[HN Gopher] Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptan...
___________________________________________________________________
Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid
research cuts
Author : strangeloops85
Score : 280 points
Date : 2025-02-23 00:37 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedp.com)
| kitrose wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, Penn has an endowment of over $22
| billion.
|
| Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?
| osnium123 wrote:
| Endowments can be very restrictive and thus it's hard to
| shuffle money around.
| bitlax wrote:
| Oh I should try that one.
| nielsbot wrote:
| What are they for then?
| saulrh wrote:
| Chronic traumatic encephalopathy and tax deductions, as far
| as I can tell.
| disce-pati wrote:
| this comment is funny and sad all at once
| chatmasta wrote:
| Endowments are investment funds that ideally generate
| sufficient returns to cover yearly operational expenses
| while also growing the principal.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| They don't cover yearly operational expenses, which is
| why they want indirect costs from granting agencies. And
| also why they charge tuition
| chatmasta wrote:
| At some schools the endowment returns are sufficient to
| cover operational expenses, which is why they can have
| such generous financial aid policies (effectively "not
| charging tuition" for those whom it would matter).
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Yeah at the Ivies and equivalents the "tuition" is
| basically a "suggested donation" and the final bill is
| based on how much the parents have to give. I'm not sure
| about room and board.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| At private schools, stated tuition is basically just a
| (soft) cost ceiling. The majority of students receive
| some level of aid, either need or merit based, or both.
| It's a pretty good system, if you want a mix of rich
| students, academically gifted students, and disadvantaged
| students who might succeed given the resources.
|
| The existience of merit-based pricing is the big
| differentator versus public schools.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Not sure which way you're saying the differentiator goes,
| but "merit-based pricing" is NOT what the top schools
| have. They are entirely need blind. You don't get
| financial aid because you're good at sports, you get it
| because you were accepted to the school and if you can't
| afford to go there then they will make sure that you can
| attend. In fact that's why the Ivies don't offer
| scholarships - because if you can't afford to attend,
| they'll reduce your tuition until you can.
|
| I'd call it merit-based _admissions_ , if anything.
|
| (Athletes can still get preference in admissions, with
| each team given a number of slots, but it's totally
| separate from financial aid decisions. And this is
| actually a disadvantage compared to top, non-Ivy schools
| like Stanford, because a top athlete from a rich family
| would go to Stanford for free but would have to pay at an
| Ivy.)
| tomohelix wrote:
| It is a trust fund basically. From what I uderstand, the
| principal is nearly impossible to use/withdraw and you can
| only use the interest/returns generated from investing the
| principle.
|
| Even that portion is also restricted. The purpose must be
| strictly academic and some part must be paid to the
| university, some must be reinvested, and then the final
| pieces can be used at the professor's discretion according
| to the rules set when the endowment is established.
|
| So generally, you are looking at 1-2% of the total amount
| that can be spent annually. Still a lot, but for research,
| tens of millions would still not be enough for something
| like Penn.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| Typically, they're set up so that the income goes to a
| particular purpose, or so that only the income is used. For
| instance, a big chunk of Harvard's engineering and CS
| professorships are funded through a donation from a 19th
| century inventor of machines to make shoes. His intent was
| to fund professorships in "practical sciences" in
| perpetuity, and he had particular terms - he wanted
| salaries to be competitive for instance. The university
| can't legally spend down the principal or use the money for
| some other purpose.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| But they can use the interest.
|
| A $20 billion endowment at a 5% ROI is $1 billion per
| year
| garden_hermit wrote:
| The interest is already what they are using. That is what
| all these scholarships and endowed chairs and so on are
| paid with.
| jasonhong wrote:
| As one simple example, some funds are for endowed chairs,
| named after donors or companies. For example, in computer
| science at Carnegie Mellon, we have chairs named for
| Richard King Mellon, Kavcic-Moura, Thomas and Lydia Moran,
| and more. (You can see a full list here:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsfacts/endowed.html)
|
| It costs a few million to create an endowed chair, and
| these funds can only be used to help offset salary costs
| for that professor (thus helping with the budget for the
| department) and for research associated with that
| professor. You can't just use all of the money in these
| endowed chairs for other things that people in this thread
| are suggesting, it's not fungible.
|
| You know, folks on HN often re-post links to Chesterton's
| Fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chest
| erton's_...), about trying to understand how things are
| done and why, before tearing things down and potentially
| causing more problems. I'd highly suggest the folks in this
| thread that are exhibiting a lot of anger about academia
| keep Chesterton's Fence in mind. Yes, academia has problems
| (as do _all_ human institutions and organizations), but the
| amount of good academia offers is quite vast in terms of
| advances in science, arts, education, public discourse,
| startups, and more.
| pj808 wrote:
| I once encountered an endowment fund that was restricted
| for use in a defined scholarship. This was problematic
| because that scholarship could only be given to students
| of a specific race. Restricting applicants in this way
| would be illegal under Canada's charter, so for at least
| a decade the funds were simply not spent. As far as I
| know nothing has changed.
| YZF wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence is also just an argument for
| conservatism and never changing anything because there is
| no end to the argument that you don't _really_ understand
| how things are done and why. Maybe "Academia" does need
| a bit of a wakeup call. You're lumping in a whole lot
| under academia and it's not really clear what portion of
| "academia" and academia dollars are linked to those
| outcomes you're talking about.
| kelnos wrote:
| You're attacking a straw man, though. I see a lot of
| posts here that aren't even _considering_ why something
| might be the way it is. We haven 't gotten to the point
| where someone might do the "you don't _really_ understand
| how things are done and why " goalpost-moving dance, and
| suggesting that of course that's how it's going to play
| out is unwarranted.
|
| I mean, the initial post in this thread is just
| completely ignorant. Expecting a university to blow their
| endowment on a short-term[0] political issue is just
| ignorant. They spend maybe 5% of their endowment each
| year, because that is the safe amount to spend, as they
| want to be able to pull that 5% out, every year,
| essentially _forever_. Two minutes of "research" on
| university endowments would surface this kind of
| information.
|
| [0] Four or even eight years is _nothing_ to an
| institution that is older than the United States itself.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Sometimes donations which are specifically earmarked for
| something.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| you only spend the return on the endowment, so that the
| endowment lasts "forever"
| binarycrusader wrote:
| As the other poster mentioned, endowments / donations often
| come with conditions attached that significantly restricts how
| money from them can be used.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Great point. It's bad enough seeing bloat in costs,
| administrators, and activist degrees. But it's downright
| ridiculous that universities with billions can't fund
| themselves using just investment income. If endowments are
| claimed to be restricted, I want to see the terms
| transparently, and see them using the funds maximally before
| coming back to taxpayers.
|
| But also - why is no one asking whether we need so many college
| educated students. I don't think it makes sense for every
| random person to get a degree or a graduate degree. These
| programs need to be highly selective since the supply is
| greater than demand, particularly for graduate degrees.
| nielsbot wrote:
| What is an "activist degree"? (Is activism bad?)
| cyberax wrote:
| Usually impractical and heavily politicized stuff like
| "colonialism studies".
|
| Activism is not necessarily bad, but the current university
| environment, for some reason, seems to produce activists
| who are just unbelievably cringe and naive.
| nielsbot wrote:
| "Colonialism studies" is politicized? In what way? Sounds
| like a history class to me--but please tell me why it
| isn't.. I'm not familiar.
|
| > seems to produce activists who are just unbelievably
| cringe and naive
|
| I'd be curious to see some examples.
| juniperus wrote:
| The idea that you can have an economically sound career
| talking about historical colonialism is a bit far-
| fetched. There are a few authors who probably scrape by a
| living writing books on this topic, but that's about it
| (and they don't need a degree to do this). If you get one
| of the handful of academic jobs where you teach this
| topic to other students, it is something of a racket,
| where you are teaching students to get a degree in a
| field where the only job is teaching other students this
| topic. There is certainly inherent value in some fields
| that don't have a direct application, like philosophy,
| but can still inform other pursuits.
|
| As for the politicization of the field of colonialism
| studies, generally, these sort of topics are viewed
| through a pseudo-religious lens today, the religion being
| utopianism, the idea that there can be survival and
| satisfaction for all. Under the utopianist worldview,
| practical concerns are ignored and the topic is judged
| under a lens of morality and dogma. That makes it an
| unserious field and marred by activism. Very true for
| many humanities and social graduate degrees. Might as
| well go to seminary and spend half a decade learning to
| be a theologian. The outcome is similar, dogmatic and
| removed from reality, makes it hard to transfer into a
| real world setting.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Sounds like a history class to me--but please tell me
| why it isn't..
|
| History, in general, has always been a somewhat
| "activist" degree. But it's a huge area of research, and
| it's not _necessarily_ politically charged.
|
| "Colonialism studies" almost always degenerate into "all
| civilization bad, need to destroy all humans and return
| to the stone age" nonsense.
|
| That's not to say that real research in this area is
| impossible, this year's Nobel Prize in economics was
| given for the colonialism research.
|
| > I'd be curious to see some examples.
|
| Recent Gaza protests in Seattle, for example. The
| protesters were handing out communist propaganda. Not in
| any roundabout way, but literal Communist Manifestos. Or
| another example, Seattle's ex-councilmember campaigned
| _for_ Trump, to help speed up the "destruction of
| capitalist oppression" (
| https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/a-big-
| sea... ). I can go on, with more examples, but they are
| mostly local to the Seattle area.
|
| For less political examples, the "just stop using oil"
| protesters who keep defacing art.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The administrators, athletic coaches, and non-productive
| tenured professors all cost a lot, and their hands were in
| the pie before these students' were. By the way, the students
| in question are for the "activist degrees" you mentioned -
| they seem to all be in the humanities.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| Penn's budget is $4.7 billion (just the university, not
| including the hospitals). Even with a $22 billion endowment,
| they can only fund a fraction of that off of investment
| income.
|
| And what are you even talking about "coming back to the
| taxpayers"? This isn't like a sports team holding a city
| hostage to get a new stadium. They apply for competitive
| grants to do particular research projects, then they do those
| projects. They aren't asking for a handout, they are being
| paid to provide a much-needed service (health research).
| kelnos wrote:
| Penn has a $22B endowment, and pulls around 5% out of that
| annually. That seems to be a reasonably safe number that will
| give them a good chance of at worst keeping the endowment's
| size constant. Sure, they can take out more every year
| (they'd have to take out more than 4x that to match Penn's
| current budget), but then their endowment would reduce in
| value every year and eventually run out. That would not be a
| good outcome.
| sethev wrote:
| Penn's endowment distributed $1.1 billion last year. Endowments
| like this are managed to last a long time - indefinitely, even.
|
| Penn itself is older than the United States - they're not going
| to start blowing through their endowment because of political
| trends over the last couple months (or next 4 years), even if
| they legally could.
| tzs wrote:
| The whole point of an endowment is to support whatever it was
| created to support in perpetuity. They do that by investing the
| endowment and using most of the income from those investments
| to support the endowment's mission, and a small part to grow
| the endowment over time.
|
| Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment,
| which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22
| billion.
| cozzyd wrote:
| If only Penn had the richest and most powerful men in the world
| as alumni
| Onavo wrote:
| Yeah, move over Harvard and Yale. Two of Penn's alumni are
| currently running the country.
| mizzao wrote:
| As a Wharton grad, the place basically trains people to be
| ruthless and make money. Morality, history, and liberal arts
| are not part of the curriculum. It appears to have
| succeeded...?
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Back then it used to be the running joke about economists:
| "if everyone takes care of himself, everyone is taken care
| of"
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I have zero sympathy for universities that work grad students to
| the bone, pay them a mere $25k stipend, and take >50% grant money
| for "overhead".
|
| The academia model is deeply, profoundly broken.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| For what it's worth, I remember well that I thought a 40k
| stipend in 2017 was an AMAZING opportunity, and was very
| excited to pursue a PhD for that reason (granted 25k today is
| significantly less). My requirements are different now, but at
| the time that was a great opportunity for me. Don't knock the
| low-pay-opportunities too too hard, the most desperate people
| really want that offer, and it is still be a better stepping
| stone than a 0k stipend. Of course I'd also like if the offer
| was better.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > the most desperate people really want that offer
|
| I don't think it's great the PhD programs disproportionately
| attract desperate talent willing to work for poverty wages.
|
| I'm not saying the labs need to pay crazy BigTech wages. But
| the status quo is downright abusive. And nevermind all the
| perverse incentives around publishing.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Unfortunately in many areas its the only way to have a
| viable career, even if you aren't planning on going in
| academia (very few can) a PhD is a definite plus / nearly
| required in many industries.
| Tostino wrote:
| That's like half of what I got hired for in the Tampa area
| (notoriously low pay) in 2011 with like 6 months of SQL
| experience and no college degree.
|
| That's really depressing to be honest.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| lol welcome to mechanical engineering. At the time, I think
| a good starting pay for a mechanical engineer was ~80k
| total. Getting half of that while pursuing a PhD seemed
| like a great deal.
| Merrill wrote:
| They could have more grad students if they reliably graduated
| them with a PhD in four years. I was once a lab tech for two
| grad students that had been there 11 and 13 years respectively.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Thats insane. In experimental science there is actually an
| incentive for the PI to keep the grad student around
| (assuming they're productive) because their training is a
| sunk cost but its very hard to justify more than 7-8 years.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Well it's going to be totally destroyed now, so good job. Can't
| have academia challenging the president with objective truth,
| can we? I'll bet the new replacement funding, will have some
| sort of loyalty pledge to Trump strings attached.
| jltsiren wrote:
| It's almost as expensive to hire a PhD student as a postdoc.
|
| A postdoc makes something close to the median wage. While not
| great, it's enough that people in general are expected to buy
| homes and start families with incomes like that. You can't
| reasonably expect more from an early career job that doesn't
| produce anything with a direct monetary value.
|
| A PhD student earns much less, because the rest is used to
| cover tuition. And that is the root issue. Neither the federal
| government nor the states pay universities to train PhDs. The
| tuition must be paid by the student or from another source. The
| former does not make sense if you are not rich. If tuition is
| paid from grants, stipends will be low, as funding agencies
| don't want to pay more for trainees than qualified researchers.
| And if the PhD student works as a part-time teaching assistant,
| undergrads are effectively paying their tuition and stipend.
| Raising undergraduate tuition fees to pay PhD students more
| would not be very popular.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The tuition is bunk. You take maybe 1 or 2 years of classes
| in your phd and its not a full courseload at all. At least in
| stem. The rest of the time you sign up for a fake class that
| doesn't meet anywhere so you qualify as a full time student
| for health insurance. Except the rub is they still charge
| your pi for that tuition for the class that doesn't exist.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Tuition is also used to pay the supervisor. Direct one-on-
| one mentoring by a tenured / tenure-track professor is more
| expensive than classes, which are often taught by adjuncts.
| fooker wrote:
| Exactly right.
|
| I had been lucky to supplement my phd stipend with big tech
| internships, but phd life was hell for most of my friends.
|
| I have seen students living in slum-like conditions, 4-6 people
| sharing two bedroom apartments, having to get free canned food
| from the university, being forced to buy dangerous 20+ year old
| cars, and so on. These are the brightest minds of our
| generation.
|
| It's sad to see so many of the comments coming out strongly in
| support of the status quo. Don't let your hatred for whoever
| the boogieman of the day is dictate your rational mind!
| tptacek wrote:
| Vanderbilt apparently iced its entire incoming biochemistry PhD
| headcount? My kid got a reject, and found out later that
| everybody else did too.
| osnium123 wrote:
| There are going to be a lot of repercussions in the future
| given how many potential future scientists won't get trained.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Where's the pharma lobby? Pharma is the only industrial
| science left in the country!
| bglazer wrote:
| They are currently on their way to Mar a Lago to ask Trump
| to roll back the drug price negotiation provisions that
| were instated by the Inflation Reduction Act
|
| https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/phrma-prepares-meet-
| trum...
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| If they are protected from competition they will end up
| like the US auto industry in the 1970's. They can try and
| do generics but Teva, Ranbaxy and Ratiopharm will eat
| them once patent protection runs out.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Of course, that'll last until Ranbaxy kills off all of
| their patients.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| They're weighing the impact on their future workforce
| pipeline (and probably hoping this this only represents a
| ~4-8 year hiccup) against whatever other benefits they can
| get from cozying up with the administration (whacky
| regulation land).
|
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pharma-ceos-
| speaki...
|
| And who knows, with the right wacky regulatory scheme
| enacted, the workforce impact will be mitigated away.
| Probably also banking on the size and power of the American
| domestic economy to still allow them to siphon talent from
| across the western world to help make up some short falls.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I was just talking to my buddy who works in big pharma
| and internally it sounds like they have zero concerns
| about the current administration impacting them.
|
| Actually the opposite, apparently Trump rolled back the
| Medicare drug cost caps so they're expecting profits to
| go up.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Pharmacy are drug marketing companies. They have
| essentially outsourced drug R&D to universities
| osnium123 wrote:
| Maybe they can start bringing in folks trained in the EU,
| Canada and China.
| wendyshu wrote:
| The US graduates too many PHDs, not too few
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| do you care to elaborate? what is too many and what are the
| repercussions of this?
| hollerith wrote:
| One of the repercussions is that young people get a PhD,
| then cannot get an appropriate job.
|
| Also, the taxpayers are paying most of the cost of these
| PhDs.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| yes, that's the general idea, no? Further studies funded
| by the government. Pushing the boundaries of knowledge is
| expensive but critical for any country that wants to
| remain influential in the world.
|
| Regarding employment rates, I can't speak too broadly on
| that as I'm more focused on the econ field, which does
| not have employment issues. But I would be interested in
| hearing the base for you numbers.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| On the condition that boundaries are pushed.
|
| I say this with partial ignorance though. I don't know
| that particular field. Generally, the number of drop outs
| at grad school is notoriously quite high across the
| entire spectrum. How much has the needle moved given what
| feels like a coin flip shot of completing an advanced
| study in all respective fields?
|
| There's more graduates than ever before too. It will
| trend sharply down over the next few years, not
| necessarily because of the loss grants from the US
| government, but because of the birth glut that has been
| looming since 2008.
| juniperus wrote:
| in the case of a humanities PhD, yeah. It's probably
| easier to become a pro-athlete than find the handful of
| jobs that require a history PhD. But a chemistry PhD?
| Engineering PhD... agricultural sciences... geology...
| the job search is still a search, but these aren't
| degrees that have no demand. You certainly are more
| likely to find industry jobs vs. academic jobs with many
| hard science degrees. The return on taxpayer investment
| is sensible compared to other taxpayer funded schemes (in
| my view, if we're going to be a country that also funds
| primary and high school). and this investment is not a
| direct funding of PhD students, but funding projects they
| carry out, which in most cases is in national interest.
| The select number of students working on completely
| useless projects that are ideological dogma are
| definitely making the rest of higher education look
| useless.
| osnium123 wrote:
| It's better to graduate too many than too few because it
| helps ensure that the US workforce of scientists and
| engineers is cost competitive.
| cudgy wrote:
| Yeah, we gotta make sure that the Pharmaceutical
| companies have a great source of cheap PhD labor. /s
|
| I wonder how all the PhD's that spent 10 years of their
| life and can't find a job feel about that?
| heylook wrote:
| Too many PhDs... in biochemistry...?
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| What's going to happen is another pandemic. Millions will
| die, and this is what opportunity cost looks like. We
| recovered from the last one due to mRNA research from NIH
| grants (NIAID, one of my clients) and DARPA blue sky funding,
| almost certain to be cut. These people are literally cutting
| the funding that saved millions of lives from the last
| pandemic. Full stop. They don't wanna hear about your facts.
| pphysch wrote:
| One day on HN I read a thread about how academia is
| (credibly) inundated with fraudulent research/publication
| practices, the next day I read a comment about how Western
| academia is (vaguely) the last vanguard against
| civilizational collapse. There seems to be a disconnect
| here.
|
| Disclaimer: I work in academia
| tptacek wrote:
| Academic misconduct is an _idee fixe_ on HN, because (1)
| there is about two orders of magnitude more research
| occurring than the median HN commenter would guess, (2)
| misconduct is generally newsworthy, and (3) even a
| minuscule portion of fraudulent research is enough to
| keep a steady drumbeat of misconduct stories to vote and
| comment on.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| I've heard from colleagues that numerous biostats programs also
| did this. Zero PhD admits for the 2025 cohorts. If the
| department has bio in the title there's a good chance almost
| all of its operating budget comes/came from NIH.
| blindriver wrote:
| It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their
| administrators, but instead they cut their admissions.
|
| "Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other
| professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164%
| and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time
| faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S.
| increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment
| which grew by 78%.
|
| When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as
| striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the
| top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same
| institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put
| another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and
| other professionals (not including university hospitals staff),
| as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading
| schools in country."
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
| tomohelix wrote:
| Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues.
| But they would also want less work and delegate
| responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the
| incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere
| instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and
| bloated institutions.
|
| It is a vicious feedback loop.
| choxi wrote:
| But why don't they? Does anyone know what all these
| administrators do?
|
| I've heard the theory that more regulation leads to more admin
| needs but I don't think higher education has been increasingly
| regulated for decades.
| pj808 wrote:
| The common argument is that universities offer vastly more
| services to their students then in the past. Career centers,
| for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part
| because students also 'shop' for universities with the best
| perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious
| examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very
| fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less
| egregious examples include better campus security and health
| support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to
| administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the
| ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students'
| expectations.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A Unitarian system might be better, faculty run classes
| maybe without even TAs, your grade is however you do on
| your final, Spartan campuses without student amenities. The
| kids would be more depended on themselves to sink or
| flourish, but it's almost like that anyways.
|
| But if I had to choose for my own kid and had the money to
| afford it, I would still go with the full campus
| experience, although a Unitarian experience would probably
| be better for access overall.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The unitarian model you mentioned is the norm in Germany
| and France (and even the UK to a certain extent - a CSU
| will have better student amenities than Oxbridge tbh).
| osnium123 wrote:
| There are also more federal regulations that universities
| need to comply with and that drives up the number of
| administrators.
| r58lf wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of
| people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For
| instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer
| enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked
| for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no
| idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think
| their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.
| skywhopper wrote:
| "I have no idea what these other people I don't work with
| do, so it must be nothing" is a really naive and insulting
| thing to say. They probably don't know what you do either,
| would it be fair to say you do nothing of value?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Does anyone know what all these administrators do?_
|
| Yes. You don't. But other people do.
|
| _I don't think higher education has been increasingly
| regulated for decades_
|
| Every industry has. Education more than most.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >Yes. You don't. But other people do.
|
| This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of
| examples would have been
| skywhopper wrote:
| There are thousands of different jobs they could have.
| You can't think of any work that might happen at a
| university?
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite. My university has a team of experts to
| help students with academic writing. Another that helps
| us figure out how best to organize our classes in the
| online LMS that we use for distance education, and to
| ensure that we all are following a similar structure so
| as to not drive our students insane. Another team that
| helps support grad students on visas with logistics
| around immigration law and what-not. We have an office
| that helps with patents and technology transfer. Another
| team that helps with data repositories and management
| plans. We have a whole research computing office that
| runs our hpc team and deals with random IT things that
| scientists are always thinking up. Another that runs our
| IRB and helps us with that whole process. Another that
| helps us handle data use agreements so we can share data
| between institutions while staying compliant with
| relevant laws and what-not. We have an office that deals
| with contracts and legal agreements so I don't have to
| figure out whether a certain clause in a funding
| agreement makes sense or not. And we have a whole team
| that helps me with budgets and financial analysis of my
| grants and research projects to make sure that my staff
| don't suddenly find themselves unemployed in the middle
| of a grant year because I overspent or didn't understand
| that certain kinds of expenses weren't allowed. This is
| just off the top of my head and includes who I've worked
| with in the last month or two; I didn't even get into the
| animal techs, the facilities folks, etc etc.
|
| These are all people who are at extreme risk of losing
| their jobs in the next weeks and months because of the
| chaos happening with NIH funding, and I can say with
| certainty that I as a scientist and an educator am far
| more effective because I have these professionals working
| with me. This is what our indirects cover and it is
| absolutely crucial.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Admin Support for distance education and foreign students
| would scale with growth of the number of students. And
| somehow admin growth rate is double the growth rate of
| student body.
|
| The rest of your examples explain why: regulation and
| maybe some unnecessary activities? I do not know who you
| are but seriously: do you need "a whole team" for your
| budget needs? How big is your budget? In my previous
| financial analyst role I (i.e one person) supported the
| accounting and financial needs for about 30 people (5
| different teams, total spend including salaries, outside
| contracts and travel about $15 million/year). All that
| done in Excel and with plenty of time to spare. My wife
| is a part time accountant and she supports about 10
| consultants with all their accounting needs: payroll,
| sending and tracking invoices, taxes (federal +
| state+city), cash reconciliation, etc...
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| The teams I mentioned all support dozens of investigators
| and their associated labs, they are shared resources.
| That's part of the point of centralizing overhead costs
| at the university level via an indirect cost mechanism-
| if every lab had to do all of that we'd be wasting tons
| of money and time, but by centralizing it we get
| economies of scale. Tragically, my own lab's budget is
| nowhere near the level that I could support enough
| financial help on my own... ;-)
|
| And yes, many of the examples I listed are there for
| regulatory reasons, and that's a good thing. We have laws
| around IRBs for good reasons, and it's very important to
| have professional support in making sure we are doing
| things the right way in that regard. Data use agreements
| are important- when subjects share their personal data
| with me so I can study it, they do so with the
| understanding that it will be handled properly and part
| of how we do that is via data use agreements, and we need
| professionals to help with that because I certainly
| didn't learn enough about contract law in grad school to
| do a good job with it on my own.
|
| There is obviously a conversation to be had about whether
| a particular regulation is appropriate or whether there's
| too much of this or that red tape, and I think every
| scientist would be able to tell stories of administrative
| annoyance. But it's absurd to argue that the solution is
| to burn it all down indiscriminately, which is what we're
| seeing.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| The thing though, is that they actually are unnecessary.
|
| We don't have these guys here in Sweden, and our university
| education costs less per head than highschool education.
| The Russians don't have these guys, and they even have the
| Indepedent University of Moscow, which is basically a bunch
| of mathematicians that let anybody who passes three of
| their courses take the rest and get a degree.
|
| This whole thing where both they and we and some other
| people let anybody who does well enough on the exams in is
| also very important, because it means that you aren't
| forced to jump through hoops to get accepted, and this
| signals something to people-- that university education
| isn't about hoop jumping or about satisfying political
| criteria, and this signals something about the attitude of
| the state to its citizens which is really important at
| least to me.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but this is the US we're talking about, and the
| regulatory environment is of course different in the US
| than in Sweden or Russia.
|
| You can argue that the US's regulations are dumb and
| shouldn't exist, but that doesn't change the fact that
| they _do_ exist, and that universities need to retain
| staff that can ensure compliance.
|
| I don't know if the huge amount of admin jobs at US
| universities today is actually necessary, but it's
| plausible that universities in one country might need
| more admin staff than universities in another.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Just because _you_ don't know doesn't mean it's just a bunch
| of lazy jerks collecting paychecks for doing nothing. You
| clearly don't know anything about the state of higher ed
| regulation if you think nothing has changed in the last few
| decades. FERPA, HIPAA, Title IX, a huge IT infrastructure and
| all the security concerns that go with that, the ADA...
| mattkrause wrote:
| "Students" might also be the wrong denominator for research-
| intensive places.
|
| Penn has an army of postdocs and research staff too. Even
| though they aren't paid out of indirects, they do need to get
| paid, have places to park, get safety training, etc, all of
| which _do_ need admins.
| rs186 wrote:
| > I don't think higher education has been increasingly
| regulated for decades.
|
| Because things never made headlines and you never paid
| attention.
|
| Maybe talk to a professor or an administrator, or ask ChatGPT
| before posting such ignorant comment.
| gedy wrote:
| Yeah it's not partisan to wonder if it's a political move to
| maximize annoyance to point blame back at the current
| administration.
|
| Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but
| school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed
| to be cut.
| uberman wrote:
| Who do you think advises students getting into classes, who do
| you think reviews applications or works with companies to get
| students jobs. There is administrative over head because these
| activities are not core competencies of researchers.
|
| People act like a reseach faculty member should be conducting
| cutting edge research while writing findings applying from
| Grant's advising students on course course offerings and
| courting employers while also snoozing with alumni for
| donations.
|
| Noone can do it all and thus there are specialist in these
| fields that usually cost a fraction of what a faculty member
| costs.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility.
| Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very
| powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative
| (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).
| heylook wrote:
| ...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a
| course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I'm happy to accept a job where my housing is subsidized.
| What university is this?
| ykonstant wrote:
| I recall that universities in extremely expensive places
| like UCLA, Stanford etc subsidize housing and/or provide
| specially priced housing for staff and faculty. Not to
| say they are cheap, they are just tolerable given the
| salaries, which is more than you can say with regular
| market pricing.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Stanford does have faculty housing: it's made available
| for the tenured faculty member to rent for life. The
| school owns the house. The professor builds no equity.
|
| The alternative, given the cost of housing near Stanford
| and faculty salaries, would be for faculty to live over
| an hour distant. The university acknowledges the benefit
| of having faculty live nearby, and also recovers the rent
| money and keeps the property.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| And yet, a lot of Stanford's faculty live right next to
| campus. It turns out all those startup board seats are
| lucrative enough that they can actually afford a house in
| the local area.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| 1. Those universities subsidize housing because the
| salaries that they offer would otherwise attract zero
| candidates due to the local cost of living.
|
| 2. It is usually the case that the university then owns a
| share of the equity in your house, and is owed a share of
| the profits when you sell.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, a large portion of a professor's duties are
| administrative.
| amluto wrote:
| None of the above has changed materially over the past few
| decades.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the
| parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago,
| and are equally full today that they were back then. The
| student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time,
| but the growth of administration was explosive.
|
| I don't entirely know how much of this is attributable to each
| part, but my suggestions are that these administrators are
| driven by:
|
| 1. Increases in student services (ie sports)
|
| 2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX
|
| 3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research
| funding
|
| 4. Huge endowments that need managers
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead.
|
| For instance, I can tell you right now with certainty that at
| any large university the number of software devs or database
| admins in the IT department far outpace the number of
| financial analysts working in foundation/endowment. Pick any
| large university at random, and I'll wager that without even
| knowing the spread.
|
| But here's the thing, universities need IT divisions. They
| also need the other large operations level bureaucracies they
| typically have put in place. Facilities and plant, university
| police, housing, etc etc. You can't pull off a large
| university without these divisions nowadays. So saying, "Oh
| we can cut them" is very shortsighted.
| rblatz wrote:
| I worked at a large public university. The University had a
| large central IT team, but each college had its own
| independent IT team that managed their own computers,
| network, printers, and other technology. Each also had
| their own software dev teams and there was significant
| overlap an inefficiencies in this model.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Not every university is set up this way, and it's not
| necessarily as inefficient as you think, since different
| colleges have different needs.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah it's easy to think centralizing IT will deliver a
| lot of efficiencies, but you pay the price in reduced
| agility on the ground.
|
| The best balance I've seen involves centralizing a small
| number of essential services, ideally ones with lots of
| compliance and security complexity. Manage that well in
| one place, then let the departments use that
| infrastructure to meet their unique needs.
| ModernMech wrote:
| When I get in front of a classroom and my tech isn't
| working, I call a number and they dispatch campus IT
| immediately to my location to fix it within 5 minutes.
| This kind of rapid response and support isn't possible
| for a department to fund, especially if it's a department
| like History.
|
| Face it - students have higher expectations now,
| professors also have higher expectations. This requires
| administrative staff to run. Back in the day school
| budgets were lower, but even when I went to college in
| 2005 they didn't have campus-wide wifi in every
| classroom. We had one professor who taught with
| powerpoint. Today, every student has a laptop in class.
|
| Maintaining a modern campus takes a big IT department and
| centralizing it is the least wasteful way to do things.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I was at a uni with departmental IT and I certainly could
| do that, I knew the 3-4 IT people by name and I could
| just message them and get whoever was on campus at the
| time to help me immediately if it was urgent.
|
| There are things better done by a central IT team like
| university level WiFi, but you can make that smaller and
| also have departmental teams for things where more
| agility is needed. If the people are competent it's
| really great.
|
| And yes 3-4 people only makes sense because it was a
| large department, but smaller departments with similar
| mandates, for example English/Literature and History,
| just have a shared departmental IT between them.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Large public universities with 50k students are essentially
| running small cities and have to provide and maintain
| facilities for a city of that size ( utilities, policing,
| housing, facility and infrastructure maintenance)
| fraggleysun wrote:
| May I suggest a fifth possibility: your core assumption is
| flawed and your professor hasn't been paying attention.
|
| Unless your college is failing, it is hard to believe that
| the student population hasn't changed significantly over the
| last 30 years, when the US population has almost grown by
| 30%.
|
| I attended UCI over 25 years ago. The student population has
| since more than doubled. Tuition rates, interestingly have
| also almost doubled.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This was at a college where indeed the student population
| did not change in size. The same goes for the professors,
| whose population grew about 5% over that time.
| kelnos wrote:
| Not every school wants to grow the size of their student
| body. And there shouldn't be any reason why they would be
| forced to.
| akvadrako wrote:
| That's a weird thing to say since many small and rather
| well regarded private schools stay small on purpose.
|
| For example, do you really think Dartmouth is failing?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yeah, the parent comment here should have been thinking
| Dartmouth rather than about one of the UCs for their
| model school. This was Caltech.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Well, as a fellow alum, I can tell you they definitely
| screwed up the last two points (esp ITAR) within living
| memory.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Many elite colleges have opted to keep class sizes small,
| and make themselves more selective instead. It is pretty
| despicable. It sounds like UCI is doing the right thing,
| although I've heard it's still hard to get into many of the
| UC schools because there are so many applicants.
|
| In fairness, a dollar in 2000 is worth $1.83 today, so that
| would (almost) account for the tuition increase.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I think its likely students having more money and therefore a
| car plus there being more students overall. Tons of colleges
| now most students have a car and parking pass even if they
| live 3 blocks off campus.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Student car ownership also didn't account for the explosive
| growth of parking at this school. The ratio of cars per
| student surely grew a little bit since the 1990's, but not
| nearly that much.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| When I was a kid my mom dropped my dad off for his college
| classes. When I went to school I took my car. We should
| micromanage college administration from the outside because
| of that.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If the lot and garage were full, it's impossible to know what
| unserved population was taking the bus in either era. Let
| alone many other statistical questions here...
| User23 wrote:
| The White House is trying to require at least 85% of grant
| money go to research and not administration. It's such an
| obviously common sense improvement and the first serious
| proposal to roll back this administrative bloat that I've ever
| seen.
| bglazer wrote:
| No they're _cutting_ payments for indirect costs down to 15%.
| They're not requiring money be spent on research instead of
| admin, they're just giving out less money.
|
| This is not and was never supposed to increase American
| research productivity. Just the opposite actually, they want
| less science done in America, and as a bonus they "save"
| about $5 billion, that is, approximately one half the cost of
| a single aircraft carrier
| jasonhong wrote:
| This sounds great in theory, until you start looking at the
| actual things that overhead covers. Things like the cost of
| my office space, my lab space, electricity, heating, building
| maintenance, telephone, computer network, IT and tech
| support, the photocopier machine we share, my admin assistant
| that handles travel and purchases, the admins in my
| department that handle grant budgets and compliance (which
| quite frankly I don't want to personally deal with), and
| more.
|
| I mentioned Chesterton's Fence in another post here, about
| really understanding a problem and why things are done in a
| certain way, before tearing everything down. I'd really
| encourage people to try to understand things better before
| jumping to conclusions, it's not all that different from the
| engineer's disease that often gets mentioned on HN.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I empathize, but you're wasting your time. Half of the
| accounts in this thread and the similar recent threads are
| bots, not Americans, or so deeply entrenched in their blind
| partisanship that they abdicated thinking for themselves
| long ago.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I wonder, am I a bot, or an American...
| r58lf wrote:
| Technically they want to limit indirect costs to 15%. This
| currently ranges from 50%-100%. Indirect costs have two
| components, facilities and administration.
|
| Facilites are the cost of buildings, electricity, janitorial
| service, etc. Think of this as things that might be included
| in the rent if you were renting a place to do the research.
|
| Administration costs are mostly salaries for people,
| administrative and clerical staff. Not the people directly
| doing the research (that's a direct cost), but the people in
| charge of safety/compliance/legal, etc.
|
| Administrative costs have been capped at 25% for a few
| decades. Facilities costs are not capped.
| tptacek wrote:
| Everything that isn't PIs and grad students is funded out of
| admin, including all the lab techs.
| jleyank wrote:
| Computer clusters, chem or bio lab gear, staff and techs,
| .... Some of this isn't cheap and it's not safe to let the
| grad students and p-docs do it. And somebody has to TA all
| those pre-xx and other mid to advanced course students.
| PhotonHunter wrote:
| Lab techs are often classified as "administrative and
| professional" employees by university HR but on NIH grants
| they would be paid for as a direct cost, other personnel (B
| on the R&R budget form).
| mattkrause wrote:
| I think "core" facilites can be handled a bit differently.
|
| There are certainly NIH mechanisms for supporting them, but
| I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are partially
| supported---or at least backstopped---by indirects...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That isn't true. Research staff is funded via grants almost
| exclusively, in computer science. I'm not sure about the
| sciences, but I would assume they would have a lot of labs
| that are not set up for education and would be funded mostly
| by grants.
| tptacek wrote:
| Well, I'm the parent of a biochemistry lab tech currently
| selecting Phd project admits, but, I don't know, maybe my
| kid is making up that he's paid out of admin.
| blindriver wrote:
| Or he could just be honestly wrong.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Just because some lab techs are admin doesn't mean they
| all are.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| This is true in physics and geo as well.
| bko wrote:
| In Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion," one of the characters
| describes a government agency that both builds monuments and
| provides medical care to children. When faced with budget cuts,
| they reduce the medical care while continuing to build
| monuments, because monuments are visible evidence of their work
| while the absence of medical care only shows up in statistics.
|
| The administrators are the school at this point, why would they
| choose to cut there?
| ptero wrote:
| I recently saw a term for this -- "hostage puppy", which I
| think is an excellent description. I think [1] is the
| original source for the definition.
|
| [1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673
| soared wrote:
| Oof the US team I work for is beholden to a foreign HQ that
| runs the hostage puppy play, great term.
| drfuchs wrote:
| Here's a literal "hostage puppy" that was quite the rage in
| 1973 (though National Lampoon didn't use that phrase): http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%2...
| ModernMech wrote:
| The literal worst thing Penn could do for students at this
| point is to take more on they aren't sure they will be able
| to support through their Ph.D. They are protecting and
| looking our for the students they have by not accepting more.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this is the same reason wealthy donors want a building with
| their name on it, but don't want to fund the janitors who
| will keep it clean.
| jasonhong wrote:
| It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a
| university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in
| academia, one clear driver is continually increasing rules,
| regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and
| lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice
| insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of
| lawsuits doctors face.
|
| For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for
| human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data,
| companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with
| companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups,
| Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts,
| cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon
| to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like
| security, these things only ratchet upward, never down.
|
| In the past, professors used to handle some of these things
| informally and part-time on top of their teaching and research,
| but it really has to be professionalized and be done full time
| because of risks and costs of getting it wrong.
|
| Taking a step back, discussions about "too many admins" also
| feels not all that different from those threads on HN saying "I
| could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many
| employees?" Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part,
| it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance,
| HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions
| needed to transform it from a product to a business.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree
| that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc)
| is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not
| something that universities can easily reduce without
| loosening requirements at the Federal level
| teleforce wrote:
| > one clear driver is continually increasing rules,
| regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and
| lawsuits
|
| I think this a gap that can be easily and fittingly addressed
| by explainable AI (XAI) hopefully with much cheaper cost
| using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum
| number of expert staff in the loop for verification and
| validation.
|
| I've got the feeling that Elon proposed DOGE as a trojan
| horse for doing this sneakily:
|
| 1) Reduced the budget to make govt more efficient so staff
| number reduction is inevitable
|
| 2) Sell and provide XAI based solutions for regulatory
| compliance, etc (accidentally his AI company name is xAI)
|
| 3) Repeat these with many govt's organization, research,
| academic institutions
|
| 4) Profit!
|
| But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did
| not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research
| students instead of the admin staff.
| danny_codes wrote:
| I wouldn't trust an LLM to do anything compliance related.
| Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit
| teleforce wrote:
| > cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision
| making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop
| for verification and validation.
| javagram wrote:
| Verification and validation of LLM output in this context
| would mean doing all the same research, training etc done
| today for human staff and then comparing the results line
| by line. It would actually take more time. How do you
| know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules
| from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it
| who has also examined every relevant document and
| artifact from the process?
| teleforce wrote:
| > one clear driver is continually increasing rules,
| regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits
| and lawsuits
|
| As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the
| increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be
| processed the admin staff not the research contributions
| itself (these invention and innovation parts are
| performed by the graduate students and professors who are
| getting cuts by the limited budget).
|
| This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM
| with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the
| work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff.
| The agent AI can also include rule based expert system
| for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster
| than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale
| scaling (pardon the pun).
|
| Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for
| the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of
| hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI
| based system will even get better over time due to this
| RHLF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > But apparently the US research universities like UPenn
| did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate
| research students instead of the admin staff.
|
| If you reduce the number of staff, the people who are going
| to hurt first are the graduate researchers. I run my lab
| with a whole host of college and department staff who make
| all of our jobs easier. If you cut them, their jobs are
| going to fall to professors, and if they have to do more
| admin work, graduate teaching and research assistants are
| going to get more shit work, and also there's going to be
| fewer than them.
|
| For instance we have a whole office that help us get our
| research funded. These people are "bureaucratic
| administrative overhead", but they make everyone's job
| easier by providing a centralized resource for this
| particular problem. Get rid of them an you can save
| millions of dollars in salaries, but you're going to lose
| more than that in lost contracts and professor/student
| productivity. This would mean students probably would get
| cut anyway, so they're making the smart move of supporting
| only the students they can, and not leaving anyone out to
| dry.
| miohtama wrote:
| Compliance industry has gone from $0 to $90B in twenty years.
| It does not produce anything real, except lobbying for more
| compliance needing more compliance services, software and
| lawyers.
|
| Here is a book about it:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-
| Operati...
| brookst wrote:
| I did work for a compliance as a service company 35 years
| ago. Customs brokers go back much farther than that. I'm
| very suspicious of the claim this whole industry didn't
| exist 20 years ago, which makes me suspicious of the other
| claims.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I work at a public K-12 in IT. We were definitely doing
| compliance reporting 20 years ago. Compliance is pretty
| central to the IEP process created in 1975, but it goes
| back further than that.
|
| We were cleaning out old cabinets that had been stored
| for many years. We found aggregated student data reports
| so old that my grandmother (still alive at 106) would
| have been among the headcount. 90 years ago we were doing
| compliance reports. The reports were very simple, but
| there were no computers to create them. They would have
| involved just as much time as we spend on today's reports
| only we have a hundred times the data in them.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have
| so many employees?"
|
| Unlike product XYZ*, there was a time in very recent history
| when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller
| administrations. At some point you have to ask - do you want
| to save the cancer, or the patient?
|
| *I am humoring your hypothetical, but there are in fact many
| cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified
| companies, e.g. the Britten V1000 motorcycle, or the recent
| article about wedding planning software
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174), or the older
| article on the windows terminal
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133)
| exe34 wrote:
| > there was a time in very recent history when these same
| schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations.
|
| as the comment you're replying to has already stated:
|
| > one clear driver is continually increasing rules,
| regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and
| lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice
| insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of
| lawsuits doctors face. > For example, there are more
| compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export
| controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't
| work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we
| can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title
| IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts,
| cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries
| (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also,
| like security, these things only ratchet upward, never
| down.
| like_any_other wrote:
| First, I don't think we should take it as a given that
| all the admin. growth is just efficiently working on
| complying with regulations. And I'm pretty sure foreign
| countries, and travel to them, already existed in 1976.
| As did patents, contracts with other companies, and
| sanctions that US entities had to respect - remember, in
| 1976 there was the _cold war_.
|
| Second and more importantly - _these same schools ran
| successfully with much smaller administrations_. The
| regulations you cite are not a law of nature - are
| universities or their bloated administrations lobbying to
| have this regulatory burden reduced or streamlined? It
| sure doesn 't look like it.
| lc9er wrote:
| Do you work in higher ed? It's ok to admit that you
| weighed in on a topic you don't understand, then bow out
| gracefully, since you've repeatedly been given accurate
| responses to your assertions.
| like_any_other wrote:
| More than half of the explanation for the administrative
| bloat since 1976 was blamed on factors that did not
| change much since the 1960s - with the notable exception
| of foreign sanctions, which were _much worse_ due to the
| cold war. Also blamed were IRBs, which have been a
| requirement since 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hum
| an_subject_research_legisla...
|
| The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like
| blaming being three hours late on a single red light.
| rayiner wrote:
| So the only people who can have an opinion on this are
| the ones who work in the industry and does have an
| incentive to perpetuate the status quo?
| kzs0 wrote:
| His/her first statement was directly answered in the
| original comment. When that was noted, they swapped to
| undermining the basis for the comment. It's pretty
| typical for techies to provide an opinion without basis
| and desire for it to be treated on the same level as
| those "in the know"
|
| So everyone should always be included in conversations if
| desired, but coming in with an uninformed opinion spoken
| loudly, desiring more to be "right" than to come to an
| understanding, won't typically be appreciated.
| scheme271 wrote:
| Are you using 1976 as a baseline? Given this and your
| other comments in this thread, it seems like it. I'm sure
| the regulatory and compliance environment have changed
| significantly in the last 50 years. E.g. OSHA and other
| agencies have significantly increased the monitoring and
| procedures needed to run a chemistry research lab due to
| accidents and deaths.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Most IRB's further outsource to consulting firms and
| blindly do what the consultants tell them to do (not
| included in head counts). That is just to say the
| administrative people added are just trained to follow
| expensive rules and lack any domain knowledge whatsoever.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The numbers in the post that you respond to are picturing a
| different situation: there are almost 3 admins per professor.
| That means the universities are not teaching places, but
| administrative places with some teaching as a secondary
| activity.
|
| I think people overcomplicated universities and that is what
| makes admins needed. Taking a step back, we need to make
| universities teaching places again, with 1 admin for 3
| professors, not the other way around. Imagine savings,
| needing less grant money, less audits, less funding that
| comes with strings attached.
|
| In the end I think people make up too much irrelevant work.
| And that needs to go away.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| do you think this is parallel to the growth of "you MUST
| attend university" mindset?
| nhma wrote:
| A more relevant metric than admins/professor would be admin
| staff/scientific staff. Given that a research group under a
| professor will probably contain numerous associate
| professors, assistant professors, postdocs, PhDs, and
| research assistants who all generate some admin workload, 3
| admins per professor does not sound outlandish.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I'm not sure what the person meant in the comment you're
| replying to, but it sounds like in your comment you're
| reading "professor" as "full professor", which is not how
| I'd read it. I'd read it as basically "faculty member".
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| But historically universities DID deliver the same product in
| a weekend. It really feels lika a lot of the extra admin
| burden was generated itnernally and self-imposed. Each piece
| of DEI is small and well-meaning, and now we have these
| massive institutions that have to cut PhD students of all
| things to balance the books.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| A major source of administrative and non-teaching staff is
| that many universities have added things like 'a hostpital'
| on the side. This is reasonable when you're running a med
| school with a research component: you need patients to work
| on, after all. The hospital provides a high standard of
| care to the community that it serves, and creates both
| revenue and costs, far in excess of any DEI program.
| dcow wrote:
| Not challenging your point, just also pointing out that
| this scenario was already factored in (i.e. hospital
| admin not included) when calculating the initial ratios.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Um, I'm not a fan of bloated university employment structures,
| but 1976 and 2018? Respectfully, you're comparing apples and
| oranges.
|
| On the campuses of today's major universities there are entire
| support divisions. Housing, Facilities and Plant, Foundation,
| and on and on. And all that is before we even get to the big
| new divisions to come online on campuses since 1976. ie -
| University Police and IT divisions. These divisions
| collectively employ thousands of people at a typical
| university. In fact, at most universities, the ratio of
| employees in the bureaucracies to academic staff is roughly
| between 15:1 and 20:1.
|
| If we want to cut that appreciably, you have to take a hatchet
| to the biggest divisions. (For most universities that will be
| IT.) Which is exactly what some universities have done. For
| example, the University of Wisconsin got that ratio down to
| roughly 8:1 at one point. But there were still a whole lot of
| database admins over at UW DoIT.
|
| Point being, when people say "administrators", they're talking
| about the flood of IT guys, facilities planners, and project
| managers hired long after 1976. Most universities are far more
| lean on deans than they are on software developers or database
| admins for instance. So it's not at all clear how to get rid of
| an appreciable number of these people and still have a
| functioning UCLA just as an example.
|
| And here's the bad news, I've only mentioned a few of the
| operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something
| like the University of Texas, or University of Michigan, or
| University of Wisconsin. Or even Penn for that matter. It's not
| as easy a problem to solve as people make it out to be.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Wait, why is University police so historically recent?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Cleary Act
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Not really.
|
| At the biggest universities, police pre-date that law.
|
| The reason is obvious when you consider how large many
| universities have become. If you throw 50000 20 year olds
| into a 3 square mile area, there's likely to be a lot of
| crime that happens. Sexual assaults, narcotics, and
| thefts mostly. There are, of course, more serious crimes
| that happen as well. In all that chaos, these
| universities have an obligation to keep order.
| jltsiren wrote:
| If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off
| engineers. This is basically the same situation.
|
| Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as
| those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If
| there are regulations governing what the university is allowed
| to do with federal money, the university needs administrators
| to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the
| university will provide accommodation, the university needs
| enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.
| acdha wrote:
| > If there are regulations governing what the university is
| allowed to do with federal money, the university needs
| administrators to ensure and report compliance
|
| I have a friend who's a fairly established scientist in his
| field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have
| exactly the effect you're describing by requiring them to
| spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every
| shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying
| to save money there will cost more than it's worth because
| most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid
| for by NIH but they'd have to add accounting staff to
| document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that
| level of precision.
| heylook wrote:
| > If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off
| engineers.
|
| In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they
| can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part
| of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering.
| 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management,
| design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing,
| engineering functions alone.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| For a tech company, sales and marketing are admin staff.
| Professors are to universities what engineers are to a tech
| company
| xienze wrote:
| > If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off
| engineers. This is basically the same situation.
|
| Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out
| of having to tighten up the finances.
|
| I'm reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a
| state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in
| other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two
| prior. The administration went on and on about how there was
| absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public
| statements about how they would "need" to do ridiculous
| things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad
| mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department,
| etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole
| thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol
| building, and the state relented.
| jltsiren wrote:
| A nominal 2% budget cut is a 5-6% real cut, assuming
| average wage growth and inflation. And if that cut meant
| going back to where the budget was 1-2 years earlier, the
| university had already faced effective budget cuts over
| those years.
| xienze wrote:
| You're missing the bigger point, that the cuts they
| proposed in response were far beyond what would be
| necessary for such a small budget cut. To say nothing of
| the fact that they immediately jumped to making highly
| disruptive cuts (like an entire department) instead of
| even considering things like cutting admin roles or
| creature comforts (which had grown like crazy in the
| years prior) first.
| skadamou wrote:
| >If students expect that the university will provide
| accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a
| small city and all associated services.
|
| No doubt you need admin to help accommodate students learning
| needs but I've come around to thinking that they should
| change the parameters around testing and give every student
| the opportunity to use "accommodations" rather than making
| them prove their disability. Everyone is being granted the
| same degree, if a significant number of the students in your
| program need accommodations, like extra time on the exam, why
| not grant it to everybody who asks? Or better yet, just give
| everyone the time they need. It seems silly to me that you
| need to prove your need before you can get things like extra
| time - I think it should be opened up to everybody
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _telling that schools like Penn don 't cut their
| administrators, but instead they cut their admissions_
|
| Administrators are typically paid out of tuition. Penn is
| cutting uses in line with sources.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I am assuming some grant overheads also go to admin.
| kelnos wrote:
| I get that, but a research university's prestige comes from
| the recognition for the research they do. Accepting fewer
| grad students means less research will be done and fewer
| papers will be published.
|
| They could presumably cut admin staff to some extent, and pay
| grad students out of the tuition funds freed up. But why
| would we expect the bosses to fire their friends?
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is a complicated ecosystem, it's not that simple.
| Academic departments are not places where there's a lot of
| slack - positions are scarce, the competition for them is
| fierce, and the people who get them are notorious
| workaholics. Cutting admin means more work on professors,
| means less research output, means fewer grants funded,
| means fewer grad students supported. So you can cut
| students and get fewer students, or cut admin still get
| fewer students but also less research and funding as well.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| [flagged]
| csomar wrote:
| Then how did the universities operate before the increases?
| How come digitalization is not able to reduce the admin
| numbers. You are the one to justify why you need this
| additional overhead and not the other way around.
| PhotonHunter wrote:
| They didn't used to have to deal with FAR and DFARS
| compliance, export compliance, cybersecurity, iEdison
| reporting, and so on. Nevertheless, the administrative
| component of F&A indirects has been capped at 26% for
| years. The universities have to fill the budget gap with
| other funds (and no, not tuition, that is not used for the
| research enterprise).
| lc9er wrote:
| This is exactly it. A modern university has needs that
| are far greater and demanding than one of 50+ years ago.
| And generally, the people doing the ground-level work are
| underpaid and overworked. If anything, there may be a
| glut of VP and C-level positions, but they don't make up
| the bulk of employees.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| In addition to what the other commenter said, most of the
| public universities doing scientific research used to be
| far better funded from their states than they are today on
| a cost-per-student basis. Additional administrative staff
| that many universities now have is often necessitated by
| their regulatory complexity as well as the need for
| generating different sources of funding. These are broad
| statements that do oversimplify matters, but part of the
| full story.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| Why would digitization reduce the number of university
| admins? I'm sure there were some clerks and secretaries
| whose jobs were automated, but the universities also had to
| add huge IT departments. Plus, everything about a
| university is more complicated now then in was 50 years
| ago. In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman
| spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots. I'm sure the
| percentage that are international is vastly higher now.
| Probably a higher percentage want to visit campus.
| Financial aid is a lot more complicated. So just the
| admissions office is doing much more work.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman
| spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots.
|
| Why not sort descending by SAT score and call it a day?
| Evaluating things like extracurriculars continues to be
| classist bullshit and is probably responsible for making
| acceptance criteria "complicated".
| fraggleysun wrote:
| Because SAT scores, alone, tell you nothing about a
| candidate outside of their ability to completely that
| test.
| aoanevdus wrote:
| By this metric I would have got into any school I wanted,
| but that's just because I put an exceptional amount of
| effort into preparing for the test. My grades and
| extracurriculars weren't top-notch. I did go to an elite-
| ish school and it was clear that many other students
| deserved to be there more than me (ie. were able to
| contribute to society more in various ways), and in my
| view that difference was legible in the admissions
| process.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Alternatively, why have they not expanded the number of
| available seats with the more than adequate resources
| available?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Because when it comes to Harvard, out of 54,000
| applications you'll have at least 1900 perfect SAT
| scores. Then how do you decide who to admit? You still
| need some process.
| scarby2 wrote:
| > Then how did the universities operate before the
| increases?
|
| Easily. Every additional rule and regulation has a
| compliance cost, we've added far too many rules and
| regulations.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| The EO in question literally just reduces the amount that can
| be spent on overhead. Maybe they should try reducing
| overhead?
| hooverd wrote:
| "Overhead" here is things like physical plant and shared
| resources.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| because most of that overhead isn't removable. all of your
| chemistry/biology/physics research has labs and lab
| managers as overhead. that is intrinsically expensive.
| mlrtime wrote:
| So why not just use the endowment, why does the tax payer
| need to fund this? 22.3 Billion isn't enough?
| tzs wrote:
| They are using their endowment. They spend around 4-5% of
| it each year.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Universities have more administrators and "other professionals"
| because they provide more services. There was only a very small
| IT department in the 70s. Student support services were
| minimal. This is not a good statistic without more context.
| amluto wrote:
| > Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at
| colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%,
| marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.
|
| There's a separate factor at play here: colleges are
| increasingly using people who are not full-time tenured
| professors to teach classes. See, for example:
| https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Every medieval fantasy movie you ever saw, who were the extras?
| The people in the castle stay because there's only ever a few
| positions in the castle. By definition there can only be a few,
| otherwise you are not a castle person.
|
| I don't know if this equilibrium is natural or not since it's
| been the paradigm for centuries across a lot of life. I'm
| describing deep entitlement, the pure raw form of it.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's also revealing the way this move is being marketed by
| universities. This certainly isn't the first time HHS has
| raised concerns about the magnitude of indirect costs. Obama's
| HHS also tried to reduce indirect costs:
| https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| There's nothing revealing about it. The article you posted
| talks about capping things around 40 or 50%, or 95% of
| current funding. Not 15%, which will bankrupt those schools.
|
| It's an example of how you can take something that's true,
| put it out of context, and be completely wrong.
| rayiner wrote:
| The 40-50% isn't what the Obama administration proposed.
| The article says the administration didn't propose a
| specific number. The point is that there's clearly a
| problem here that isn't something Trump is making up.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| One of the common moves I've seen with Trump and
| particularly his defenders is to take an issue that's
| real, then convert it into a weapon. So imagine my dog is
| overweight and needs to go on a bit of a diet: well, what
| if we took that same dog and reduced its calorie intake
| by 75% until it starved to death. Then while I'm standing
| over the corpse, I explain to you that "this isn't
| something I was making up, there was a real problem
| there."
|
| Even if, against all odds, you really are in favor of
| reforming things, killing a bunch of dogs pretty much
| guarantees a good-faith conversation can never happen. At
| some point you just need to decide if you're on the side
| of truth or bullshit.
| rayiner wrote:
| That's just a roundabout way of saying you disagree with
| us about how to solve the issue, and assign a different
| relative valuation to the outcome where the process-
| oriented careful approach fails to achieve any change.
| You're welcome to do that, but that's just living in a
| democracy.
|
| _E.g._ Obama promised sunlight and reforming the
| intelligence community. But in the end he didn't do
| anything because he trusted the institutions and
| processes too much. So we voted for Tulsi to take a chain
| saw to the CIA.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Tulsi is an ideological tool of BJP/RSS/VHP. Who knows
| how many people she is going to pawn the family jewels
| to.
| rayiner wrote:
| Tulsi is America First, just like BJP is India First.
| That makes her a natural antagonist of Liberal
| Internationalism and Islamic Global Socialism. But I have
| seen no evidence to make me doubt her fierce
| nationalistic loyalty to the U.S.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their
| administrators, but instead they cut their admissions.
|
| Ye olde Sowell quote[1] about institutional priorities and
| budget cuts seems highly appropriate here.
|
| [1]
| https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...
| toomim wrote:
| Incredible.
| analog31 wrote:
| Are adjuncts counted as faculty? We were not when I was one.
| This could just be a classification problem.
|
| I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying
| to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.
| MITSardine wrote:
| My university only has 6% faculty, but 52% scientific staff
| overall, not counting graduate students. I do believe this is
| a classification issue coupled with the appearance and now
| ubiquity of precarious positions (soft-funded staff,
| postdocs).
| sethev wrote:
| Graduate students are paid to attend - they're more like
| employees than undergraduate students. Why wouldn't a
| university faced with funding cuts start by not hiring
| additional people rather than getting rid of current ones?
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| Maybe because graduate students directly contribute to the
| university's mission by teaching undergrads and "producing"
| research (both of which bring in $$$), while administrators
| seem to be purely a cost center, many of whom serve no useful
| purpose?
| sethev wrote:
| I mean, the grants that are being cut is the money that
| graduate students bring in. Less grant money -> fewer
| graduate students. In theory maybe it's possible to be more
| efficient like you're suggesting, but it's hard to see how
| the immediate response could be any different.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Is it possible to do all three at the same time?
|
| - talk about academic "administrators"
|
| - lazily generalize
|
| - be intellectually honest
|
| The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole
| book of information!
| 1shooner wrote:
| I encourage anyone taking this line of criticism to compare an
| e.g. $5B state university to any other similar sized
| enterprise, and consider what increased operational and
| administrative costs those other organizations have had to
| undertake since 1976. This can include HR and IT and
| healthcare, legal liability and industry compliance. Now add to
| that the additional regulatory burdens specific to higher
| education, and the increased market expectations of higher
| education as a holistic 'experience' that is almost
| unrecognizable from what it was 50 years ago.
|
| Much of that professional staff is geared toward corporate-
| style product development and marketing, because they've been
| forced to by a lack of public funding. And while a commercial
| corporation generally aims to retain and grow a customer base,
| gaining some economy of scale for those professional positions,
| universities are functionally capped at those small ratios you
| describe.
|
| Of course there is administrative bloat, and the funding model
| doesn't do enough to self-regulate that, but lack of public
| investment causes more systemic inefficiencies than that.
| analog31 wrote:
| This may be a side issue, but is a pet peeve of mine. Penn is a
| private university.
|
| I'm a staunch supporter of higher education, but I think it's
| worth observing that the public university and college system
| educates people at a much lower cost. The huge cost disparity
| between private and public college challenges most simplistic
| explanations.
|
| I'm drawn to the parallels between our "private" universities
| and our "private" health care system. Both face almost exactly
| the same criticism of costing twice as much while imposing
| barriers to access.
|
| I don't think improving higher education is the present
| government's intention, but if it were my intention, I'd focus
| on supporting our public universities, colleges, community
| colleges, and trade schools. Both of my kids graduated from
| public colleges, debt free.
| MITSardine wrote:
| The author of that article is acting as though there were only
| two types of employees at a university: faculty and
| administrative. Yet this is false, faculty are "team leaders"
| managing a team of scientific staff (non-faculty). Typically
| (besides PhD students) postdocs and research scientists.
|
| For instance, one university has:
|
| - faculty 6% (the actual professors and associate professors
| running things)
|
| - postdocs 9% (faculty/staff scientist aspirants with a PhD)
|
| - research staff 25% (e.g. research engineer, research
| scientist)
|
| - other academic staff 12% (I imagine, technicians)
|
| - admin staff 28%
|
| So, while faculty is only 6% of the overall workforce,
| scientific employees still make up 52% of the lot. Add to that
| the PhD students who are not counted as employees in the US
| despite being paid and having employee duties towards their
| superior (a member of faculty). This same university has about
| 40% of the number of employees worth of graduate students (7k
| to the 17k), for instance.
|
| In conclusion, what the statistics you report show, is rather
| how precarious research has become. There existed no such thing
| as a postdoc in the 70s; my advisor's advisor, who was
| recruited in that decade, had already signed a contract for
| tenured employment before his PhD was even over, as did many of
| his peers. Nowadays, it's typical to postdoc for a minimum of 3
| years, and then play the odds, which are not in the candidate's
| favour as the 6% faculty to 9% postdoc hints at.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It's way way way easier to freeze hiring (akin to admissions)
| than to go through a layoff. Not saying admin salaries are
| justified but gutting staff has much more fallout than fewer
| admissions.
| bglazer wrote:
| This ends with America's domestic biotech and pharmaceutical
| industry functionally disappearing and being shipped offshore,
| similar to many previously American led industries. This is
| already happening [1], and will only accelerate as academic bio
| research is strangled. There are all kinds of cultural
| justifications being thrown around for this, all kinds of
| grievances being rehashed or invented in real time, but it's the
| same old story as manufacturing in America. It's just wealthy
| powerful people stripping an industry for parts, disinvesting and
| pocketing the remains.
|
| https://www.biospace.com/business/big-pharma-rushes-to-china...
| trostaft wrote:
| Most departments at the moment are choosing to be conservative
| with their funds. No one really knows how their capacity, whether
| through grants or through teaching, is going to change. As far as
| I know, many universities are also pausing hiring for full-time
| employees (which is probably wise, at least until the dust
| settles). Really tough time to be looking for an academic
| appointment...
|
| I'm grateful that I have enough funds to guarantee two more years
| here as a postdoc, but if things don't settle for the better
| there might not be a spot here anymore.
| etrautmann wrote:
| It's worth noting that Pitt's indirect rates are normal for
| universities and this is how the system functions.
| Animats wrote:
| They are high relative to private industry. They're supporting
| all those administrators that colleges have accumulated.
|
| It's significant that U. Pitt. chose to stop admitting students
| rather than starting to lay off administrators.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| Is there a stat or place I can read more about that? I hear
| people throw throw the idea of administrative bloat around a
| lot but would be interested to see data behind that
| blindriver wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admin
| i...
| jslezak wrote:
| Private industry does not run campuses full of graduate
| courses and basic research that America's technological
| prosperity depends on
|
| Those overhead fees go to fund that, so universities don't
| have to be even mere full of nepo baby donor legacy
| admissions than they already are
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| No, overhead doesn't pay for grad students or techs. That
| money comes out of the grant funding or tuition fees (if
| not funded off the grant)
| jslezak wrote:
| Dude this IS the grant funding they're slashing. The NIH
| (and other grantmakers) make research grants and the
| overhead fee from that goes to the university. This is
| precisely what they've cut
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Direct costs, not indirect. Grad students and techs don't
| see that money, unless in rare instances for a grad
| student the grant funding is suddenly cut off for one
| reason or another (private grants or some sequester by
| the NIH)
| jslezak wrote:
| You are saying words. They make little sense however. The
| total cost of running these institutions can be broken
| down however you want. If the total doesn't add up to the
| necessary amount they can't operate
| sightbroke wrote:
| Not really, and it's not really how things work either.
|
| Private industry is charging/billing cost + margin for
| profit.
|
| University is saying X is allocated for research, Y is
| allocated to keep the lights running for the facility and pay
| for students. The students are generally funded by research,
| not the University. No research money, no money for students.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| I guess you need to compare universities to research
| institutes like Howard Hughes (HHMI). Unfortunately only
| academic institutions are eligible for grants from NIH/NSF,
| so they don't break down their costs like that.
| PhotonHunter wrote:
| This is incorrect: while some NIH and NSF grants require
| an academic institution as the prime or sole awardee
| there are many that are open to private organizations and
| others that are mandated to be specific to small
| businesses (SBIR).
| costigan wrote:
| Research funding awarded to universities and to
| performers internal to NASA (back when there was a
| reasonable amount of that) had overhead rates that were
| similar to the NIH rates. When I worked at Xerox PARC, we
| would perform research for other parts of the company and
| charged overhead too, although the rate was a little
| lower (around 40%). Institutional overhead has been a
| regular feature of how research has been organized and
| funded for 60 years. Change is fine, but most of the
| costs are legitimate, and it takes time for the rest of
| the system to adjust to changes in one part of it. Doing
| it abruptly is damaging the system and will negatively
| impact the careers of many students and young
| researchers.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Most non-university non-industry non-government research
| institutes in the US (eg. Salk Institute, J. Craig Venter
| Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys) rely on their
| researchers applying and getting grants from the NIH and
| NSF just as university scientists do. And their overhead
| costs are generally even higher than universities because
| they have no other source of income other than grants (I
| used to be faculty at JCVI). HHMI is unusual in that it
| is funded by a rich person's estate and doesn't need
| this.
| mlyle wrote:
| Administrative bloat is a concern, but these indirect costs
| include things like equipment, too.
|
| If you build a good lab which has versatile equipment to
| address many use-cases, the indirect costs will be high.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| BS they include equipment. Everything we needed was either
| bought by us on grant money, or was part of some
| collaborative grant for the whole department. E.g. and
| imaging lab that maybe had a SEM or two-photon, etc.
| mlyle wrote:
| What you bought on one grant, and then is lab equipment
| being maintained and serviced afterwards is now
| "facilities" costs.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| The university definitely doesn't "service" it at all. If
| it breaks, you call up the company and hope its under
| warranty, or you pay someone to fix it, again off the
| grant funds.
| mlyle wrote:
| I guess it's fairies performing all those calibrations
| and restocking all those consumables that can't easily be
| charged to individual projects.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| They did jack crap. Anything more complicated than a
| light-bulb or a toilet that broke, the lab handled it
| internally somehow (either getting the company to fix it
| or doing it ourselves).
|
| There were a few department-wide resources. Again,
| ultimately funded off someone (or a bunch of people's)
| grants
| mlyle wrote:
| Funded as _indirect costs_.
|
| The "A" of F&A is capped at 26%.
|
| That means any overhead over 26% went to some kind of
| facilities cost at your lab.
|
| (Most private industry informal accounting would call
| that 26% "20% overhead").
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > They are high relative to private industry.
|
| Academia is not "private industry."
| ks2048 wrote:
| Do you know that "overhead" costs are not equivalent to
| payouts to administrators?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| If my tax dollars are supporting research, I'd rather they go
| to universities even if that means some bloat in the form of
| more people hired than otherwise, rather than corporate
| shareholders.
| angry_moose wrote:
| The overhead rate at every corporation I've worked for is
| between 70-80%.
|
| Two S&P 100s, one 500.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Its "normal" because its generally accepted, not because it
| makes any sense.
|
| I was part of a research lab on grants like that. We had close
| to $1m in total funding, on top of that indirect was like 50%
| (so $500k/year) We maybe had 4000 sq. foot of lab space in an
| old building that wasn't maintained well. We had one bathroom
| for each gender on the floor for the research arm of two whole
| medical departments. Two admins for the whole research
| department of 7-8 labs totallying maybe 60-70 staff.
|
| I ran the numbers and the lab space would have maybe cost
| $100k/year tops (probably more like $80k, depending on quality)
| if we were rent out equivalent industrial office space. On top
| of that you have electrical, heating, telecom, at most $10k.
| Support services such as HR, cleaning, IT support (of which we
| didn't use a whole lot) could have been contracted out, at most
| around $20k. So there was about $350k which I figured was
| mostly just a subsidy and went to "administration". Not that I
| was philosophically opposed to it, except maybe the admin.
| SideQuark wrote:
| The parts you list result in wasted research money. The
| system you complain about results in more R&D getting out
| into the world.
|
| The money you complain about goes to run an org that has
| connections, does advertising, provides stable employment
| when grants fluctuate, has hiring and HR and payroll and a
| zillion other services, all making those doing the research
| more able to do research, and provides more channels to move
| results into production.
|
| So it makes sense. You just haven't thought through or had to
| perform all the pieces, so to you it doesn't make sense.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Ah yes, we need a fudge factor to subsidize a bunch of
| unquantifiable woo like "advertising" and "stable
| employment".
|
| I'm sick and tired of elites telling me basic business
| operations of profit and loss, value for money,
| _quantifiable results_ are beyond my peasant brain to
| understand.
| vkou wrote:
| > Ah yes, we need a fudge factor to subsidize a bunch of
| unquantifiable woo like "advertising" and "stable
| employment".
|
| Try convincing the AC guys to work for parts cost + a
| skilled worker wage * number of hours worked, see how
| well that goes over. They'll laugh you out of the room,
| and you'll be left sitting on your ass without air.
|
| _The entire world_ charges overhead for work done. Most
| of it _way_ more than 25% of the sticker price.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| >Try convincing the AC guys to work for parts cost + a
| skilled worker wage * number of hours worked, see how
| well that goes over. They'll laugh you out of the room,
| and you'll be left sitting on your ass without air.
|
| Huh? Thats exactly what they do. Parts + labor
| vkou wrote:
| And at what markup do they bill you, compared to what
| they paid their supplier, and to what they pay the guy
| who drives out to install it?
|
| (Hint: Nearly half of what you pay on the bill is _their_
| overhead.)
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's wonderful that I can compare proposals and know the
| bill. To pretend NIH grants are anything remotely like
| normal private sector contractors is absurd and
| shamefully deceitful
| vkou wrote:
| > It's wonderful that I can compare proposals and know
| the bill
|
| Does the NIH not, like, compare proposals before deciding
| on whether to pay for them?
|
| > To pretend NIH grants are anything remotely like normal
| private sector contractors
|
| Please enlighten us to the differences that are at all
| pertinent to this question. Specifics, not vague scare
| quotes.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| While there are classes of grants with different levels
| of funding, the grants are generally considered on their
| own merits and not based on how much overhead a the
| recipients institution would charge. Thats a side
| negotiation.
| vkou wrote:
| It's a side negotiation that, as I understand, happens
| through a _different_ process, set down by law. But there
| 's still a process, and contracts have been made by the
| parties involved, and there's a legally mandated timeline
| for renegotiating those contracts that is not being
| followed.
|
| You are right that it _is_ different from how the private
| sector operates. The private sector does not even let you
| think about negotiating either their overhead or profit
| margin.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Typically overhead is only charged on a portion of expenses.
| In our case, anything over $5k or that is part of a
| "constructed equipment" over $5k (these two categories are
| the large majorities of expenses in our lab, as most things
| we buy are components of detectors we build) are overhead
| free. Supplies/laptops/travel/tools/business
| meals/inexpensive equipment do incur overhead, but the
| effective overhead rate is much less than the nominal one.
| dgacmu wrote:
| You're actually still misunderstanding overhead a little.
|
| Overhead isn't applied uniformly. For example, tuition for
| Ph.D. students isn't charged overhead, nor is (usually)
| equipment. So on $1m of funding, if you've got 4 Ph.D.
| students, that may be something like $200k/year of tuition
| that isn't subject to overhead. Add in another $100k of
| equipment and suddenly that 50% indirect cost rate is
| actually more like 35%, so you end up doing $1m of "work" on
| $1.35m of budget.
|
| Departments often negotiate something called "overhead
| return", which is a way of returning a small amount of money
| to the individual departments -- some of this does things
| like supporting Ph.D. students if their advisor runs out of
| funds, or helping research faculty bridge short funding gaps.
| These things are reasonable and help the institution remain
| coherent through the uncertainty of grant-driven existence.
|
| There's waste everywhere, but it's not quite as bad as it
| might seem without a deeper understanding of the university
| research funding model.
| mlyle wrote:
| It's also worth noting that this overhead percentage is
| misleading. A lot of other contexts would view $1M of work
| on $1.35M of budget as 25% overhead, not 35%.
| mjfl wrote:
| This is likely a temporary move, intended to be used for
| rhetoric. Eventually the faculty will complain, because they rely
| on large pyramids of postdocs and grad students for almost all
| labor. There's simply no way to continue the work of university
| research without a strong supply of grad students. Once this is
| realized, and the NIH doesn't bend, then grad admissions will
| increase again, and admin cuts will start, as they should.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this is likely a temporary move, intended to be used for
| rhetoric_
|
| It's a rational move given the U.S. governments word on
| payments and commitments is no longer credible. If your
| employer started bouncing paycheques, your cutting back on
| expenses wouldn't be "intended to be used for rhetoric." It's
| simple self preservation.
| benatkin wrote:
| The tax cut ruins that, as would the DOGE dividend
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _tax cut ruins that_
|
| Ruin what?
| benatkin wrote:
| Fiscal responsibility
| osnium123 wrote:
| That or the volume of research will simply shrink and world
| class research will take place only in China.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Amazing commenters here -- for them people are like cattle.
| "Temporary move". Graduate students without an offered position
| -- it's nothing, they'll just wait a bit. Cut one funding one
| day, maybe release later.
| mjfl wrote:
| I didn't say it's a good thing. I think it's dishonest and
| manipulative.
| gammarator wrote:
| The "large pyramids" are largely funded by federal grants. If
| the grants aren't there, the grad students won't be either.
| mjfl wrote:
| Wait- do you think the grants have gone away? Do you even
| know what overhead is?
| costigan wrote:
| Didn't the NIH freeze the review meetings in this year's
| proposal review process, putting all grant funding that
| would start next fiscal year in question? This is separate
| from the change to the overhead rate.
| Merrill wrote:
| 59% indirect research costs for administrative overhead seems
| high. Could it be that these charges against grants are used to
| fund students in other subject areas where grants are not
| available?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 59% is borderline criminal. Perhaps 15% is too low. But 59% is
| absurd and unacceptable.
| cute_boi wrote:
| FYI, Overhead don't include everything. Even in remaining 49%
| there are many overheads :)
| linksnapzz wrote:
| The Salk Institute's overhead rate, IIRC, is 90%. Yet, they
| keep getting funds, so they're doing something right.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Fraudulent orgs also keep getting funds. That don't make it
| right.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, what's the fraud? I'm a bit tired of that word as of
| late as some kind of catch-all for "I don't understand
| how this works and I don't like it".
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I'm not accusing any particular organization of fraud. I
| am rejecting the notion that just because one institution
| historically receives funds that those funds were put to
| good use.
|
| I understand how grants and overhead rates work. It's an
| embarrassment.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "you're not literally saying fraud, but you're also not
| NOT saying it's fraud"
|
| Serious accusations need serious evidence. I'm not a fan
| of this sowing of doubt without a solid basis to back it
| up. That's very much the DOGE modus operandi, and it's a
| lazy and dangerous form of argumentation. I'll call it
| out wherever I can.
|
| You're just saying "thing bad" and expecting agreement
| without putting any legwork in. The onus is on the
| accuser, not the accused.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > The Salk Institute's overhead rate, IIRC, is 90%. Yet,
| they keep getting funds, so they're doing something
| right.
|
| I do not agree with this statement. Take from that what
| you will.
|
| > The onus is on the accuser, not the accused.
|
| In criminal law I agree. When it comes to budgeting I do
| not. The onus is on every program to prove every year
| that they're worth funding. I don't accept the notion
| that just because something was funded in the past that
| it was wise then and that it's wise to continue to fund.
|
| So when someone says "this org has a 90% indirect cost
| rate and keeps getting funded" I do not think "they must
| be doing something right". I instead think "wow they
| better have a frickin spectacular argument as to how that
| is possibly justifiable, and I'd bet $3.50 they don't".
| aaronharnly wrote:
| It's worth clarifying that the 59% overhead rate doesnt mean
| 59% of the funds go to overhead. If you have a $1m grant, you
| add on $590k for overhead. Then the total grant is $1.59m, so
| actually 37% of the total funds are for overhead.
| jofer wrote:
| It's pretty typical, actually. 50% is about the minimum that
| major universities take out of a grant you get as a researcher
| at the university.
|
| It's nominally to fund general facilities, etc. At least at
| public universities, it does wind up indirectly supporting
| departments that get less grant money or (more commonly) just
| general overhead/funds. However, it's not explicitly for that.
| It's just that universities take at least half of any grant you
| get. There's a reason large research programs are pushed for at
| both private and public universities. They do bring in a lot of
| cash that can go to a lot of things.
|
| This also factors a lot into postdocs vs grad students. In
| addition to the ~50% that the university takes, you then need
| to pay your grad student's tuition out of the grant. At some
| universities, that will be the full, out-of-state/unsupported
| rate. At others, it will be the minimum in-state rate. Then you
| also pay a grad student's (meager) salary out of the grant.
| However, for a post-doc, you only pay their (less meager, but
| still not great) salary. So you get a lot more bang for your
| buck out of post-docs than grad students, for better or worse.
| This has led to ~10 years of post-doc positions being pretty
| typical post PhD in a lot of fields.
|
| With all that said, I know it sounds "greedy", but universities
| really do provide a lot that it's reasonable to take large
| portions of grants for. ~50% has always seemed high to me, but
| I do feel that the institution and facilities really provide
| value. E.g. things like "oh, hey, my fancy instrument needs a
| chilled water supply and the university has that in-place", as
| well as less tangible things like "large concentration of
| unique skillsets". I'm not sure it justifies 50% grant
| overhead, but before folks get out their pitchforks,
| universities really do provide a lot of value for that
| percentage of grant money they're taking.
| rayiner wrote:
| Well that makes it sound worse than I thought. Why should it
| be any higher than the pro rata allocation of the project's
| actual use of university facilities (lab space, equipment,
| etc)?
|
| Even in the defense industry, a cost-plus contract with a 10%
| margin is a lot. And it's a federal crime to include costs in
| the overhead amount that aren't traceable to the actual
| project.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Its essentially a subsidy, and been abused for years.
|
| One clarifying point. Indirect is normally charged on top
| whatever the PI gets. So they don't "take out" 50% the
| total. They add 50% to the original grant. So if a
| researcher gets a $500k grant, 50% indirect would be $250k,
| and the total allocation is $750k.
| rayiner wrote:
| That sounds similar to cost plus in the defense sector.
| fraggleysun wrote:
| It is different. Cost plus allows the contractors to
| charge for development and add a profit margin.
|
| The corporate equivalent would be a fixed price contract,
| which has overhead built in and far exceeds university
| rates.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| In the defense/other industries, everything is put under
| the "cost" part. There's just a lot more line items that
| cover all that stuff.
|
| The overhead simplifies this to a large extent in that the
| PI only needs to account, as a "direct" expense the cost of
| his team (salaries, and things not covered by the
| university such as compensation to human subject
| volunteers, etc.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| High overhead indicates efficiency, not waste.
|
| If you are Bozo University that has no grants, you also have no
| overhead, because everything you spend is attributable to that
| first grant. You spend $50 for tiny little flasks of liquid
| nitrogen. You buy paper at Staples.
|
| If you are UCSF, you have 80% "overhead" because everything is
| centralized. Your LN2 is delivered by barge. You buy paper from
| International Paper, net 20, by the cubic meter. You have a
| central office that washes all the glassware. Your mouse
| experiments share veterinarians. All of this costs much, much
| less _because_ of the "overhead".
| largbae wrote:
| I am trying to follow this...
|
| if a grant is the same $1M and Bozo University gets to spend
| all million on the actual research at hand, but UCSF only
| gets 200K, how is UCSF more efficient?
|
| Wouldn't the LN2 be traceable to the project either way as
| direct non-overhead cost, but UCSF efficiency makes that cost
| lower, achieving the same overhead ratio but either a lower
| grant cost or more researcher stipend?
| tarlinian wrote:
| Plenty of actual research costs count as overhead to avoid
| the need to hire an army of accountants to allocate every
| single bit of spend.
|
| For example, the electricity costs of the lab in which the
| research is run would typically be paid for by the
| university and would be considered overhead. It's not
| "administrative bloat". Most of the particularly gross
| administrative bloat is on the undergraduate side of things
| where higher tuition costs have paid for more "activities".
| rayiner wrote:
| Well how do you know that if you aren't accounting for
| it?
| PhotonHunter wrote:
| F&A rates (facilities and administration, "indirects")
| are subject to negotiation every 4 (IIRC) years, where
| those costs are accounted for (perhaps not well enough,
| but that is a separate point). The administrative
| component of F&A been capped at 26% for years and R1
| universities are maxed out, so the negotiations are over
| the facilities component.
| mlyle wrote:
| You can know what the research organization costs as a
| whole; and you can know what's "worth" charging to
| individual projects. The rest is indirect costs, which
| you can measure and use this data when negotiating
| indirect cost reimbursement with NSF or NIH.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Note that the institution I used as an example doesn't
| even have undergrads. It is not using NIH grants to
| cross-subsidize a college. Medical research is the only
| thing they do. And they are the #2 recipient of grants,
| after Johns Hopkins.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Caltech has undergrads.
| comeonbro wrote:
| If I understand you correctly, what you're claiming is:
|
| University 1 gets $100. $10 of it goes to admin, $90 to
| researcher. Researcher spends $60 on supplies and equipment.
| This is accounted for as 10% administrative overhead.
|
| University 2 gets $100. $20 of it goes to admin, $40 to
| researcher, $40 to supplies and equipment. This is accounted
| for as 60% administrative overhead.
|
| Is this an accurate characterization of your claim?
| mlyle wrote:
| > University 2 gets $100. $20 of it goes to admin, $40 to
| researcher, $40 to supplies and equipment.
|
| This is not how it works; this would be 150% overhead. ($60
| / $40).
|
| Basically, if something is a shared utility (common lab
| maintenance, supplies that can't be metered and charged to
| specific projects, libraries on campus, etc.) then it's
| overhead.
|
| Also included in overhead is administrative & HR
| expenses... and things like institutional review boards,
| audit and documentation and legal services needed to show
| compliance with grant conditions.
|
| The reasons for high overhead are threefold:
|
| 1. Self-serving administrative bloat at universities and
| labs. We all agree this is bad.
|
| 2. Shared services in complex research institutions (IRBs,
| equipment maintenance, supplies, facilities). This is
| _good_ overhead. We want more of this stuff, though we want
| it to be efficiently spent, too.
|
| 3. Excessive requirements and conditions on grants that
| require a lot of bodies to look at them. This is bad, too,
| but doesn't get fixed by just lopping down the overhead
| number.
|
| Unfortunately, if you just take overhead allowance away
| suddenly, I think it's just #2 which suffers, along with a
| general decrease in research. Getting rid of #1 and #3 is a
| more nuanced process requiring us to remove the incentives
| for administration growth on both the federal and
| university side.
| bglazer wrote:
| First the rate was negotiated on a per institution basis with
| the government. It's based around a mountain of oversight and
| compliance. Ironically all that compliance work contributes to
| the need for more administration.
|
| Second, modern research needs a lot of people doing non-
| directly research adjacent stuff. Imagine looking at all the
| support people on an airbase, and saying why don't we just cut
| them and let the pilots fly without all this logistics baggage.
| fooker wrote:
| >Could it be that these charges against grants are used to fund
| students in other subject areas where grants are not available?
|
| No, PhD students from areas where funding is not available are
| required to teach. The university pays them for the teaching.
| Considerably less than what they would have had to pay someone
| who teaches for a living.
| jmclnx wrote:
| [flagged]
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| You can still get an education, you just have to be rich.
| Gigachad wrote:
| So the number of educated people in the country drops
| rayiner wrote:
| The america that put a man on the moon had only 10% of
| adults with a college degree.
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Doge geniuses would have cut that 4% of the federal
| budget right before Apollo 11
| anon7000 wrote:
| It's an interesting question. Would doge suddenly have a
| change of heart if they were trying to compete with a
| serious enemy?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Given Trump's stances this week, I somehow think we've
| gone reverse red scare and would just work to spread
| communism in America. We're just so different from 50/60
| years ago.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The America that launched 158 rockets to orbit in one
| year and landed most of the boosters for reuse had a
| substantially higher rate.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So, how was education doing in pre-1971 East Pakistan?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| we also had manufacturing jobs, strong unions, and a
| better minimum wage. We getting any of those back?
| jmclnx wrote:
| True, but in the 40s, 50s and 60s, High School Courses
| were very close to undergrad courses now in the US.
|
| Back then, public schools were not afraid of failing
| students, plus hardly anyone in high school worked after
| school. Typically they work at summer jobs. Also if you
| dropped out at 16, you could find work at a living wage,
| not now.
| yongjik wrote:
| Oxford and ETH Zurich will be open for the rich, but
| Trumpists openly despise higher education, and I'm not sure
| whether any American universities will be safe if Trump stays
| in power for four years.
| wraaath wrote:
| RIP US-based Academia INC In the immediate term, obviously
| the center of academic research moves to Europe/Asia, but
| the longer term damage is irreparable. Where is the 0-1
| basic research that fundamentally moves the ball forward
| going to come from? Clearly not the US anymore.
| mlrtime wrote:
| You mean like Pitt's endowment of 5.8 Billion?
| rayiner wrote:
| If a Chinese university was spending 59% on overheard the
| university president would be imprisoned. The CCP has no
| tolerance for that kind of thing.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| And America didn't allow that for a long time. Obama
| attempted to cap indirect costs unsuccessfully.
|
| America also has what appears to be an unlimited tolerance
| for undergraduate tuition fully paid for by non-dischargeable
| debt.
|
| You'd be hard pressed to find another group in America with
| less sympathy than universities with the common man. Except
| perhaps government workers
| vkou wrote:
| That says more about the common man than it does about the
| institutions he hates, and it says nothing good about him.
| rayiner wrote:
| The common man is definitionally the one whose'a opinions
| matter. Maybe academics should become worthy of the
| respect of those who fund their activities.
| threecheese wrote:
| So we should make sure everyone feels represented? That's
| not working very well.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Should it? The common man didn't want women to vote 100
| years ago (and didn't go to acedemia either). They didn't
| want minorities to be people (or I guess count as 60% of
| a person) 200 years ago. The common man could be wrong.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The common man approved these changes, eventually. That's
| democracy. Violating the will of the people _now_ because
| they didn't always agree with you is not democracy. You
| would much prefer to live in a monarchy or some form of
| feudalistic society if you would prefer to override the
| will of the people
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yup. But they didn't change their minds overnight. And
| not without a lot of protesting, and even some bloodshed.
| That's what's trying to happen. People from 100 years ago
| before the 19th amendment would also interpret it as
| "violating the will of the people", but that's almost
| always how you change minds as a grassroots.
|
| >You would much prefer to live in a monarchy or some form
| of feudalistic society if you would prefer to override
| the will of the people
|
| Protesting a proposed monarchy does not mean I approve of
| a monarchy. I'm not really a fan of this kafkatrap esque
| narrative. People post-Women's suffrage would also
| complain, so it's not like you're critical to convince of
| this to get my goals.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| We live _in a democracy_!
|
| > Democracy is the theory that the common people know
| what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
| Mencken
|
| Elites forget who runs the show
| vkou wrote:
| > We live in a democracy!
|
| We do. That's how we collectively decides what gets done.
| It's the least bad system for making decisions.
|
| That doesn't mean we sometimes don't make some really
| fucking stupid decisions, and there's no way to whitewash
| it.
|
| Just because a lot of people believe in something doesn't
| mean they are right, it just means that's what we are
| going to be doing. Plenty of democratic societies have
| made horrific mistakes in the past. American readers
| might be passingly familiar with the Declaration of
| Causes of Seceding States, while German readers may have
| heard of something that happened in 1932.
|
| And since the election, the show is definitely being ran
| by elites, they just happen to be elites with a much
| wealthier PR department. It's wild, though, how they've
| duped people into thinking they are some kind of
| everyman-outsiders.
|
| Anyone who still thinks the richest narcissist in the
| world and a slumlord from New York give two figs about
| some working class sap will be in for a surprise.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The disillusionment with elites has been brewing forever,
| such is the nature of common vs. elite. However I would
| say the outright detestment for normal people reached its
| pinnacle when Obama said people who don't vote for him
| "cling to guns and religion" and Hilary Clinton said
| those voting Trump were a "basket of deplorables". Such
| blanket statements from our leaders describing half the
| country truly proved the minds of those fully detached
| from the common man.
|
| It's fair to protest and disagree. It's another thing to
| call those who oppose you in a democratic society "nazis"
| or other hyperbolic pablum.
|
| The absolute failure and collapse of the American left
| will be studied endlessly over the coming years. It will
| rebuild. But the wilderness will be long and difficult.
| vkou wrote:
| > Such blanket statements from our leaders describing
| half the country truly proved the minds of those fully
| detached from the common man.
|
| Of the two parties this past election, one ran a campaign
| of governing for _all_ America, and the other of
| division, with a loud and clear goal of punishing the
| half of the country that didn 't vote for them.
|
| Yet, strangely enough, the latter campaign was the one
| that succeeded. It's strange how the standard for the two
| parties differs.
|
| > It's another thing to call those who oppose you in a
| democratic society "nazis" or other hyperbolic pablum.
|
| Are you implying that it's somehow impossible for a
| democracy to elect a fascist or an authoritarian? Did the
| Confederacy, or the Reich just magically appear out of
| thin air?
|
| (Bonus question: Why do they... Keep giving, and
| applauding Nazi salutes at rallies? Did they sleep
| through history class? Are they unaware of what that
| symbol means? Should I not believe what I see with my own
| eyes?)
| rayiner wrote:
| I grew up in NoVA. The dominant attitude at the time
| among the cognitive elites who worked for government was
| that we know how to do things, and we'll use our
| capabilities in service of doing the things the common
| people want. It was a veneer even then--for example
| immigration has been increasing for decades even though
| the majority has never wanted that. But at least lip
| service was paid to the order of authority.
|
| Sometime between Bush and Trump I that was replaced by an
| attitude of "the common people are deplorables and our
| values and goals are better." Same attitude we have in
| south asia actually.
| bnjms wrote:
| _What part_ of these new policies helps address this issue?
| rayiner wrote:
| The fact that the policies limit overhead to 15%?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| You apparently have little idea how indirect rates work
| in academia.
|
| Some basic math: A $500K grant with a 60% indirect will
| have 0.6*$500K = $300K worth of indirect costs on the
| 300K+500k= $800K grant. The indirect cost are thus
| $300K/800K or 37.5% of the total.
|
| This compares well to cutthroat biotechs which have SG&A
| rates of 40 to 60%.
|
| Further, the indirect rates in academia largely support
| services like histology labs, imaging cores, compute
| resources, safety training, and chemical disposal. It
| would be far more expensive if each lab had to contract
| out these services directly.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Do you know what "overhead" means in this context?
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| They would in the end vote against you. You can't let that
| happen.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Franco and Stalin both increased University funding.
|
| Cuba to this day spends more of its GDP on education than any
| other nation on Earth.
|
| Syria (under Assad) spent more than South Korea, Afghanistan
| more than Greece, Iran more than the UK, Egypt more than
| Ireland, Iraq (under Sadam) more than Japan, Saudi Arabia
| more than Canada, etc.
|
| You can look it up, the more totalitarian the government the
| higher the spend on education not less.
|
| There's three big cohorts that heavily fund their University
| systems:
|
| 1. The Nordic States 2. Former British colonies 3.
| Dictatorships
| monero-xmr wrote:
| China doesn't fund all of the bullshit research America does in
| the social sciences of dubious quality and reproducibility. I
| would love to axe everything that isn't a hard science.
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes. The only thing that contributes to society is science.
|
| That's why we have museums devoted exclusively to science and
| the study of science. It's why scientists tend to write great
| books about the human condition.
|
| Jesus Christ.
|
| Also. Define hard science please.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It seems to me that wonderful books about philosophy and
| the human condition could be written without taxpayer
| funding, considering all of human knowledge is available at
| our fingertips
| foobarian wrote:
| What if... the taxpayers would like such books to be
| written?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Why are we blaming Schools for using taxpayer funds and
| not the congress (or state govenor) who makes the budget?
| When did we celebrate shooting the messenger?
|
| Also, this is pretty selfish reasoning. I'm sure the
| manufacturing jobs feeding us would take a stance to
| defund science as well. It's just a bunch of nerds
| playing around in a lab. They aren't contributing to the
| country.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| They have a whole fund for it called National Social Science
| Fund that funds non-STEM and alike research.
| fooker wrote:
| Great that you have invoked China. Guess what their research
| grant overhead is? 15-20%.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Source?
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| These things lead to (very) low-quality threads, as seen below.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| amazing how many Americans can applaud this reduction when it is
| completely illegal. America works because of checks and balances
| and oversight. Obviously there are problems and grift.
|
| But to think that everyone is okay that solving it means Elon and
| a hand picked group of 25 year olds can just slash budgets and
| see top secret documents when none of them would pass a drug test
| or screen means we are know looking at the fall of the American
| system
| blindriver wrote:
| Imagine thinking that it's illegal to cut spending when you're
| $36 Trillion in debt. I think it should be illegal to NOT cut
| spending when you're at that debt level.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes, it is. In the constitution.
|
| Moreover, anyone who paid the slightest attention to Trump's
| own words knows these cuts aren't paying off a deficit.
| beej71 wrote:
| There are legal ways to cut spending and illegal ways to cut
| spending.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| You sound like this: blocking bribing your politicians is bad.
| How people can applaud this?!!
|
| Imagine having tds so bad you support fraud etc because someone
| managed to put a "legal" label on it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sadly, it'll have to hit their wallets directly before they
| realize they've been hoodwinked. I wish people would realize
| this sooner, but America's long been a country that reacted too
| late instead of taking preventative measure.
| juniperus wrote:
| I keep seeing people point out whether things are legal or
| illegal.. but my understanding is that the executive branch
| decides which crimes to prosecute, which makes this point
| fairly irrelevant save for judicial intervention, which is also
| tenuous at best when it comes to some of these moves.
| codelion wrote:
| It's a tough situation. I agree administrative bloat is a real
| problem in universities, but cutting indirect cost recovery so
| drastically seems like a really blunt instrument. It's going to
| disproportionately hurt research programs, and freezing
| admissions is a pretty drastic first step. Hopefully the
| temporary pause gives them some breathing room to figure things
| out.
| FpUser wrote:
| Rich will get education anyways. Less fortunate will be squeezed
| out of opportunities. Nice.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "Roaring" 20's, amirite? It's just not us roaring.
| aurizon wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy-P17UwK4A
| jostmey wrote:
| I see a lot of comments about Universities being inefficient,
| bloated with administrators, and that the cap on indirect rates
| is justified. I agree, but it is not as simple as made out to be.
|
| I've worked at a university, startup, and large company. In terms
| of efficiency, startup > university > large company. In other
| words, large companies are less efficient than universities and
| universities are less efficient that startups.
|
| I agree the grant overhead is ridiculous and that Universities
| are bloated with administrators. It felt like every 6 months, an
| administrator would find a previously unnoticed rule that would
| indicate my office placement violated some rule, and I would have
| to move. I think I went through three office moves. Ugh. On the
| other hand, universities provided time and resources for real
| work to get done
| sega_sai wrote:
| Now, imagine the alternative universe where the government was
| actually interested in reducing administrative bloat in
| universities. It could have introduced for example a limit on
| grant overhead on all future grants, which would have likely
| forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc. Obviously we
| don't live in that universe. We live in the world where
| capricious government with people like Musk who think they know
| everything better than everyone else just introduces arbitrary
| cuts. And then various commenters (including here) contort
| themselves trying to justify those cuts.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| > _It could have introduced for example a limit on grant
| overhead on all future grants_
|
| So exactly what they introduced, except not applying to current
| grants?
|
| > _forced universities find saving in admin /sports etc._
|
| Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?
|
| only for a select few; most are a loss
| neilv wrote:
| > _A Penn professor, who requested anonymity due to fear of
| retribution, told the DP that the decision appeared to be "last
| minute" and came after departments had already informed the
| University of the students who were selected for graduate
| programs._
|
| > _The professor added that the University "pulled the rug out"
| from many faculty members, some of whom had already offered
| acceptances to students they had thought were admitted -- only to
| now face the possibility of having to cut those students from the
| program._
|
| If students were informed they were accepted, by anyone at the
| university (even verbally by a professor), then it's time for the
| university to cover this (regardless of which budgets it was
| supposed to come out of), even if it has to draw down the
| endowment.
|
| Unless the university is willing to ruin a bunch of students'
| lives in brinksmanship, and then deal with the well-deserved
| lawsuits.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I don't think the relationship between departments and the
| central University is what you think it is
| neilv wrote:
| Will wronged parties who decide to sue, sue the department,
| or the university?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They would sue the professors in their individual capacity
| as well as the university.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Federal workers should just quit en masse to teach these guys a
| lesson. And make them hire back for 2x the salary.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Yes, do that! Quit ASAP!
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Most people need their jobs to pay their rent and have health
| insurance and aren't programmers with a LinkedIn inbox full of
| recruiters to draw on. They weren't making a ton of money to
| begin with and many desperately need the job. Public service
| has nice long term benefits like a pension, but most federal
| employees are not well off by any measure.
|
| I find people who feel glee at the suffering of these families
| disturbing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If we could all group together, such a resignation wouldn't
| even last a day. It's the ultimate prisoners dilemma and
| we're slowly running out of options less drastic. everyone
| would benefit and few would lose their jobs compared to this
| still-fast slashing.
|
| also, nitpick:
|
| >aren't programmers with a LinkedIn inbox full of recruiters
| to draw on.
|
| It's not 2022 anymore. Those LinkedIn inboxes are empty for
| me. This market sucks.
| juniperus wrote:
| a general strike is great and all, but didn't Reagan call
| the bluff with those air traffic controllers and just hire
| all new ones? Replacing top scientists in all the
| institutions is basically impossible, but for the most
| part, a lot of positions would be certainly easy to fill.
| Park rangers? Forest service employees? lab techs? These
| are jobs that tons of people with a Bachelor's would be
| more than happy to fill. Government employees generally
| want to keep their job for life. So most are more inclined
| to hide under the covers and try to avoid the spotlight.
| Though I have seen many get antagonistic and incredulous
| with recent events but I think it should be clear that
| people need to keep up. With this recent email sent out
| saying "reply or you're fired," I mean it's cute some
| people think they aren't going to reply, but they must do
| that at their own peril. I'd be replying quick.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Park rangers and lab tech are highly skilled highly
| contextual roles. You can't just go and pull someone off
| the street and make them experts in running assay
| machines or have decades of knowledge of a park and its
| terrain. There are plenty of people who can be churned
| for sure, but why are we doing this to them? There are
| ways of restructuring that's thoughtful and mission
| enhancing, this is just wanton destruction to both our
| institutions and peoples lives and livelihoods - all
| because less than a majority voted for a single person -
| who is going against the will of the legislature and the
| majority of people. Politics aside, this is a time of
| sorrow and life altering trauma for a great many people.
| The profound lack of empathy for them and the acting like
| they're somehow the "enemy" is just heartless.
| lvl155 wrote:
| That's my point really. People just assume government workers
| are lazy and don't do much but in reality a lot of these
| people play CRITICAL roles. Having been on both sides,
| government workers aren't more or less efficient versus
| private counterparts. I can go on and on about lazy and zero-
| skill people in private enterprises that survive purely on
| "networking". And we saw evidence of this during the pandemic
| when a lot of these people were exposed.
|
| This country would literally fall apart within the week and
| people will beg them to return.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Wrong strategy for the time. These people don't care about what
| is lost, they're greedy individualists, they don't care about
| the country.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It hasn't happened in America, but I think people severely
| underestimate how devastating a real strike can be. Remember
| that the ports strike in October only lasted 2 days but
| estimated costs were already in the 10 (or even 11) figures.
|
| A full on government walkout for a day would fix a ton. They
| won't care, but even their voter base wouldn't ignore the
| late payments, cancelled appointments, and overall confusion
| a day would do.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You're wrong, their voter base would ignore everything
| short of their own children being killed. It's tenacious
| smooth brain solidarity.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Every society is X missed meals away from anarchy. For a
| society like America that hasn't experienced famine en
| masse in almost a century, that X wouldn't need to be too
| high. They can ignore their kids but not their bare bones
| basics.
| wraaath wrote:
| March 2020 almost became that.
| juniperus wrote:
| I'm all for the concept of a general strike, but I think
| the general public would be very unsympathetic with a
| government employee strike. People would be racing to put
| their name as someone willing to replace a striking
| government worker.
| lvl155 wrote:
| I don't think you realize how hard it is to fill these
| critical jobs. You would need skilled labor at pay
| substantially below the private market rate. A lot of
| these talented people work for the government because
| they're patriotic. And this admin is doing its best to
| piss off these people.
| juniperus wrote:
| I don't know about that. The benefits are a big reason a
| lot of people want to be lifelong government employees,
| it seems.
| colincooke wrote:
| The entire academic industry is in turmoil, the uncertainty on
| how bad things could get is probably the worst of it as
| Universities are having to plan for some pretty extreme outcomes
| even if unlikely.
|
| For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher
| for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are
| worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please
| not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change
| made with no warning and no consultation.
|
| If the government decided that a cap was necessary it should be
| phased in to allow for insitutions to adjust the operational
| budgets gradually rather than this shock therapy that destroys
| lives and WASTES research money (as labs are potentially unable
| to staff their ongoing projects). A phased in approach would have
| nearly the same long-term budget implications.
|
| Are there too many admin staff? Likely? Is this the right way to
| address that? Absolutely not.
|
| For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in
| Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in
| your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. If
| you're on year 12 of an academic career, attempting to get your
| first job after your second (probably underpaid) postdoc and
| suddenly there are no jobs, you can't just wait it out. You are
| probably just done, and out of the market forever as you will
| lose your connections and have a gap in your CV which in this
| market is enough to disqualify you.
| rayiner wrote:
| > For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or
| higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your
| concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but
| oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely
| illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
|
| Why should the public believe that procedures that produced 59%
| overhead rates in the first place can be trusted to fix those
| overhead rates now? Sounds like a demand for an opportunity to
| derail needed reform by drowning it in red tape.
|
| Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead
| rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren't
| individually appropriated by Congress.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the
| overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly
| aren't individually appropriated by Congress.
|
| 2024 appropriations (and it showed in many years before
| then-- Public Law 118-47. Statutes at Large 138 (2024): 677.
|
| SEC. 224. In making Federal financial assistance, the
| provisions relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45,
| Code of Federal Regulations, including with respect to the
| approval of deviations from negotiated rates, shall continue
| to apply to the National Institutes of Health to the same
| extent and in the same manner as such provisions were applied
| in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. None of the funds
| appropriated in this or prior Acts or otherwise made
| available to the Department of Health and Human Services or
| to any department or agency may be used to develop or
| implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to
| intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of
| the approval of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond
| the proportional effect of such approvals in such quarter.
| rayiner wrote:
| That says the indirects must be based on the existing
| regulations. The memo purports to rely on the existing
| regulations. It relies on 45 CFR SS75.414(c)(1), which
| states:
|
| > The negotiated rates must be accepted by all Federal
| awarding agencies. An HHS awarding agency _may use a rate
| different from the negotiated rate for a class of Federal
| awards_ or a single Federal award only when required by
| Federal statute or regulation, or _when approved by a
| Federal awarding agency head or delegate based on
| documented justification as described in paragraph (c)(3)
| of this section._
|
| Subsection (c)(3), in turn, says:
|
| > (3) The HHS awarding agency must implement, and make
| publicly available, the policies, procedures and general
| decision making criteria that their programs will follow to
| seek and justify deviations from negotiated rates.
|
| Just based on a quick perusal it seems like the
| administration has a decent argument that the agency head
| can approve the 15% indirect by fiat as long as he or she
| comes up with a documented justification.
| mlyle wrote:
| https://goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-costs-at-nih
| This reads that argument in the exact opposite direction:
|
| > So, an HHS division like NIH can use a different rate
| only for a "class" of grants or a "single" grant, and
| only with "documented justification."
|
| > There is nothing that says NIH could, in one fell
| swoop, overturn literally every negotiated rate agreement
| for 100% of all grants with all medical and academic
| institutions in the world, with the only justification
| being "foundations do it" rather than any costing
| principle whatsoever from the rest of Part 75 of 45
| C.F.R.
|
| Further, this doesn't allow a blanket adjustment to
| _existing_ awards.
| rayiner wrote:
| That is an argument in the opposite direction, but it
| overlooks two things.
|
| 1) The "documented justification" must reflect the
| requirements of subsection (c)(3), but that provision
| imposes no real substantive requirements. It's a
| litigable, but the linked article concludes there must be
| more justification than the statute seems to require.
|
| Note also that, amusingly, _Kisor_ is still the law of
| the land and under that decision agencies still get
| deference in interpreting their own regulations.
|
| 2) The article frames the Congressional rider as
| prohibiting changes to the indirects. But the statute
| only prohibits changing the regulation, which HHS hasn't
| done.
| mlyle wrote:
| This is a pretty twisted reading; it basically is a
| reading of the statute that it has no effect or any kind
| of restraint at all.
|
| We'll see what happens.
| tlb wrote:
| The purpose of many laws is to require documentation
| without imposing any new limits on what the government
| can do.
| rayiner wrote:
| The statute just says the agency must use the existing
| regulations. The regulations were promulgated by the
| agency to govern its own discretion. The executive reads
| the regulation to constrain the civil service to a
| particular process, but allow the negotiated indirects to
| be overridden by the head of the agency with a documented
| reason.
|
| You're assuming that the regulation would constrain the
| head of the agency but why would that be the case?
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| Whether or not the head of agency is allowed to a drastic
| change like this doesn't change the fact that it is
| stupid. It's going to cost money in the long run.
| skwb wrote:
| > Also, what would be illegal about the change?
|
| At the *very* least you should be following the
| administrative rules act (requiring you to solicit 45 days
| for comments by effected parties) before making such a
| dramatic change in policy.
|
| Courts absolutely love striking down EOs (of both Dems and
| Reps Admins) when they should have been following the
| administrative rules act.
| rayiner wrote:
| You can file an APA lawsuit about anything. Nobody really
| calls APA violations "illegal." It's a "show your work" and
| "don't be drunk or crazy" procedural law.
| skwb wrote:
| The fact that courts do strike down admins on violating
| the APA does, in fact, make it illegal.
| jhp123 wrote:
| DACA repeal was blocked on APA grounds
| colincooke wrote:
| 1. Why should the public believe that they can fix it.
| Perhaps they can't, that's not entirely my point. My point is
| that if the government firmly believes that a change is
| necessary there are _simple_ ways of acheiving such a change
| without causing such chaos, waste, and hardship. Perhaps a
| phased in approach, or other mechanisms. Overnight shock
| therapy offers very little economic benefits while having
| very harsh personal and insitutional cost.
|
| 2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is
| actually negotiated directly between the institution and the
| NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal
| judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but
| my read of this is that this is a change that would need to
| come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates
| through the mandated process.
|
| [1]: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-
| result...
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| You seem to be unfamiliar with how indirect rates work.
|
| First some basic math: if a project is budgeted at a direct
| cost of $500,000, the indirect rate of 60% applies to the
| $500,000, i.e. $300,000.
|
| The total grant is thus $500K + $300K = $800K. The $300K
| indirect costs are thus 37.5% of the total. This is an upper
| limit, as many direct costs such as equipment do not get
| indirect rates applied to them.
|
| Second, these rates are painstakingly negotiated with the NSF
| and NIH. Yearly audits to ensure compliance must be passed if
| funding is to continue.
|
| Third, these indirect cost go towards to items such as
| electricity, heat, building maintenance, safety training and
| compliance, chemical disposal, and last by not least
| laboratory support services such as histology labs,
| proteomics core, compute infrastructure, and some full time
| staff scientific staff. Only a relatively small portion goes
| to administration.
|
| Finally, scientists generally would welcome review and reform
| of indirect costs to ensure they get the maximize benefit
| from the indirect rates. However, DOGE is not interested in
| reform. They are interested in raze and burn destruction.
|
| If DOGE gets its way, it will knock the Unites States off its
| perch as the world's technological leader.
| a2tech wrote:
| You can tell people the truth all day long. They don't want
| to hear it. They're convinced that academia is rotten to
| the core and none of your facts and figures will dissuade
| them.
|
| For example I know at my institution every dollar, every
| piece of effort, is painstakingly tracked and attributed to
| funding sources. We have extensive internal checks to make
| sure we aren't misusing funds. Audits happen at every major
| milestone. All of that effort is reported. It's exhausting
| but the government requires it because we have to be good
| stewards of the funds we have been granted. No one believes
| it.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| We must keep trying. It's frustrating but we can't give
| up. Scientific progress depends on us.
| addicted wrote:
| I'm not part of academia but was heavily involved in
| funding because of my position in student government
| while still in college.
|
| While I won't argue there isn't waste (what endeavor
| doesn't have waste?) it's an incredibly tiny percentage
| (except in cases where there was actual fraud, which we
| also discovered and the Feds prosecuted and convicted
| people for).
|
| The irony is that academia is so afraid of "waste" that I
| wouldn't be surprised if colleges spend more money on the
| auditing and the compliances, etc than the actual waste
| they prevent.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I've had to deal with NIH audits up close. The amount of
| work devoted to compliance can make one question if the
| grant money is even worth it in the first place.
|
| A big part of the reason indirect rates evolved is
| because the administrative burden to track direct costs
| is immense. How do you split up direct costs on an
| electric bill? Do you place a meter on each wall outlet
| and try to assign each amp to a specific job? Or safety
| training? Divide the safety meeting minutes by ..... ?
| It's impossible. Which is why Vannevar Bush pioneered
| indirect costs. See the history section here:
|
| https://www.cogr.edu/sites/default/files/Droegemeier%20Fu
| ll%...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| A bit stupid on a community like this because many people
| at least spent 4 years in school.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| > knock the Unites States off its perch as the world's
| technological leader.
|
| It's a funny thing. there is a distinct chauvinism to any
| citizen's nation. Every American is confident and
| absolutely positive that we are the best in so many
| categories. By what metrics? And who measures these? What
| about other nations who claim the top spot as well?
|
| Before I travelled to Europe in 2008 I had some mental
| image of backwards, technologically inept populace that had
| old electronics and lagging standards and rickety brittle
| infrastructure. I mean you watch films and look at pictures
| and you see the roads and the old buildings and the funky
| cars and there's just a mix of things that are 500 years
| old or 1500 years back and thoroughly modern.
|
| when I finally showed up in Spain I was completely
| disabused because all the electronics and the homes were
| totally modern and there were big box superstores that
| looked exactly like Target or safeway.
|
| We went to shopping malls, watched normal first-run films
| in luxurious theaters that sold beer, and we rode around in
| cars/trains/boats, and I visited veterinarian and physician
| and hospital, and the medical treatment was
| indistinguishable from the American type.
|
| I mean, this is one consumer's anecdata, but you've got to
| consider that we're ready to believe vague propaganda about
| #1 America First Outclassing The Solar System, and the
| fervent patriotism is perhaps not a 100% accurate lens.
|
| Universities are _designed to collect and disseminate
| knowledge worldwide_. The top institutions and even the
| worst ones thrive on international collaboration. Think
| about how difficult it is to achieve and hold military
| superiority even. Schools are an effective equalizer, and
| globalist mindsets are the default.
| emeril wrote:
| the US is def not the best in many categories - though I
| suspect certain pockets of the US (overrepresented on HN)
| are like SV re: tech/quality of life and academia
|
| many people I know - mostly [science/math/etc. denying]
| republicans think the US is the best at everything
| including healthcare (!!!) despite reams of data
| conclusively proving otherwise
|
| my fingers are crossed that DOGE/Dump does something
| stupid enough to irritate the populace (and by extension
| a handful of senators/representatives to grow a mini-
| spine) enough to stop this destruction
| juniperus wrote:
| in terms of scientific research though, America is ahead
| of much of Europe. It's historically been easier to get a
| good job in research in the US. Some research is also
| harder to carry out in Europe due to regulations. Now,
| whether the European lifestyle compares to the US is a
| different story. But when it comes to university-level
| research, it has been the case that there is just more
| money to throw toward it in the US, leading to more
| highly-cited papers. That might be changing, though.
| addicted wrote:
| The "overhead" isn't even overhead as most people understand
| it.
|
| But the real question is why does the general public think
| 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an
| appropriate level of "overhead" is 1000%.
|
| In reality the people who actually know anything about how
| this is calculated, across the board and across the political
| spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all.
|
| The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who
| hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means
| other than taking a lay persons understanding that all
| overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that
| anything above 0% is bad.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is really it. Generally they gesture vaguely toward a
| notion of "administrative and bureaucratic overhead",
| without really understanding how that overhead actually
| cuts waste and improves research output by removing
| redundancies. If we were to zero out this administrative
| overhead, it would mean every professor would end up doing
| less research and more not-research.
| rayiner wrote:
| Were the people at HHS who tried to reduce indirect costs
| in 2013 during the Obama administration also not the
| "people who actually know anything?" https://archive.ph/202
| 5.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...
|
| I bet the "people who actually know anything" at Boeing
| would also say their launch costs are as low as they can go
| and there's nothing to cut.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It seems like the better comparison from your article
| would be 1992, but really, having RFK Junior sitting
| there with a chainsaw is in no way comparable to 2013
| rayiner wrote:
| It's different because RFK with a chain saw might achieve
| change where Obama failed.
|
| We have had 3 populist elections in the last 5 cycles.
| Obama 2008 was co-opted and Trump 2016 was stymied by
| Russia investigations. So this time there's RFK and Elon
| and Tulsi with chain saws. If the people don't like the
| results they can vote for Harris in 2028. But at least
| sometime tried to do what the winning party voted for.
| meroes wrote:
| These are cuts to enrich the extremely wealthy, not for a
| lean-mean-fighting industry. Your whole conception is
| off. They don't need or care if the entire country does
| better overall, they care about personal wealth. It's
| Obama wasn't trying anything of the sort.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Also, what would be illegal about the change?
|
| Besides the president screwing with the budget agreed upon by
| Congress that kicked all this off?
| amluto wrote:
| I'm not convinced that the rate, per se, is actually a
| problem. What is a problem is the structure. If a contract
| said "you get $1M to do X and your university gets $590k,
| paid pro rata by time until completion", fine, and one could
| quibble about the rates.
|
| Instead, the grant is for $1.59M, and each individual charge
| to the grant pays an extra 59% to the university,
| conditionally, depending on the type of charge and the
| unbelievably messed up rules set by the university in concert
| with the government. Buying a $4000 laptop? Probably costs
| your grant balance $6360. Buying a $5000 laptop? Probably
| costs $5000 becuase it's "capital equipment" or "major
| equipment" and is thus exempt. Guess who deliberately wastes
| their own and this also the university's and government's
| money by deliberately buying unnecessarily expensive stuff?
| It gets extra fun when the same research group has grants
| from different sources with different overhead rates: costs
| are allocated based on whether they are exempt from overhead!
|
| And cost-plus disease is in full effect, too. If the research
| group doesn't use all their awarded money because the finish
| the project early or below estimated cost, the university
| doesn't get paid their share of the unspent money. This
| likely contributes to grantees never wanting to leave money
| unspent.
|
| Of course, DOGE isn't trying to fix any of the above.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| If they can't be trusted to fix the problem themselves with a
| 5 year phase in period they most definitely can't be trusted
| to fix the problem immediately...so I don't get your point.
| rayiner wrote:
| Everyone involved in the current process has an incentive
| to not change anything. If you go through the existing
| process with some five year target, the universities and
| bureaucrats will bleed you to death with procedures and
| lawsuits and lobbying, as they did with prior efforts under
| Obama. It's the same way NIMBYs kill development projects.
| The only way to change it is shock and awe.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| What article are we taking about? The response to "shock
| and awe" was rescind offers to students, not cut down on
| administrators or address inefficiencies.
| rayiner wrote:
| That's a temporary measure. The universities know that in
| he long run they need students but can cut
| administrators. But at least the immediate reaction is
| controlling costs rather than geering up to lobby and
| litigate their way out of it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The US has a peculiar culture where elite academic
| institutions are very much willing to limit their numbers
| of students, so it's not clear to me that they will in
| the long run control costs. Large, prestigious US
| universities have historically preferred funding more
| administrators over more students.
| blindriver wrote:
| Elon proved with Twitter that large corporations can survive
| drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts/layoffs (80%+) and
| still survive. If DOGE waited to do things less drastically,
| nothing would ever get done. The cuts that are going through
| are nothing as drastic as what Twitter endured (except USAID)
| so I guess he is willing to risk short term disruption for
| long-term spending cuts and that the organization will
| reorganize and restabilize pretty quickly.
| duxup wrote:
| > and still survive
|
| Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the
| same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country
| is far different than a government institution.
|
| The comparison here isn't encouraging and makes no sense.
| antman wrote:
| Amazon made almost no profits for many many years others
| too. They follow a reinvest or expansion strategy and if
| investors believe it the stock goes up. It is not
| encouraging that Twitter lost 80% of its value under Musk's
| leadership and not something pne wants for the US
| Government which also does not work on a for profit basis.
| Ofcourse Musk fakes that he doesn't know that and promotes
| his unsubstantiated wins stories daily.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Amazon offered very obviously valuable and profitable
| services. I think we're starting to realize ad-based
| monetization is not how to maintain a billion dollar
| corporation anymore. I wouldn't have much aspects for
| Twitter even if Musk never took over. But he sure did
| accelerate things.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| >ad-based monetization is not how to maintain a billion
| dollar corporation anymore.
|
| Online ad revenue has been growing, 15% per year
| recently. Huge growth. That includes legacy networks like
| (decrepit) Facebook, which is seeing double digit growth,
| and the short form video frontier is growing considerably
| faster and constantly pushing out new ad/partnership
| models and is very much a strong growth industry in an of
| itself.
|
| Ad revenue is more than sufficient to sustain a billion
| dollar corporation. It can and does sustain trillion
| dollar corporations, and the industry is currently in a
| strong growth phase with a lot of obvious green fields
| for innovation.
| khazhoux wrote:
| You seem to miss the point.
|
| Twitter was an imperfect yet functional website before
| Elon. Elon fired most of the staff. Twitter then continued
| to be an imperfect yet functional website.
|
| Hell, I remember ten years of HN saying "WTF does Twitter
| need so many people for??", and then those same people said
| "OMG Elon is insane to fire so many people!!".
| cudgy wrote:
| Many people are more concerned about the messenger than
| the message. They'll flip-flop their opinions solely
| based on who is doing the bidding.
|
| A glaring recent example. If Biden had taken action like
| Trump has to negotiate with Russia to stop the Ukraine
| war, would the Democrats be screaming that Biden is a
| "Putin apologist"?
|
| If Barrack Obama made statements about deporting
| undocumented immigrants (which he did), Democrats fall
| largely silent. If Trump makes similar statements, same
| Democrats scream fascism, racism, and Nazi/white
| supremacy.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Not just the act matters. The rhetoric used by the
| messenger matters to.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't know what that means as far as a comparison to a
| government institution.
|
| Twitter could be massively profitable, or woefully
| unprofitable ... it has no impact on anyone outside
| investors.
| rayiner wrote:
| Twitter's cash flow has doubled:
| https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-x-doubled-ebitda-
| since-2...
| abduhl wrote:
| This is an incorrect statement. Twitter's revenue halved
| but its expenses were cut as well meaning its EBITDA
| doubled. The most likely conclusion on cash flow is that
| it went down actually, probably by a half in line with
| revenue (since revenue is a sign of flow in).
|
| This is not the stunning retort to criticisms of Elon's
| "fire them all" approach that some imagine it to be. It
| basically says "we cut expenses by 75% and only lost half
| our business." Which half of the US government are you
| willing to lose, and are you sure you're cutting the
| right 75% to lose the targeted half? Which half of the
| subjects that we fund R&D for are you willing to lose?
| rayiner wrote:
| https://www.bankrate.com/investing/ebitda/ ("Some
| investors and analysts use EBITDA to assess the operating
| performance of a business or as a broad measure of its
| cash flow.")
|
| Increasing EBITDA by downscaling the business and
| severely cutting expenses is a common approach when
| turning around an unprofitable company.
| abduhl wrote:
| https://altline.sobanco.com/ebitda-vs-cash-flow/ ("EBITDA
| and cash flow are both important financial metrics, but
| they serve different purposes and provide different
| insights into a company's financial health.")
|
| We can quote secondary sources back at each other all
| day, but it's somewhat pointless because the truth is
| what I said already: EBITDA and revenue are merely
| indicators for cash flow, not synonyms. You used the
| wrong words dude.
|
| I also noticed you only replied on a pedantic point while
| leaving the substantive questions on which half of the
| government and research funding you'd like to see gone
| (and how these cuts target that half) as an exercise for
| the reader.
| rayiner wrote:
| I think it's common for people to refer to "cash flow"
| (without referring to OCF or FCF or whatever specifically
| ) when they mean EBITDA, but I'm happy to be wrong about
| that. I'm not a financial analyst. But as you
| acknowledge, EBITDA is an indicator of cash flow. Is
| there a difference between the two measures that you
| think is relevant to X? X is increasing how much money
| they're making right?
| abduhl wrote:
| I'm glad we agree that cash flow is not the same as
| EBITDA.
|
| The question we are talking about is whether Twitter
| makes more money now versus before Musk's take over. If
| "makes more money" means revenue, then the answer is a
| definitive no, it does not make more money now. If "makes
| more money" means profit, then the answer is that we
| don't know but probably not because profit is found after
| ITDA (hence the B in EBITDA) and we know the ITDA is
| substantial for Twitter given how it was acquired.
|
| So yes there is a difference between cash flow and EBITDA
| that is germane here, and the difference is that cash
| flow doesn't help us answer the question that we are
| asking while the one piece of information that we do have
| (revenue) tells us the opposite of the answer you're
| trying to imply.
| duxup wrote:
| Elons own statements at his meetings indicates otherwise.
| rayiner wrote:
| The linked article, which is relying on WSJ reporting,
| says EBITDA increased from $682 million to $1.25 billion.
| duxup wrote:
| Elons own description of his business is that they're
| only just profitable some quarters.
|
| Let alone that we're talking about comparing an
| advertiser based social network to a government
| institution.
| shusaku wrote:
| This is the most infuriating part of this. Musk acted like a
| moron and overpaid for twitter. Then cash constrained, he
| rapidly cut things to save money. Now twitter is completely
| diminished in its reach, at an all time brand low, and at
| real risk from competitors.
|
| Meanwhile, the companies Musk built that actually have
| dominated their space are big idea innovators like Tesla and
| SpaceX. Musk wasn't successful because he's a good penny
| pincher, he was successful by burning cash on big ideas and
| talented people.
|
| But somehow we decided its case 1 that we'll apply to the
| government.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Case 2 had a lot of safeguards _around_ Musk to keep him
| isolated from the talented people. But Case 1 made Musk
| feel better. So we know which one he prefers. Not like he
| 's going to suffer the losses the most.
| costigan wrote:
| This equivalence between a company that provides one app
| that, if it were to disappear, would hurt no one, and a
| government that has thousands of functions, many of which are
| life-and-death in both the short and long run, is just
| ridiculous.
| ars wrote:
| Very few government functions are life or death.
| costigan wrote:
| Let's take one example. The Epidemic Intelligence Service
| (EIS) is a two-year post-residency program that trains
| health professionals in applied epidemiology. These
| officers are crucial for on-the-ground investigations of
| disease outbreaks. It's a 2-year program, with 50-60
| doctors in each year. All of the first-year doctors in
| this year's program were fired by DOGE, so far, for a
| capacity reduction of 50%. Both years are in the
| 'probationary' civil servant category, so the jobs of the
| rest of them are still at risk.
|
| I asked ChatGPT 4o for other examples, and it generated a
| list of 40. You can do that for yourself, if you're
| interested.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Except when they are.
| rasz wrote:
| FAA, CDC, NNSA, it goes on and on
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Regardless, the life-and-death ones are being slashed
| too. They aren't discriminating in these plans.
| juniperus wrote:
| when it comes to scientific research, sometimes a
| research breakthrough is life or death to people.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Twitter that large corporations can survive drastic,
| chaotic and insane levels of cuts/layoffs (80%+) and still
| survive.
|
| US Government is not Twitter, but yeah, I can see some
| element of it. Now I suddenly remember, the various comments
| here convinced me that X/Twitter will be dead in just two
| months. Yet, it's still around. Not that I care to make
| account there or bother looking at it, but I figure if it
| kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone
| moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So you're still just going to attack the most extreme
| interpretations and dismiss the truth because it's not
| literally dead?
|
| Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big
| brands don't literally die often; someone will want to try
| and play around with it.
|
| >but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the
| news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't
| have any customers?
|
| Twitter is technically stable in terms of servers. They did
| a good job doubling up by 1) minimizing the load needed by
| making users sign in to see more than a literal permalink
| (you can't even see comments anymore) while 2) being a bait
| to get more new accounts to report on engagement. Not that
| that matters now since Twitter is no longer publicly
| traded.
|
| It's the everything else around it that caused it to
| plummet.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > So you're still just going to attack the most extreme
| interpretations and dismiss the truth because it's not
| literally dead?
|
| I can attack my own interpretation, that seems fair,
| doesn't it? You can have your own interpretation, and
| then attack it, (or not attack it) later.
|
| > Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big
| brands don't literally die often
|
| I had no idea! That's cool. I never really used either
| one that much. I do know yahoo is still around. One
| difference is I periodically I see links to X/Twitter. I
| never see people link to digg or myspace. But sounds like
| you have a different perspective, which is also cool.
|
| > dismiss the truth because it's not literally dead?
|
| Just to be clear, the truth for me is my impression from
| reading HN about 2022 or so. Namely from comments like
| these:
|
| > (Nov 18, 2022) I very much doubt that. Twitter must
| have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the
| workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if
| Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal
| entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.
|
| I agreed to them at the time. So not sure how "truth" and
| "dismissing" applies; it's really just an impression. Am
| I allowed to dismiss my own impression? Seems odd to
| object to that...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I can attack my own interpretation, that seems fair,
| doesn't it? You can have your own interpretation, and
| then attack it, (or not attack it) later.
|
| Your comment just gave some vibes that because Twitter
| didn't literally die 2 years ago (as you and others
| predicted) that it seems that introspection was
| completely proven wrong, "Yet, it's still around". I just
| simply wanted to assert that being nearly dead doesn't
| exactly inspire confidence, even though the doctor was
| technically disproven by his statement of "you'll be dead
| in 6 months".
| rayiner wrote:
| Twitter's cash flow has doubled:
| https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-x-doubled-ebitda-
| since-2...
| thcipriani wrote:
| "Elon Musk's X is worth nearly 80% less than when he bought
| it, Fidelity estimates"[0]
|
| [0]: <https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-
| twitter-x-...>
| viccis wrote:
| > can survive drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts
|
| I get ads on X that are just videos of animals being slowly
| shot multiple times to death. There's also some for tools to
| slim jim car locks. None of the mainstream/normal accounts I
| used to follow (shout out SwiftOnSecurity) are there, and
| instead it's a hotbed of crypto scams and deranged vitriol.
| The site is still running, but is a shell of its former self,
| making so little money that Elon is trying to sue people (and
| now, abusing US govt payment systems) to force them to pay
| him for advertising.
|
| I can see how if you think that's a success, that you would
| think similar actions with regard to the US government are
| successful. The necessary cuts he's making are not necessary,
| and I'm guessing you aren't impacted, so, given the general
| lack of theory of mind towards others, I'm not surprised you
| think they're ok. The rest of us out there who understand the
| idea of human suffering are concerned for our fellow citizens
| facing arbitrary and unnecessary pain as the result of a
| capricious court eunach's drug influenced decisions before
| the "restabilization" that will never happen.
| hedora wrote:
| > _short term disruption_
|
| Great euphemism for "In one month, we're going to kill tens
| of millions by withholding food/medical care and permanently
| destroy institutions that took a century to build".
|
| I'm going to use that phrase.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| This is false. Twitter is not the US government. And Twitter
| is certainly not the US scientific establishment which is
| dispersed broadly across the nation and which has taken
| decades to build up. Many research universities will shutter
| their research departments permanently if these overnight
| changes are implemented. This is especially true in smaller
| states like Alabama, which is why Republican Katie Britt is
| sounding the alarm. Moreover, many people will leave the
| field permanently.
|
| Moreover, scientific R&D is a strange place to slash if cost
| savings are the goal. Medicare and Medicaid comprise over 50
| times the NIH and NSF combined budget of approximately $50B.
| If we want to save costs, research into diseases like
| Alzheimer's Disease is the way to go. Alzheimer's currently
| costs the nation $412B per year [1], eight times the NIH
| annual budget. Therapies which delayed the onset of
| Alzheimer's Disease by 20 years would nearly eliminate this
| cost.
|
| Let's be clear: DOGE is led by a self described autist who
| has little idea how government and broader society functions.
| The damage he will do if left unchecked is vast.
|
| [1] https://nchstats.com/alzheimers-disease-in-the-us/
| ks2048 wrote:
| It seems Twitter is in a death spiral. That is the model to
| apply to scientific research and academia that has powered
| Americas dominance for the past 100 years?
| antman wrote:
| Elon proved with Twitter that he doesn't know what he is
| doing. Huge loss, zero lessons. If US ends up being downsized
| financially and ethically the way Twitter has, that will also
| provide zero lessons for Musk.
| addicted wrote:
| Twitter's valuation has plummeted since Elon's purchase.
|
| And to the extent Twitter is still limping along it's because
| Twitter due to its very nature benefits immensely from the
| stickiness of social networks.
|
| For example, Facebook is almost completely junk. It hasn't
| improved or been relevant in a long time. And yet it survives
| and makes tons of money simply because people don't want to
| rebuild their networks.
|
| There are many other examples where even minor cuts have been
| devastating. The classic example is of course GE, the
| ultimate example of cutting a company to the bone, which
| worked for a decade or so, but set the company up to
| essentially cease to exist after.
|
| Then you have Boeing, a company in an industry with less
| competition than probably any other in the world and it's
| struggling to make money because of this thinking.
| cudgy wrote:
| Boeing and GE are inappropriate comparisons. Their cost-
| cutting maneuvers were primarily driven by moving existing,
| quality work to overseas contractors. It was simply about
| saving money without worrying about efficiency or long-term
| benefit. The overhead of managing contractors spread
| throughout the entire world is much more difficult than
| overseeing groups say within the Seattle Washington area. I
| really don't see how this compares to reduction of work
| forces in government divisions. These government positions
| are not being moved overseas along with the complicated
| overhead of managing the groups all around the world.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The functions will end up being outsourced to contractors
| and bureaucracy will have to deal with managing them and
| their failures. This is exactly what has already happened
| to many departments and direct cuts to workforce will
| only worsen it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Define "survive". Elon is still a billionaire?
|
| Sure, if we detonate all nukes, I imagine 20% of humanity
| will survive. "We" won't die out that easily. Me and you are
| probably dead, though. Statistically speaking.
| amluto wrote:
| Having spoken with people who worked there, Twitter built a
| system for which the technical its mostly ran without much
| help. So it's not surprising that you can still tweet with
| most of the staff gone.
| fooker wrote:
| I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the
| fixed overhead aspect of this.
|
| There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and
| live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a
| football coach for ten million and builds a new building every
| year.
|
| This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the
| universities are intentionally making this look worse than it
| is for public sympathy.
| colincooke wrote:
| Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid
| critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in
| this manner has little added economic benefit in the long
| run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the
| short run.
|
| You can make a strong argument these institutions require
| reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not
| through such broad strokes.
| fooker wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| The kind of reform you are talking about does not work
| against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of
| small countries.
|
| It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then
| it'll be a game of whack a mole.
|
| There's a reason things got so bad.
| vkou wrote:
| Yes, the rule of law is incredibly inconvenient. Why be
| bound by it, when you can just do anything that you want?
| fooker wrote:
| Yes, that's why countries are not just run by courts and
| judges.
| vkou wrote:
| If you want to change the law, the legislature is right
| there. All it needs to do is pass a bill.
|
| If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to
| follow it.
|
| This is generally how civilized people are expected to
| behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to
| do away with the rule of law.
| fooker wrote:
| There's no law to change here.
|
| Universities have freedom in how to use grant money. The
| government had so far not bothered with controlling what
| they do with the money coming from the government. The
| situation is a bit like you donating to a charity and
| they spending it on executive bonuses.
|
| Are you proposing that the government has to sign
| everything into law before taking any action? Can you
| think of why that might be a terrible idea?
| affinepplan wrote:
| this isn't true. I don't think you understand how
| university funding works.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There isn't. Congress decided the budget. Your goal is to
| blame your reps and make sure they budget the way you
| want next time. That's the proper way.
| fooker wrote:
| I think we are talking about different things here.
|
| I am not writing in support of funding cuts.
|
| I am strongly supportive of stopping universities from
| skimming most of the funding, and the research getting a
| tiny bit. Student researchers doing the actual work get
| less than minimum wage.
|
| If you are surprised by the 'less than minimum wage'
| part, it's a bit of creative accounting by universities
| counting a 'tuition waiver' as part of your wages.
| cudgy wrote:
| Since when is it required that all the money in a budget
| be spent? Amounts are budgeted for a division and then
| it's up to that division to operate within that budget.
| It doesn't mean they have to spend every single dollar in
| the budget. In fact, it should be a goal to spend less
| than the money that's allocated in the budget so that it
| can be applied to the next year. The idea that all the
| money has to be spent, regardless is part of the problem.
| vkou wrote:
| > Since when is it required that all the money in a
| budget be spent
|
| Since Congress passed The Constitution's Appropriations
| Clause and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment
| Control Act (ICA) in 1974.
|
| Because otherwise, the executive could just unilaterally
| shut down any part of the government at any time. _Or
| siphon money from one department to another_.
|
| Which it can't by design, since _congress_ controls the
| purse.
|
| There's a process outlined in that act, under which the
| executive can report to Congress that it is reducing
| spending, and Congress must approve that reduction in
| order for it to take effect. That is the law of the land.
| The law is being broken.
|
| If you don't like the budget, there is one governing body
| that can do something about it in this country. The
| legislature. They control spending, just like putting
| people in prison is controlled by the judiciary.
|
| Strangely, all the people grousing about executive
| overreaches are dead silent on all this.
|
| The sin has never been executive overreach, the sin was
| always an executive they did not control.
| rayiner wrote:
| There is a very basis here for invoking "rule of law"
| where:
|
| 1) we're talking about discretionary grants being made
| out of taxpayer dollars;
|
| 2) congress has delegated authority to make the grants
| and to the executive, including determining indirects;
| and
|
| 3) the executive action is being used to save money.
|
| It's also "the rule of law" in some sense when NIMBYs sue
| to keep a Ronald Mcdonald House from being built in their
| posh neighborhood, but that doesn't mean we need to
| lionize it on that basis, or preemptively surrender to
| efforts to invoke the law to block reform. The
| universities can afford expensive lawyers with their 59%
| indirects, let those lawyers worry about it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Translation: it's too slow and you don't care what breaks
| in the process. You already got yours.
|
| Anyone complaining about slow courts should probably
| focus on the courts themselves, or the money coming in.
| Not the act of laws.
| cudgy wrote:
| And yet everyone was arguing recently about how amazing
| Deepseek was because they operated on such a smaller budget
| and how the restriction of chips into China forced them to
| find an efficient solution to training an LLM model. Sudden
| and drastic changes don't always result in bad outcomes; in
| fact, they can many times produce outcomes that were never
| possible without the shock to the system.
|
| Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the
| changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually
| and systematically through a series of conferences and
| meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented
| sometime in the future.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Doesn't the football stuff fund itself through tickets,
| licensing, etc? It seems hard to believe research overhead
| grants are going to the football coach.
| fooker wrote:
| Money is fungible.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| And?
|
| The one thing has nothing to do with the other.
|
| Football funds itself. That's why the coach makes so much
| money. If research funded itself, researchers would make
| a lot of money.
| costigan wrote:
| Only if the organization with the money wants to do that.
| Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any
| major university pays for physics research facilities (or
| any topic outside of sports medicine)?
| fooker wrote:
| >Only if the organization with the money wants to do
| that.
|
| Great, this should be a enough of an argument then for
| the federal government to decide how grant money is used.
| costigan wrote:
| It does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is
| for.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Not when double entry accounting is involved.
| o11c wrote:
| I've heard that said. But my university tuition had an
| explicit 10% charge to subsidize upgrades for the football
| program, so ...
|
| It's very easy to lie in budgets by only counting a subset
| of expenses.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Spurious. Football coaches are not paid by overhead dollars.
| but mainly by alumni that like football wins.
|
| No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they
| pay way more than a 50% "markup". Unless they go to a
| research university: then they pay much less, and just like
| the federal government they are getting a fine deal.
|
| Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the
| situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are
| essentially mooching on the research institutions and the
| federal government.
| cudgy wrote:
| So you don't think that some of the money that gets sent to
| athletic directors to build fancy stadiums and pay for
| multimillion dollar coaches would've gone possibly to
| research facilities if those athletic departments didn't
| exist?
| ls612 wrote:
| The places paying their football coaches big bucks have
| football programs that are net revenue generating.
| icameron wrote:
| Athletic programs are a net profit center at many D1
| football schools.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| No, I do not. Most health science centers do not have
| football teams ;-). I am at UTHSC in Memphis and I can
| assure you we do not send money to support the Vols in
| Knoxville. Worlds apart.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Football program spends big because it rakes in huge amounts.
| In order to keep making all that money though they need a
| good team which costs money.
| ars wrote:
| > it should be phased in to allow
|
| This NEVER works. It just doesn't.
|
| Bureaucracies are self perpetuating, it's just their nature.
| Each person at the bureaucracy is 100% certain they are
| essential.
|
| The only way to shrink them is to force them.
| costigan wrote:
| The federal workforce, as a percentage of all jobs in the
| U.S. was 4% in the 50's, decreased steadily to 2% in 2000 and
| has held roughly steady since then. (The source is
| https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-
| the-f... second figure, and I'm taking total jobs as a proxy
| for the population that the workforce serves.)
|
| The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency.
| Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the
| beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the
| stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized
| completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of
| our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project,
| managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well."
|
| GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993,
| contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape,
| empowering employees, and enhancing customer service.
| Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential
| directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific
| initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the
| Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which
| required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and
| measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR
| contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs
| during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early
| retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-
| in-force or RIFs).
|
| Source: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bk
| grd/bri...):
|
| The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA,
| were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice
| vote.
|
| I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency
| drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to
| understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the
| "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the
| NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between
| branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was
| wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in
| people's lives, because the changes were implemented over
| several years with much more warning.
|
| I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are
| the stated goals, but that's a different issue.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It worked during Clinton's administration, and didn't involve
| a wrecking ball. It's possible when people actually
| commmunicate with each other.
| eezurr wrote:
| >For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in
| Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break"
| in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a
| job.
|
| Honest question. If the job market is that competitive, why are
| we guiding people down this path that requires investing their
| entire young adult life? To me, it seems you've inadvertently
| made a case for cutting funding.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| We aren't really. We are guiding people to get college
| degrees. However, undergraduate education and professional
| research are both done by the same institution. Further, that
| institution likes to have those professional and apprentice
| professional researchers work as teachers. The result of this
| is that undergraduates get a lot of exposure to professional
| Academia, so they naturally have a tendency to develop an
| interest in that profession. Given how small the profession
| actually is, even a small tendency here saturates the job
| market.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| At this point, what profession isn't "small"? It feels like
| jobs are declining across all industries except for the
| most exploitative ones they can't easily outsource.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The big question is how should the government allocate the
| funding for basic research between career stages to maximize
| the benefit to the society.
|
| If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you
| get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then
| most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating.
|
| If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs
| you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia,
| but it happens in a later career stage.
|
| If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced
| researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are
| stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of
| their ability to contribute.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| You can also get a job in the private sector after a PhD.
| It's not necessarily a waste of time for those we don't get
| to work in Academia.
| epolanski wrote:
| > you are forever unable to get a job
|
| In academia*
| khazhoux wrote:
| > For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or
| higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your
| concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but
| oh my please not like this
|
| This comment encapsulates a big part of why people like Trump.
| They are sick of inaction in the name of careful consideration
| and nuance.
|
| And I kinda understand it. By analogy, I've see this many times
| at different companies I've worked at. Whether it's a 20-year
| scripting engine or a hastily put together build system that
| barely works but the entire project depends on, whenever
| someone suggests to replace it you just get reason after reason
| for why you have to move slowly and consider all the fine
| details. Months and years pass and the core system never
| improves because an "old guard" shuts down every attempt to
| change it. Finally, someone new comes in and calls bullshit and
| says enough's enough, and rallies a team to rebuild it. After a
| difficult process, you finally have something that works better
| than the old system ever could.
|
| Yeah, I understand the story doesn't always end well, but the
| analogy above helps me understand Trump's appeal.
| josho wrote:
| Let's ask ourselves what happens when the story doesn't end
| well and it's a service that government has been providing.
| The answer may be lives are lost, the economy breaks, enemies
| win victories, etc.
|
| Move fast and break things is fine in a competitive
| marketplace. It's asinine for the government to do.
|
| The answer is to elect better politicians who can nominate
| better heads and those department heads can drive the
| necessary change without succumbing to the old guard.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The people in charge don't want good action, they just want
| action and now. They want to damage these institutions. They
| have published and spoken extensively on this. That we keep
| letting their defenders change the narrative to pretend
| anything else and continue to give good faith WHEN THEY HAVE
| TOLD US THEY ARE NOT ACTING IN GOOD FAITH in insane to me.
|
| BTW, interesting thinking on the action for action's sake
| governing style:
|
| "The cult of action for action's sake. "Action being beautiful
| in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous
| reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...
|
| If that action also hurts liberals working at traditionally
| liberal aligned institutions, all the better in their minds.
| yongjik wrote:
| The sudden cut on NIH funding is intended to maximize fear and
| chaos, and since this is NIH, the impact will be most felt in
| cutting-edge medical research. And I think that's precisely the
| point: Trump is in a rampage to destroy American institutions,
| his supporters _hate_ higher education, and high-ranking research
| universities are a prime target.
|
| Come on, are we supposed to discuss the finance of university
| administration as if this is some well-thought-out proposal to
| make America's universities be better and more efficient? Don't
| give in to the gaslighting. The barbarians have breached the gate
| and we're arguing whether torching down the main street would
| help us with next city council meeting.
| kelnos wrote:
| This is the thing that really frustrates me: much of the
| discussion around the damaging effects of what Trump and Musk
| are doing seems to assume some sort of good-faith motivations
| on the part of Trump and Musk.
|
| But that's not what they're doing. They're dismantling the
| executive branch of the federal government because they want
| less regulation for all their corporate buddies, and they want
| to privatize lots of government functions to, again, benefit
| all their corporate buddies.
|
| And on top of that, they want to cut taxes (for corporations
| and the wealthy, mainly) at a level that will reduce tax
| revenue beyond the spending cuts they want to make. So they
| won't be balancing the budget, or reducing the deficit. We'll
| still have a federal government that borrows more and more
| money every year, but provides less and less to the people of
| the country.
|
| That's it. There's no noble plan here.
| pphysch wrote:
| America has been a plutocracy for decades; Trump 2.0 isn't
| new in that sense.
|
| I think beneath Musk's buffoonery there is a political pivot
| happening. Part of me wonders if he is a heel to make Trump
| seem more normal.
| marcosfelt wrote:
| This blog post gives some good context on why indirect rates
| exist and some more reasonable ideas for reforming the current
| system: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-costs-at-
| nih?utm...
| iamleppert wrote:
| Time for these universities to pick up the tab and run a
| sustainable business that isn't dependent on government handouts.
| If their research is high quality and valuable, it will survive.
|
| The current state of academia paper mills, unreproducible
| research and rampant fraud are a direct result of the spigot of
| money and lack of accountability.
| klysm wrote:
| Complete bullshit. Research is high risk and frequently 0
| return. It's fundamentally not a sustainable business. Is it
| worth doing still? I would say yes.
|
| These actions by the government are fucking over people who
| have dedicated years of their lives to pursue advanced research
| degrees and academic careers.
| ks2048 wrote:
| They are not "running a business". The American research
| Universities have been reaping great rewards for relatively
| small investments.
| iamleppert wrote:
| It's about time they start running one. The American people
| are done subsidizing ivory towers, meanwhile they have
| endowments that could fund the entirety of it themselves.
|
| Higher education is in for a rude awakening under the Trump
| administration. All I can say is it's a shame Doge can't do
| layoffs and clean house at some of these universities. Do
| away with tenure and get rid of the dead weight!
| naijaboiler wrote:
| This is such a stupid and myopic view. It honestly is
| pathetic
| tmpz22 wrote:
| How many jobs on your resume exist solely because of the
| charity of American Research Universities?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There's a good reason Acedemia and Business should be as
| separate as possible. Do you think we would have been
| researching EV's if Oil got to fund grants?
|
| Innovation isn't found by making faster horses, you can't treat
| tomorrows tech as you would yesterdays line budget.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Mike Caulfield says,
|
| > _If institutions don 't push back together, they will cease to
| exist in the form they are now. I don't know how to say this more
| clearly._
|
| And my heavens yes. This is the government threatening to end
| funding for universities. This movie here is no where anywhere
| near enough. This is an attempt to end the entire higher
| education system.
|
| Does it need help & reform? Yes. But simply destroying education
| outright serves no good. This is a destruction of civilization by
| radical extremists. Universities need to be working together to
| defend against this mortal threat to the existence of higher
| education.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| U Pitt's endowment is 5.7 Billion! The funding cuts are big but
| it's only ~2% of the endowment, why are they pausing PHD
| admittance rather than using the resources they have readily
| available?
| wraaath wrote:
| endowment per student for the top universities runs mid-7
| figures for places like Princeton (3.75M), Yale (2.7M), MIT
| (2.1M) etc. The endowment per student for UPitt in 2023: 172k,
| which really doesn't give it a lot of wiggleroom to spend while
| maintaining the purchasing power of the gift endowments over
| time.
| quink wrote:
| The endowment as of June 30th 2023 was $5.5 billion. A year
| later it was $5.8 billion. If you add inflation and this
| spending cut alone, it has not grown.
|
| Sure, it's "only ~2%", but surely I don't need to tell you how
| the money, meant to _persist in perpetuity_, a _237_ year old
| institution has accumulated to educate _30,000_ students is a
| different measure than an annual income? - a drop large enough
| to, as I pointed out above, no longer make it a viable sum of
| money in perpetuity?
|
| Here I'm imagining you, sitting on let's say, $500,000 and
| thinking it's no problem if you spend _an extra_ $10,000 more
| every year, it's only 2%, and then wondering after a while
| where all the money to invest went, but where your money went
| entirely. I think rather than comment on a university's
| finances, better make sure yours are in order first because I
| suspect there's a troubling fundamental lack of financial
| literacy on display here that's going to come back to haunt you
| at some point.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| This makes complete sense when the universities grand purpose
| is to perpetually aggregate money to manage as a tax exempt
| hedge fund.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| In the article, they did not specify if the funding cut is a
| result of re-structuring direct-indirect cost ratio (essentially
| no research cut but the administration cut only), or the fund
| granted to a fewer researchers. If they actually receive less
| money for the same current researches, there is no need to accept
| fewer students.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| This is nothing more than Administrators administering to protect
| their influence and cushy jobs.
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/bureaucrat...
| pmags wrote:
| Many of the comments here reveal a profound ignorance about the
| actual costs of conducting biomedical research, as well as a lack
| of knowledge what the Trump administration is doing to knee-cap
| NIH funding.
|
| 1. If you want to have some perspective on what indirect costs
| actually cover I'd recommend this video (published 2 years ago)
| by AAU, AAMC, and other partner associations. --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
|
| 2. The courts have temporarily blocked the indirect cuts to
| existing grants, but the Trump administration is using other
| backdoor means to further withhold funding. See this article in
| Nature -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
|
| The long and the short of it, is that NIH is not reviewing grants
| or making awards at anywhere near "normal". Study sections are
| being cancelled at the last minute without any certainty about
| when they will be held. Investigators with existing multi-year
| grants don't know what to expect at renewal time. Factor in the
| layoffs at NIH and NSF as well.
|
| The administration has also said they intend to cut NSF budgets
| from $9B to about $3B dollars.
|
| Under these circumstances it would be irresponsible for
| universities to admit normal numbers of graduate students.
|
| Even if tomorrow the Trump administration said "Whoops, we messed
| up" and reversed all executive orders, I'd estimate they've cost
| the US research enterprise something like 12-18 months of
| productivity. And we're only 1 month into Trump 2.0.
|
| Here's some other knock on effects I anticipate we'll see in the
| next 3-6 months:
|
| 1. Opportunities for undergrad research will be greatly reduced.
| If you have a college age kid who's interested in engaging in
| research of any kind (sciences, humanities, engineering) they
| will have many fewer opportunities and those opening that exist
| will be even more competitive to get into.
|
| 2. Universities will cut way back on lab renovations, new
| facilities, and delay upkeep. Few people understand just how many
| tradespeople work on a university campus every day. This includes
| both facilities staff but also many outside contractors. This
| will have a major impact on blue collar jobs.
|
| 3. IT companies, biotechs, and scientific suppliers for whom
| universities are key clients are going to be hit hard. Expect
| layoffs and small companies to close up shop in this sector as
| the effects of research cuts percolate through the system.
| yes_really wrote:
| Pitt has an endowment of 5.5 BILLION dollars [1].
|
| It really does not seem like they paused all PhD admissions as an
| honest way to optimize their money. It seems like they are using
| their institutional power to protest Trump's policies, to create
| a sad state of academic research so that Trump is blamed for it
| until he reverts his policies.
|
| I feel sad for the rejected PhD students that were caught in the
| crossfire of Pitt's protest.
|
| [1] https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pitt-s-endowment-2022-23
| dang wrote:
| All: some of the comments in this thread are about the University
| of Pittsburgh, not Penn, because there were two Pennsylvanian-
| university-pauses-admissions-due-to-funding-cuts threads duelling
| on the front page and we merged the Pittsburgh one hither. Sorry
| to any Pittsburghers; it was purely because this thread was
| posted earlier.
|
| * (It was this one: _U. of Pittsburgh pauses Ph.D. admissions
| amid research funding uncertainty_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43145483.)
| juniperus wrote:
| I know in my state school, none of the labs expect to be able to
| take any student, period, at least for now. Some labs have even
| told students they might need to find a new lab to finish their
| degree, which I don't know how that works. Right now, the
| uncertainty is playing a major role. Advisors don't know if their
| money will evaporate/not be renewed, and are highly doubtful that
| new grants will roll in. The people running federal labs are
| saying basically that the expectation is to run a tight ship and
| do the research that is necessary, but not to expect being able
| to run wide-ranging projects as they have, that everyone needs to
| reduce their size and wind down what they're doing to only what
| is necessary.
|
| I certainly don't think shutting down American research and
| having a country where there are no new graduate students is a
| really sane scenario. I think some research is definitely
| inexplicable when it comes to being taxpayer-funded, and some
| labs are bloated and can run a tighter ship. But everyone is
| basically paying the price because of a small minority of labs
| who are operating as though they aren't receiving taxpayer money,
| and are conducting research that is truly pointless. Of course
| those labs exist, but they are a small group of labs... Clearly
| no one wants to spend the time to look at all the grants and
| projects individually to find the bloat. The strange part is that
| doing this sort of mass-culling actually just invigorates many to
| double-down on what they are doing if it is somewhat politically
| unsavory right now. So it really isn't achieving much other than
| recruiting an opposition to republican power, which is probably
| worth more to prevent than the money that could be saved.
|
| I think it's realistic to assume that the federal government is
| going to just wholesale cut a lot of the science funding, because
| compared to other nations, America actually funds a whole lot of
| science, and from what I can tell, that's much less true in other
| countries. The effects of that might be a bit abstracted from
| this event, these cuts might just result in less scientific
| innovation, which could cost billions of dollars added up over
| time easily. But, if this is just a sort of shock-and-awe thing,
| and then money starts becoming available again and the result is
| that "DEI" practices are expunged from criteria, then maybe the
| takeaway is just that labs just act with a lot more caution. From
| what I see, most labs already operate under large amounts of
| caution because the grant system is tricky enough.
| whatever1 wrote:
| The experiment that the US is running is unprecedented.
|
| What if we screw all our allies, make them scared for their
| safety so that they start building their own weapons, dismantle
| completely the government apparatus by assigning clowns to lead
| it, gut the income by incapacitating IRS and bringing down all
| the institutions we built as a nation (universities, congress,
| courts etc).
|
| I am trying to avoid conspiracies, but how would an enemy from
| within would look like, if not like this? The only thing not done
| yet is to point our own ICBMs at us.
| pbronez wrote:
| To the extent that MAGA can be said to have a point, I think this
| is it. Deep underneath the arrogance and scapegoating, they're
| calling bullshit on institutions that have become self-licking
| ice cream cones.
|
| I think there's some truth to that criticism. I would prefer to
| see the institutions reformed democratically than destroyed by
| fiat. I contend that sacrificing rule of law is deeply
| counterproductive. But the core complaint that things aren't
| working? There's some truth to it.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The core complaint is by no means new, and the Trump/Musk
| "solution" is worse than the problem.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The government's decision to cap the overhead rate for university
| grants requires _more_ administrational burden rather than less,
| so the only thing to cut are the actual researchers.
|
| Another example of the stupidity of Trump/Musk's actions.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Hosting a large number of top universities which conduct research
| attracts the best and brightest minds from around the world, many
| of whom stay in the US after doing their PhD, and is a
| significant factor in what makes the US the biggest economy in
| the world.
|
| Even if you subscribe to an America First policy, tearing down
| university research labs (which is the knock-on effect of cuts at
| the NIH, NSF, etc.) is one of the worst things you could do.
|
| Want to actually cut gov spending? Look no further than the
| military budget (which the GOP Congress is proposing to
| _increase_, not decrease).
|
| (That being said, yes, there is waste at universities. I'm all
| for some reform, but this is not reform, it's destruction.)
| umvi wrote:
| Defense, social security, Medicaid should all have high
| scrutiny, but that would be unpopular so neither party will
| touch those; thus, serious deficit reduction won't happen
| because doing so requires making unpopular decisions
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| defense, yes
|
| social security and medicaid, absolutely not (scrutiny, fine;
| cuts, no)
| geekraver wrote:
| Ph.D. programs being stopped: https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-
| tech/2025-02-21/universit...
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| OP here: I think the reason for reducing Ph.D. admissions is very
| simple and should be understandable to anyone who has ever been
| responsible for making payroll. We (at universities) have great
| uncertainty about future "revenue" (grants) with even funding for
| ongoing contracts/ grants not being guaranteed to come in next
| fiscal year. So we need to reduce expenses which are placed on
| the grants, the largest amount of which is paying for our
| trainees. The vast majority of universities in the US do not have
| extremely large endowments, and at least at the school I work at,
| the (very modest) endowment amounts that can be used for ongoing
| expenses already are.
|
| I, as a PI, am not directly admitting anyone into my group this
| year to ensure I have enough funding to pay existing group
| members. We're hunkering down and making sure those we have now
| will be funded through the rest of their Ph.D. While this article
| is talking about program-level decisions, there is a bottom-up
| aspect as well - at my program and many others, we (faculty)
| directly admit students into our group and are often responsible
| for their salaries from day one. Many faculty are, at an
| individual level, making the same decision I am, to reduce or
| eliminate any admissions offers this year.
|
| Edit: For reference, I am not at UPenn, but at a "typical" state
| school engineering program.
| currymj wrote:
| most of the general public doesn't know PhD students get paid
| stipends.
|
| if they do know that, they don't realize how tightly each
| term's stipend is tied to a specific funding source.
| efavdb wrote:
| I mostly had to teach throughout my PhD. Curious if funding of
| that sort is also at risk or if it comes out of tuition from
| undergrads.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| In theory it is less at risk, but in practice there may be
| fewer TAships due to general budget shortfalls and also more
| students competing for those spots.
| anticensor wrote:
| Why not offer a doctorate with the doctoral students paying
| tuition like we do in Turkish private universites?
| jltsiren wrote:
| It doesn't make sense if you are not rich.
|
| Completing a PhD typically takes 5-7 years in the US. In my
| public university, the nominal tuition for that time would
| be $100-150k for in-state students and $180-250k for
| others. Then add living costs on top of that. A PhD
| increases expected lifetime earnings over bachelor's, but
| not in all fields and definitely not enough to justify such
| spending.
| stonogo wrote:
| TA salaries come out of the university overhead on grants.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| how many admin people are Penn and other unis cutting in
| "anticipation"?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| It's a different budgetary item. Unlike a household budget
| where people are given a general income and then asked to
| decide to spend it on housing, gas, groceries, etc. It's far
| more like SNAP, where the money given to you is legally bound
| to very specific things-- you can buy baby food but not
| diapers for your baby.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that salary money cannot
| be shifted around.
|
| Grants paying for PhD students- sure, those cannot be
| shifted to pay for admin; that makes sense.
|
| Are administrators line items in the state budget? Then
| this would make more sense.
| MITSardine wrote:
| It's even more specific than that. Grants are often
| specific to a research project and you're not supposed to
| pay, say, a postdoc that works on X with a grant that's
| supposed to cover work on Y.
| mercacona wrote:
| Cutting admin people might mean more paperwork for professors
| and researches, which can lead to less grants and funding
| because you can't do science while doing paperwork. Not that
| easy to be efficient without losing productivity.
| kkylin wrote:
| Not disagreeing there's bloat and inefficiencies at many US
| research universities, but something I think is missed in a lot
| of these discussions is that a lot of research funding works on a
| reimbursement basis: for relatively small things like travel, we
| (faculty, students) would spend first, then get reimbursed. For
| bigger items the university pays and charges the grant
| accordingly (after due diligence). None of this happens without
| armies of accountants; these are often classed as
| "administrators."
|
| I would love to have fewer vice presidents, etc., people who
| really _are_ administrators / middle managers, on our campuses.
| But there really aren't as many of these positions as people seem
| to think. Articles like [0] (cited in one of the othe comments)
| seem to lump everyone who is not faculty or student an
| "administrator." Most such people are really staff; on the
| research side they help with accounting, compliance, etc. (On the
| student-facing side there's also a lot of staff -- students &
| families expect a lot more from universities now, everything from
| housing to fancy gyms to on-campus healthcare, and more. All that
| needs staff to run.) To confuse things more, some faculty (say at
| med schools) don't teach all that much, and some "administrators"
| do pitch in and teach from time to time.
|
| Again, I don't disagree we can do better, but I also think any
| discussion of higher ed costs and inefficiencies really should
| start with the reality of what universities do.
|
| [0]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
| muaytimbo wrote:
| 22.3 billion endowment. Maybe they can fund a little research
| without taxpayers?
| zkmon wrote:
| Though it might look like the effect of new gov, actually all
| this is just the wave of AI and excess technologies poisoning the
| very birth places of those technologies and science. The effect
| takes many forms and appears to be associated with other cause,
| but overall trend is clear. Humans don't need places of learning
| any more. Universities are heading into their ruins.
| drawkward wrote:
| Defend the cathedral!
|
| Without the production of knowledge, it will soon prove
| impossible to levy objective evidence against the despicable lies
| of the Trump administration.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| At Yale
|
| > Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad
| [1]
|
| If Penn suffers from this same bloat, maybe they should be
| cutting adminstrators. I see no mention of such cuts in this
| article.
|
| [1] https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-university-employs-
| nearly...
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