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Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.
May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.
Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.
If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.
Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.
There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.
Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.
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