[catgary]

I see the value of the students, it just seems like an odd thing for a government to subsidize via NIH/NSF funding. We don’t really have anything analogous to that in Canada and it just seems awfully weird that it exists in the US without the “it’s older than the country” excuse that Oxford/Cambridge have.

[bpt3]

How is any of this subsidized by NIH/NSF funding? Those grants are only spent on the cost of research, either direct or indirect.

Also, a number of the schools we're discussing are older than the US itself; Harvard predates it by almost 150 years.