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).
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.
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.
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.)
At the very top, schools don't need to worry too much about competing to attract top students, because they're the best schools and the top students are going to be trying to get into them anyway. Private schools below that (like Stanford, USC, etc) use discounted tuition to try and convince top students to attend, leading to the merit-based tuition I described.
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.
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.
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, Kavčić-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#Chesterton'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.
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.
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.
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.
As the other poster mentioned, endowments / donations often come with conditions attached that significantly restricts how money from them can be used.
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 naïve.
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.
A lot of discuss here--sorry if my thoughts are a bit jumbled, but:
> The idea that you can have an economically sound career talking about historical colonialism is a bit far-fetched
I don't believe all careers need to have economic soundness as their pursuit.
> the idea that there can be survival and satisfaction for all
I feel that it's wrong to dispossess people of their lands and resources just because you can. I think that perspective is underrepresented in our society. I think there is usefulness in teaching "the other side" of history. I also believe a wealthy society should invest in jobs that are not "economically sound".
> practical concerns are ignored and the topic is judged under a lens of morality and dogma
What do you mean "practical concerns"? What other lens is there than morality? I don't believe morality can be dogma, but interested to hear your view.
> dogmatic and removed from reality
Present reality? No room for moral correctness or the study of it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the thread of your comment is that everyone should have an "economically sustainable job". Why is that so important?
> 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.
> "Colonialism studies" almost always degenerate into "all civilization bad, need to destroy all humans and return to the stone age" nonsense.
How does studying colonialism lead to that conclusion? "Almost always"? Based on what survey?
> For less political examples, the "just stop using oil" protesters who keep defacing art.
The essence of protest is grabbing attention, disruption. This means inconveniencing the comfortable. I concede that I'm not sure the anti-fossil fuel protesters defacing famous art are earning sympathy for their cause.
> The essence of protest is grabbing attention, disruption.
That's not the point. The point is that shitheads think that "just stopping oil" at the drop of a hat (by 2030) _is_ an option. That governments can just "sign a treaty" and stop all the fossil fuel extraction in less time than it takes to design and build an average HVDC power line.
I actually spoke with one of their members on WhatsApp, and they do believe that.
> Sorry, what exactly is nonsense about the linked paper?
Basically, that everybody is just trying to displace poor natives with pollution.
> Dream big!
Yeah, that's the part that is cringe and naïve. Adult people kinda need learn to distinguish between dreams and reality. And actually work on improving the reality.
> Basically, that everybody is just trying to displace poor natives with pollution.
If by "everybody" you mean "Capital", then that's probably true, overall. It's how the system works.
> Yeah, that's the part that is cringe and naïve.
Pretty depressing that that is your take. Dream big, go in the right direction, get wins where you can. Better than aiming small and getting even less done. My take, anyway.
It absolutely is. Capital is appropriative. Capital destroys the natural world for growth and imposes tyranny on the working classes. So, agree to disagree.
> The violence to force that "dream" is.
Violence? You mean protests? Or policy changes that you disagree with?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
With a whole 8.6% of PhDs showing evidence of suicidal planning[1], I think the stats support this view. I wouldn't wish the mental turmoil I went through in grad school on anyone.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And (4) just as everyone likes to think they could have made it as a pro athlete, everyone likes to think they could have made it as an academic, but had better things to do.
- Brian Nosek's team examined 100 studies from high-ranking psychology journals in 2015, and could only reproduce 1/3 of them.
- Tim Errington did the same for cancer papers, and could not reproduce most of them either (he spent 8 years for this efforts btw)
- When you aggregate the reported p-value in scientific publications, it often reveals a "funny" distribution (Leggett 2013, Ookubo 2016)
They are not picking up rare misconducts by low-profile researchers. Fraudant research (from p-hacking to data rigging) is
very common and a very serious issue.
I don't have much to say about psychology. But Tim Errington himself pushes back on the notion you're trying to sell, that his failure to reproduce research in his own replication projects creates a "yes this research is real" and "no this research isn't" result. Reproduction is hard, effect sizes can be small, reproduction studies can themselves be flawed (that's just how science goes).
The biggest thing though is just this idea that a non-reproducing paper is a failure of science. Journal articles are the beginnings of conversation in a discipline, not the last word on it.
You can see what I mean, though: people who probably couldn't name 3 important researchers in a field see people working on replications in those fields (Nosek, Errington) as celebrities. Because reported failures to replicate are newsworthy, and the day-by-day grind of incremental findings and negative results aren't.
I'm sure you can find evidence for both pretty easily. But that doesn't change the facts in this case - we would not have had any Covid-19 vaccines at all without the NIH funding that is presently being cut. And just because we have non-reproducible studies in psychology does not mean there's an issue in biology or chemistry. Your flippant answer doesn't change the facts of the case.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
“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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
“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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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…
Yes, this is so. Ideally, you’d see a mix of direct support (e.g., a core as part of a large site grant like a U54) for things that advance the state of the art and indirect support for core activities supporting other investigators. Institutions vary how they manage core facilities as cost centers, what level they’re administered at (unit or uni-wide).
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.
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.
This sounds like maybe this is an undergrad student? There's something called REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) that is issued in general to a university and then the university administers it to undergrads. But it is still a grant. Here's an example by the National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/reu
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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?
> 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 RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
> 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.
I thought the purpose of this was to reduce waste. Firing a low cost administrator and replacing them with N highly-trained (and higher cost) Ph.D.s is not efficient use of taxpayer dollars.
The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research. You cannot do that if you take all the resources and spend on managers and administrative staff.
> The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research
Given that my comments are downvoted like crazy, I've got the feeling that the US university including the Professors (tenured) are missing the forest from the trees regarding this issue.
I once asked a senior and prominent US Professor regarding their multi-million dollars grant for single project that can be easily spent on multi-project with similar or higher impact in other countries. His answer was they have to spent a lot on students, and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.
This is a good thing. It's expensive to support a Ph.D. student in America; it's a lot cheaper if you're in a country with lower cost of living. But as a researcher, you want to do research in an expensive area because it means you'll be around other smart people and lots of resources.
At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems.
> and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.
Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.
> At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems
I admire your strange perspective on govt's money spending on research but let's be honest it's not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads. Nothing last forever the, wastages and corruptions (wealth and morals) are the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls (Egypt, Roman, Iranian Sassanids, Ottoman, British, Russian, Indian Moghul and Chinese Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, etc).
How do you square that math with your assertion that "most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff"? You can at least admit you are expressing very strong opinions here for someone who doesn't have a firm grasp on the issues and no relevant experience working in this area. You're not aware of the fractal of complexity in this area, and you boiled it down into a heuristic which is smugly wrong.
> not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads.
You can't really articulate how these things are wasteful, so why are you concluding the overheads are unnecessary? See my sibling reply to the OP using the analogy of a skyscraper.
You are a person coming in the middle floor of the sky scraper saying "What are all these beams for? They seem unnecessary, let's get rid of them."
The engineers and architects who built the sky scraper told you those beams are holding up the roof.
You say "I know better, they are waste and unnecessary overhead!"
The engineers and architects point out towers of the past were much smaller. People expect towers today to be taller than ever before, and if you want taller buildings you need more and more support beams. Gutting the tower of support beams will cause it to collapse in short order.
We can talk about how to rearchitect the tower to use fewer beams overall, because that's a worthwhile discussion. But this approach of "slash all the waste!" is basically a game of Jenga, because you aren't sure what's actually waste and what's load bearing.
> the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls...
The main reason empires fall is because people who have no experience building them take over and drive them into the ground with their own hubris and ignorance.
If that's the goal, firing the administrative staff will have exactly the opposite effect. Administrative staff and managers free researchers to do research. If administrative staff and managers are fired, researchers will be administrating and managing instead of researching.
Getting rid of administrators doesn't obviate the need to administrate. It has to be done, so we do it efficiently using shared resources, which brings economies of scale -- that efficiency Musk keeps talking about. What you're arguing for is increasing waste so everyone has less time to do critical work.
Here's an analogy:
To support the roof of a house, you need a few support beams. To support the roof of a skyscraper, you need many more support beams. You can't support the roof of a skyscraper with the number of support beams that support the roof of a house.
University research started as a house, but now it's a sky scraper. You're coming into the skyscraper saying there's too many beams, but you're judging by house standards. Maybe there are, but most of them were put there for good, well-considered reasons; as a layman you have no idea which are load bearing, so if you come knocking them down you endanger the whole tower. Which is a shame because it's gotten really really tall - taller than any other tower in history - so toppling it because you don't understand it would be a huge loss for everyone.
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.
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.
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.
> "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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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/Human_subject_research_legisla...
The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like blaming being three hours late on a single red light.
Just looking in from the outside of this conversation,
> 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: ...
Is it that those were just bad examples and the actual bulk of the work is coming in from elsewhere? Or is it the case that these areas were already in place, but have since come to demand additional work that they didn't before (for what reason?)? &c
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.
Please have an informed opinion. Mouthing off about things you don’t understand based on distorted statistics with political bias that you also don’t understand is not the same thing as having an informed opinion. Believe me, plenty of folks who work “in the industry” of higher ed have ill-informed opinions on this subject as well, but the folks throwing rocks without even trying to understand what’s really going on are just trolls.
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.
The ancestor comment cited statistics on admin. growth from 1976 to 2018, that is why I mention 1976. Otherwise, your comment is very representative of the defenders of admin. bloat - a learned helplessness in simply assuming that all this busy-work must be serving some purpose, then pointing some example of superficially beneficial regulation.
But even if we grant that all the regulations are as crucial as chemistry lab safety, that doesn't explain the bloat:
It is just funny how technology was supposed to help society become less bureaucratic, but it has done just the opposite. Now to do anything, you need a bunch of administrators that will manage the systems that one needs to be "more efficient"!
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.
>In place of large, on-campus administrative bureaucracies, UATX plans to make administration remote, outsourcing positions abroad. Not only will this arrangement save university funds, Howland noted, but it would also pay foreign workers livable, US-level wages. Further, the school will forgo—along with competitive varsity sports—what he called “club-med amenities”: climbing gyms, student recreation centers with ball pits and golf simulators, napping stations, private pools, and the like. UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.
It's interesting, but not the kind of thing I'd expect to disrupt much. Looking into the details a little more, this place has a long ways to go before it lives up to those claims. Far from doing away with administrative bureaucracies, the academic catalog currently lists roughly as many administrators as faculty.
In boasting it won't have "club-med amenities" you might expect it to be cheaper than typical schools, but the tuition is $30k, and the total cost to attend is almost $60k! You can go to state college for less than that and they have an order magnitude more classes to take. Not to mention climbing walls.
Good luck getting accredited so your students are eligible for federal student loans. Who effectively accredits universities? Other universities, indirectly. It is a cartel.
I remember reading interesting things recently about Arizona State University and the "New American University" model - https://nadia.xyz/asu is a nice summary
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.
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.
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".
You are misinterpreting what’s going on. Universities are places where lots of people live and work. There’s support staff for all of that. Some activity that goes on is teaching. Some is research. Some is community engagement and outreach. All of those functions also need support staff, particularly research. At many large universities, research is the primary function, not teaching. Research requires a lot more support staff than teaching.
I think I am not misinterpreting. I expect an university to do teaching and focus on teaching (including some research). I expect any auxiliary activity to be minimized as much as possible, from cafeteria workers and campus electricians to HR and accounting.
An airline has three times more aircraft mechanics than aircraft pilots. Would you say this operation is an aircraft repair and maintenance shop that happens to do some airplane flying on the side?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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%.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see radical Islamic terrorism (TM) wasn’t marked down at cliché Walmart so you stopped by the mix and match barrel next to the DVDs on the way out. Maybe rootless cosmopolitanism will be on sale next time since its trademark expired along with Mickey Mouse’s.
Did I hallucinate that islamic socialism that was a boot on Bangladesh’s neck for decades? Islamic socialism was the dominant ideology in the islamic world among the elites, and still is among the diaspora. It’s real—it has a wikipedia page!
Regardless, I wasn’t using the term as a pejorative. What Islam, socialism, and liberal internationalism have in common is that they’re inherently cross-national, universal ideologies. That puts them in conflict with strong nationalism.
Tulsi is an american nationalist. For example she was okay with Assad, because she (correctly) felt Assad wasn’t a threat to america, was keeping a lid on Al Qaeda, and didn’t care about “human rights” in Syria. That view is just american nationalism. But it pisses off liberal internationalists and muslim socialists. Because their own outlook is universalizing, they assume her support for keeping Assad in place must indicate support for Assad’s policies and ideas.
> So we voted for Tulsi to take a chain saw to the CIA.
If "we" means "the minority MAGA base", then sure. But Gabbard has never been popular. Her favorability is at -13.7 in the RCP average [1], was never above water even during the heat of the campaign, and is at about -20 now.
That's just how political parties work! No single faction needs to carry a majority--but everyone votes together fully aware of what the platform is. And Trump kept his promises to his coalition partners and appointed both Tulsi and RFK Jr., and John Thune of all people busted his ass to get her confirmed. (Democrats should try this approach.)
The DNI doesn't run the CIA. In fact, between the CIA director and the DNI, it's rather the other way around. I don't know what the heck that has to do with a discussion of indirect costs, but I'm bored and didn't want to let that weird claim stand.
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).
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And HHMI makes lease payments, etc, on facilities for researchers at partner institutions that cover a lot of what would be incorporated in indirect costs.
They also cover expenses of people, not specific projects, so the broader grant means that there's less of a need for common overhead across projects.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
> 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.
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?
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.
"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.
> 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”.
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.
Take the army for example, it's estimated 30~40% of the workforce is dedicated to logistics. This is equivalent to 42~66% overhead (in the same sense that overhead is discussed in the context of academia, as +% cost) if you were to count only combat personnel as the direct costs.
This is was universities do, they only count research expenses as the direct costs. Yet it's quite obvious a university can't run just on scientists.
This 59% overhead is equivalent to 37% of the expenses. So, unlike you, I'm positively surprised that 63% of expenses go directly to the core mission with only 37% "waste" (which is necessary to ensure the scientists can actually work, and work efficiently).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
The indirect is a negotiated flat rate that covers costs that would be too numerous or difficult to account for in the direct costs. Like how would you as a researcher budget a fractionalized portion of access to a supercomputer cluster in each and every grant you need? You would need to hire new accountants just to handle this!
The indirect rate is basically covering the whole infrastructure of research at a university. In theory all could be put into direct costs but…again…we get to tremendously difficult accounting
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".
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And I don't know. Why is it taking people so long to wake up? Does he have to bash more at social security until people realize he's not trying to give you more money?
Do you think there are systemic problems in the executive branch of the US government? Wasteful, bloated structures? Agency overreach? Criminal lack of transparency? War-mongering security services? Revolving doors? What do you think about the fact that neither political party ever tries to solve these issues in substantial ways when it is in power? Don’t you find it odd that once someone is in power and is actually trying to do something about it they are attacked from all sides? Could it be that they are imperfect but they are not being attacked for the flaws in their approach/execution but rather because they are threatening structures the ruling class are exploiting?
Elon doesn't own a house and he drives a Tesla Model S (compare that to Sam Altman that has at least a $3 million Koenigsegg Regera supercar). His biggest extravagances are dumping/wasting/overpaying $45B for Twitter, his private jet for convenience, and 13 children.
I don't think Elon cares very much about money or the trappings like other multi-billionaires.
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.
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.
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
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadNot enough in the piggy bank to cover?
The existience of merit-based pricing is the big differentator versus public schools.
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.)
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.
A $20 billion endowment at a 5% ROI is $1 billion per year
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#Chesterton'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.
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.
Activism is not necessarily bad, but the current university environment, for some reason, seems to produce activists who are just unbelievably cringe and naïve.
> seems to produce activists who are just unbelievably cringe and naïve
I'd be curious to see some examples.
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.
> The idea that you can have an economically sound career talking about historical colonialism is a bit far-fetched
I don't believe all careers need to have economic soundness as their pursuit.
> the idea that there can be survival and satisfaction for all
I feel that it's wrong to dispossess people of their lands and resources just because you can. I think that perspective is underrepresented in our society. I think there is usefulness in teaching "the other side" of history. I also believe a wealthy society should invest in jobs that are not "economically sound".
> practical concerns are ignored and the topic is judged under a lens of morality and dogma
What do you mean "practical concerns"? What other lens is there than morality? I don't believe morality can be dogma, but interested to hear your view.
> dogmatic and removed from reality
Present reality? No room for moral correctness or the study of it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the thread of your comment is that everyone should have an "economically sustainable job". Why is that so important?
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.
How does studying colonialism lead to that conclusion? "Almost always"? Based on what survey?
> For less political examples, the "just stop using oil" protesters who keep defacing art.
The essence of protest is grabbing attention, disruption. This means inconveniencing the comfortable. I concede that I'm not sure the anti-fossil fuel protesters defacing famous art are earning sympathy for their cause.
Look at nonsense like this: https://www.dukeupress.edu/pollution-is-colonialism Or pretty much anything featuring the word "decolonization".
> The essence of protest is grabbing attention, disruption.
That's not the point. The point is that shitheads think that "just stopping oil" at the drop of a hat (by 2030) _is_ an option. That governments can just "sign a treaty" and stop all the fossil fuel extraction in less time than it takes to design and build an average HVDC power line.
I actually spoke with one of their members on WhatsApp, and they do believe that.
> The point is that shitheads think that "just stopping oil" at the drop of a hat (by 2030) _is_ an option
Dream big!
Basically, that everybody is just trying to displace poor natives with pollution.
> Dream big!
Yeah, that's the part that is cringe and naïve. Adult people kinda need learn to distinguish between dreams and reality. And actually work on improving the reality.
If by "everybody" you mean "Capital", then that's probably true, overall. It's how the system works.
> Yeah, that's the part that is cringe and naïve.
Pretty depressing that that is your take. Dream big, go in the right direction, get wins where you can. Better than aiming small and getting even less done. My take, anyway.
No, it's not.
> Pretty depressing that that is your take.
The "dream" part is not a problem. The violence to force that "dream" is.
It absolutely is. Capital is appropriative. Capital destroys the natural world for growth and imposes tyranny on the working classes. So, agree to disagree.
> The violence to force that "dream" is.
Violence? You mean protests? Or policy changes that you disagree with?
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).
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.
Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.
The academia model is deeply, profoundly broken.
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.
That's really depressing to be honest.
https://bsky.app/profile/luiszaman.bsky.social/post/3ljsazk6...
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.
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!
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39671991/#:~:text=Sixty%20st...
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/phrma-prepares-meet-trum...
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.
Actually the opposite, apparently Trump rolled back the Medicare drug cost caps so they're expecting profits to go up.
Also, the taxpayers are paying most of the cost of these PhDs.
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.
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.
I wonder how all the PhD’s that spent 10 years of their life and can’t find a job feel about that?
Disclaimer: I work in academia
- Brian Nosek's team examined 100 studies from high-ranking psychology journals in 2015, and could only reproduce 1/3 of them.
- Tim Errington did the same for cancer papers, and could not reproduce most of them either (he spent 8 years for this efforts btw)
- When you aggregate the reported p-value in scientific publications, it often reveals a "funny" distribution (Leggett 2013, Ookubo 2016)
They are not picking up rare misconducts by low-profile researchers. Fraudant research (from p-hacking to data rigging) is very common and a very serious issue.
The biggest thing though is just this idea that a non-reproducing paper is a failure of science. Journal articles are the beginnings of conversation in a discipline, not the last word on it.
You can see what I mean, though: people who probably couldn't name 3 important researchers in a field see people working on replications in those fields (Nosek, Errington) as celebrities. Because reported failures to replicate are newsworthy, and the day-by-day grind of incremental findings and negative results aren't.
"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...
It is a vicious feedback loop.
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.
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.
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.
This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of examples would have been
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed to be cut.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, do you really think Dartmouth is failing?
In fairness, a dollar in 2000 is worth $1.83 today, so that would (almost) account for the tuition increase.
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
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.
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.
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…
thanks for correcting me.
The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?
[1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673
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.
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.
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 RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
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.
yes, then you hire more professors, instead of hiring more staff! Funny how people don't seem to realize the obvious.
Given that my comments are downvoted like crazy, I've got the feeling that the US university including the Professors (tenured) are missing the forest from the trees regarding this issue.
I once asked a senior and prominent US Professor regarding their multi-million dollars grant for single project that can be easily spent on multi-project with similar or higher impact in other countries. His answer was they have to spent a lot on students, and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.
This is a good thing. It's expensive to support a Ph.D. student in America; it's a lot cheaper if you're in a country with lower cost of living. But as a researcher, you want to do research in an expensive area because it means you'll be around other smart people and lots of resources.
At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems.
Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.
> At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems
I admire your strange perspective on govt's money spending on research but let's be honest it's not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads. Nothing last forever the, wastages and corruptions (wealth and morals) are the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls (Egypt, Roman, Iranian Sassanids, Ottoman, British, Russian, Indian Moghul and Chinese Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, etc).
The rest of that sentence is not true though. Read this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43146300
How do you square that math with your assertion that "most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff"? You can at least admit you are expressing very strong opinions here for someone who doesn't have a firm grasp on the issues and no relevant experience working in this area. You're not aware of the fractal of complexity in this area, and you boiled it down into a heuristic which is smugly wrong.
> not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads.
You can't really articulate how these things are wasteful, so why are you concluding the overheads are unnecessary? See my sibling reply to the OP using the analogy of a skyscraper.
You are a person coming in the middle floor of the sky scraper saying "What are all these beams for? They seem unnecessary, let's get rid of them."
The engineers and architects who built the sky scraper told you those beams are holding up the roof.
You say "I know better, they are waste and unnecessary overhead!"
The engineers and architects point out towers of the past were much smaller. People expect towers today to be taller than ever before, and if you want taller buildings you need more and more support beams. Gutting the tower of support beams will cause it to collapse in short order.
We can talk about how to rearchitect the tower to use fewer beams overall, because that's a worthwhile discussion. But this approach of "slash all the waste!" is basically a game of Jenga, because you aren't sure what's actually waste and what's load bearing.
> the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls...
The main reason empires fall is because people who have no experience building them take over and drive them into the ground with their own hubris and ignorance.
Getting rid of administrators doesn't obviate the need to administrate. It has to be done, so we do it efficiently using shared resources, which brings economies of scale -- that efficiency Musk keeps talking about. What you're arguing for is increasing waste so everyone has less time to do critical work.
Here's an analogy:
To support the roof of a house, you need a few support beams. To support the roof of a skyscraper, you need many more support beams. You can't support the roof of a skyscraper with the number of support beams that support the roof of a house.
University research started as a house, but now it's a sky scraper. You're coming into the skyscraper saying there's too many beams, but you're judging by house standards. Maybe there are, but most of them were put there for good, well-considered reasons; as a layman you have no idea which are load bearing, so if you come knocking them down you endanger the whole tower. Which is a shame because it's gotten really really tall - taller than any other tower in history - so toppling it because you don't understand it would be a huge loss for everyone.
Here is a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
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.
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)
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.
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.
The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like blaming being three hours late on a single red light.
Could you give some hints as to what would constitute sufficient evidence to convince you?
> 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: ...
Is it that those were just bad examples and the actual bulk of the work is coming in from elsewhere? Or is it the case that these areas were already in place, but have since come to demand additional work that they didn't before (for what reason?)? &c
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.
But even if we grant that all the regulations are as crucial as chemistry lab safety, that doesn't explain the bloat:
regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
> there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies...
Sounds like the perfect time to start a disruptive university program! Where's Andrew Carnegie when you need him? Any relevant examples in this space?
https://dartreview.com/a-radically-different-model-of-americ...
In boasting it won't have "club-med amenities" you might expect it to be cheaper than typical schools, but the tuition is $30k, and the total cost to attend is almost $60k! You can go to state college for less than that and they have an order magnitude more classes to take. Not to mention climbing walls.
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.
Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.
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.
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.
Administrators are typically paid out of tuition. Penn is cutting uses in line with sources.
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?
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".
Easily. Every additional rule and regulation has a compliance cost, we've added far too many rules and regulations.
The shallowest of dismissals… not interesting/disappointing to encounter
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...
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.
It's an example of how you can take something that's true, put it out of context, and be completely wrong.
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.
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.
Regardless, I wasn’t using the term as a pejorative. What Islam, socialism, and liberal internationalism have in common is that they’re inherently cross-national, universal ideologies. That puts them in conflict with strong nationalism.
Tulsi is an american nationalist. For example she was okay with Assad, because she (correctly) felt Assad wasn’t a threat to america, was keeping a lid on Al Qaeda, and didn’t care about “human rights” in Syria. That view is just american nationalism. But it pisses off liberal internationalists and muslim socialists. Because their own outlook is universalizing, they assume her support for keeping Assad in place must indicate support for Assad’s policies and ideas.
If "we" means "the minority MAGA base", then sure. But Gabbard has never been popular. Her favorability is at -13.7 in the RCP average [1], was never above water even during the heat of the campaign, and is at about -20 now.
[1]: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/tulsi_gabbard...
That's just how political parties work! No single faction needs to carry a majority--but everyone votes together fully aware of what the platform is. And Trump kept his promises to his coalition partners and appointed both Tulsi and RFK Jr., and John Thune of all people busted his ass to get her confirmed. (Democrats should try this approach.)
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...
I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.
- talk about academic "administrators"
- lazily generalize
- be intellectually honest
The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole book of information!
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.
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.
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.
https://www.biospace.com/business/big-pharma-rushes-to-china...
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.
It's significant that U. Pitt. chose to stop admitting students rather than starting to lay off administrators.
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
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.
They also cover expenses of people, not specific projects, so the broader grant means that there's less of a need for common overhead across projects.
If you build a good lab which has versatile equipment to address many use-cases, the indirect costs will be high.
There were a few department-wide resources. Again, ultimately funded off someone (or a bunch of people's) grants
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").
Academia is not "private industry."
Two S&P 100s, one 500.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Huh? Thats exactly what they do. Parts + labor
(Hint: Nearly half of what you pay on the bill is their overhead.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ruin what?
I understand how grants and overhead rates work. It’s an embarrassment.
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.
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”.
Find something real to criticize and do it with actual facts.
Take the army for example, it's estimated 30~40% of the workforce is dedicated to logistics. This is equivalent to 42~66% overhead (in the same sense that overhead is discussed in the context of academia, as +% cost) if you were to count only combat personnel as the direct costs.
This is was universities do, they only count research expenses as the direct costs. Yet it's quite obvious a university can't run just on scientists.
This 59% overhead is equivalent to 37% of the expenses. So, unlike you, I'm positively surprised that 63% of expenses go directly to the core mission with only 37% "waste" (which is necessary to ensure the scientists can actually work, and work efficiently).
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.
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.
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.
The corporate equivalent would be a fixed price contract, which has overhead built in and far exceeds university rates.
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.)
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".
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?
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
These things lead to (very) low-quality threads, as seen below.
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
Moreover, anyone who paid the slightest attention to Trump's own words knows these cuts aren't paying off a deficit.
Imagine having tds so bad you support fraud etc because someone managed to put a "legal" label on it.
And I don't know. Why is it taking people so long to wake up? Does he have to bash more at social security until people realize he's not trying to give you more money?
I don't think Elon cares very much about money or the trappings like other multi-billionaires.
Apparently Twitter is much more profitable than before he bought it, despite revenue declining, so the banks/other investors are happy. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/02/x-in-2024-doubled-high...
Might still be an overpay but not as dramatic as people predicted.
Let's see what actually happens in 2025.
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