exactly the wrong way to approach trying to help people, which honestly if you are as cynical as I am you see as the point. I don't often believe people who say "I was only trying to help" as they actively seek to destroy other people's cultures and languages.

All I know from our several back and forths is that you don't like the term latinx and some other people don't, and therefore this proposal, of which you cannot even articulate the details, is a priori defacto harmful. If that's all you have than I think I've learned all I can from exchange.

> people feel they have to insert coded language for white academic elites

Assumed; there's no proof that happened here. You're inventing the genesis of this proposal in your mind.

> this very complex social issue.

Agreed, and that's why we shouldn't draw conclusions (like "they actively seek to destroy other people's cultures and languages") from a single word or a title, and why we usually rely on panels of domain experts who understand the nuance to fund such complex social research. Which is what happened in this case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html