re: WSJ: Faculty-on-Faculty War Erupts at Columbia

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Wealthy foreign students also generally pay full sticker price.

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The gulf arabs commonly send kids at full price paying out of essentially their sovereign wealth funds/oil revenues. The kids or their families typically weren't actually paying.

Appreciate it. But I think this is one of those features where the AI really isn’t fully developed yet, particularly when it comes to summarizing data on figures and graphs. Here’s the top link that your AI question generated…

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Notice the second picture, exhibit IV-35b. In the last year of data, 2019…
-Health Sciences spent a total of 27.3 billion on research
-Engineering 15.9 billion
-Biological and Biomedic Sciences 15.4 billion
-Math, Stats and Physical Sciences: 6.3 billion
-Non-science and engineering: 4.3 billion
-Behavioral and social science: 4.1 billion
-Humanities: 0.5 billion


Now transition to Exhibit IV-35c next, which reveals the portion of spending financed by federal research grants…
-65.8% of math, stats and physical sciences funding came from grants, for a total of 4.15 billion dollars in federal grants
-60.2% of biological and biomed, meaning 9.27 billion dollars
-Engineering was 59.7%, meaning 9.5 billion dollars
-52% of health science, for 14.2 billion dollars
-Behavioral Sciences was 41.7%, for 1.71 billion dollars
-27.5% of other nonscience and engineering, meaning 1.18 billion dollars
-9.2% of humanities, for a meager .05 billion dollars.


So in total, 40.06 billion dollars in federal grants. Of those, 37.12 billion went to the top four STEM fields. Which is 92.7% of the total federal grant funding going to STEM.




Now that may not be a perfect number, it’s just one source. But the point is, AI put the upper estimate at 67%. But their own first link actually has it at nearly 93%. So you still can’t really trust those headline AI summaries, especially when it comes to data analysis. It’s getting a lot better, but you have to be extremely specific with your prompts to get it to pull the correct information from graphs and tables.




So I think the evidence remains in place, STEM absolutely dominates federal funding for grants. And even if Biden did ramp up spending on non-STEM grants in the last four since since this dataset ended, it surely wouldn’t push the ratio to anywhere near 50/50

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Appreciate it. But I think this is one of those features where the AI really isn’t fully developed yet, particularly when it comes to summarizing data on figures and graphs. Here’s the top link that your AI question generated…

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I'd rather have you be right on this than me!

Having said that, I drilled down a little when I made the post because I didn't believe it either. I don't have time to reconstruct that right now, but I did find indications that non-STEM funding has grown dramatically since the late 2000's. This may be a LINK to one of the studies you're quoting. Note the growth in college and university spending, which suggests those endowments are being used for non-STEM research. That's their prerogative of course, but I don't have to like it in the ere of spiraling tuition and "student" athletes making millions.

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The gulf arabs commonly send kids at full price paying out of essentially their sovereign wealth funds/oil revenues. The kids or their families typically weren't actually paying.

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Yep. There was a Saudi "prince" in my dorm back in grad school. It was a private "dorm" - restaurant and pool on the 11th floor, maid service, etc.... I got a deal on the place because I started my research assistantship mid-term and they weren't full due to rich kid flunk outs.