koper comments on RIP America

Graduate students provide enormous value for their cost in funding. I’d like to better understand how k-12 students contribute here. Those students make up 88.7k of the reduction. How much do these students contribute and at what cost?

I’m in no way against inspiring the next generation. My question is aimed at correctly interpreting this table. The NSF is a worthwhile expense, but let’s understand the data we have.

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[+] fossilesque@mander.xyz [S] 32 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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[–] BlazeDaley@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago*

I’m not disagreeing. The report isn’t clear. This is written by people asking Congress for a budget cut.

NSF programs indirectly impact millions of people, reaching PreK-12 students and teachers, the general public, and researchers

The actual impact to the pipeline may be far larger.

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[–] reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 14 points 1 year ago

The chart is on a page discussing this:

My workplace is NSF funded and supports a number of activities designed to increase interest in the discipline among young kids or improve teaching techniques for k-12 teachers. Similarly, we run an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program to give undergraduate students exposure to hands on research (and hopefully encourage them to stay in the discipline for graduate school).

A majority of our funding still goes to PhDs doing fundamental research, but the pipeline that feeds academic research begins with children, and research funding priorities aren’t blind to that.

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And...?

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[–] koper@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

The tweet gave me the impression that these people lose their jobs. But it turns out that's not entirely true, because it also counts undergrad and preK students who participate in a program one way or another. That's still bad, but not as bad as the tweet suggests. Surely there is a better way to represent the budget request?

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[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

It's maybe comparable to a bee hive or ant nest losing it's workers. Each single one of them isn't important at all. But if nearly all of them are gone, the hive/nest will do much worse or even collapse.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

you do realize graduate and undergrad students do research in labs as part of thier degree, or lab experience right. they are indeed researchers, just not labeled as such by employers to pay them a wage or any benefits. and also they do most of the lab work as well, the postdocs/PI are the ones drumming up the IDEA, and implementing some of the experiments. if you go to any research paper from a science journal you can sometime see graduate and undergraduate researcher as part of the affliate"acknowlegement of the paper.

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[–] koper@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago

As I understand these NSF-funded research projects are only part of the entire curriculum. So it would be a misrepresentation to say that the US is "getting rid of" these students. They will still study and get a degree, they'll just have a harder time finding an appropriate research project. That's still bad, but not the same as what is claimed by the tweet.

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