Stealth is somewhat overrated, especially 5th gen. Sure you get a lower radar cross-section which means you are less visible to X-band radar but near-peer adversaries or even non-peer technologically advanced adversaries don't rely only on X-band radar, to say nothing of distributed array radar where the transmitter and receiver are not in the same location. More than one networked war plane in the air are essentially distributed array radar. There are other bands which admittedly as not as good as X-band in terms of how much energy you need and how accurately you can locate things. But you can send a missile in the general direction using say S-band and have the missile turn on it's seeker once it's closer. Once the missile is close enough, a stealth plan can no longer hide. This is what the Russian S-400 and S-500 do for example.
Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.
Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.
Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.
I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.
Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.
Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.
Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.