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."
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.
> "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?
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation.
Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.
> If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance
I have a friend who’s a fairly established scientist in his field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have exactly the effect you’re describing by requiring them to spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying to save money there will cost more than it’s worth because most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid for by NIH but they’d have to add accounting staff to document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that level of precision.
> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers.
In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.
>If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.
No doubt you need admin to help accommodate students learning needs but I've come around to thinking that they should change the parameters around testing and give every student the opportunity to use "accommodations" rather than making them prove their disability. Everyone is being granted the same degree, if a significant number of the students in your program need accommodations, like extra time on the exam, why not grant it to everybody who asks? Or better yet, just give everyone the time they need. It seems silly to me that you need to prove your need before you can get things like extra time - I think it should be opened up to everybody
> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation.
Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out of having to tighten up the finances.
I’m reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two prior. The administration went on and on about how there was absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public statements about how they would “need” to do ridiculous things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department, etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol building, and the state relented.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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%.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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…
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.
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.
The entire academic industry is in turmoil, the uncertainty on how bad things could get is probably the worst of it as Universities are having to plan for some pretty extreme outcomes even if unlikely.
For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
If the government decided that a cap was necessary it should be phased in to allow for insitutions to adjust the operational budgets gradually rather than this shock therapy that destroys lives and WASTES research money (as labs are potentially unable to staff their ongoing projects). A phased in approach would have nearly the same long-term budget implications.
Are there too many admin staff? Likely? Is this the right way to address that? Absolutely not.
For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. If you're on year 12 of an academic career, attempting to get your first job after your second (probably underpaid) postdoc and suddenly there are no jobs, you can't just wait it out. You are probably just done, and out of the market forever as you will lose your connections and have a gap in your CV which in this market is enough to disqualify you.
> For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
Why should the public believe that procedures that produced 59% overhead rates in the first place can be trusted to fix those overhead rates now? Sounds like a demand for an opportunity to derail needed reform by drowning it in red tape.
Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress.
You seem to be unfamiliar with how indirect rates work.
First some basic math: if a project is budgeted at a direct cost of $500,000, the indirect rate of 60% applies to the $500,000, i.e. $300,000.
The total grant is thus $500K + $300K = $800K. The $300K indirect costs are thus 37.5% of the total. This is an upper limit, as many direct costs such as equipment do not get indirect rates applied to them.
Second, these rates are painstakingly negotiated with the NSF and NIH. Yearly audits to ensure compliance must be passed if funding is to continue.
Third, these indirect cost go towards to items such as electricity, heat, building maintenance, safety training and compliance, chemical disposal, and last by not least laboratory support services such as histology labs, proteomics core, compute infrastructure, and some full time staff scientific staff. Only a relatively small portion goes to administration.
Finally, scientists generally would welcome review and reform of indirect costs to ensure they get the maximize benefit from the indirect rates. However, DOGE is not interested in reform. They are interested in raze and burn destruction.
If DOGE gets its way, it will knock the Unites States off its perch as the world’s technological leader.
> Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress.
2024 appropriations (and it showed in many years before then-- Public Law 118-47. Statutes at Large 138 (2024): 677.
SEC. 224. In making Federal financial assistance, the provisions
relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45, Code of Federal
Regulations, including with respect to the approval of deviations
from negotiated rates, shall continue to apply to the National
Institutes of Health to the same extent and in the same manner
as such provisions were applied in the third quarter of fiscal year
2017. None of the funds appropriated in this or prior Acts or
otherwise made available to the Department of Health and Human
Services or to any department or agency may be used to develop
or implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of the approval
of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond the proportional
effect of such approvals in such quarter.
At the *very* least you should be following the administrative rules act (requiring you to solicit 45 days for comments by effected parties) before making such a dramatic change in policy.
Courts absolutely love striking down EOs (of both Dems and Reps Admins) when they should have been following the administrative rules act.
The “overhead” isn’t even overhead as most people understand it.
But the real question is why does the general public think 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an appropriate level of “overhead” is 1000%.
In reality the people who actually know anything about how this is calculated, across the board and across the political spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all.
The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means other than taking a lay persons understanding that all overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that anything above 0% is bad.
1. Why should the public believe that they can fix it. Perhaps they can't, that's not entirely my point. My point is that if the government firmly believes that a change is necessary there are _simple_ ways of acheiving such a change without causing such chaos, waste, and hardship. Perhaps a phased in approach, or other mechanisms. Overnight shock therapy offers very little economic benefits while having very harsh personal and insitutional cost.
2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is actually negotiated directly between the institution and the NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but my read of this is that this is a change that would need to come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates through the mandated process.
If they can’t be trusted to fix the problem themselves with a 5 year phase in period they most definitely can’t be trusted to fix the problem immediately…so I don’t get your point.
I’m not convinced that the rate, per se, is actually a problem. What is a problem is the structure. If a contract said “you get $1M to do X and your university gets $590k, paid pro rata by time until completion”, fine, and one could quibble about the rates.
Instead, the grant is for $1.59M, and each individual charge to the grant pays an extra 59% to the university, conditionally, depending on the type of charge and the unbelievably messed up rules set by the university in concert with the government. Buying a $4000 laptop? Probably costs your grant balance $6360. Buying a $5000 laptop? Probably costs $5000 becuase it’s “capital equipment” or “major equipment” and is thus exempt. Guess who deliberately wastes their own and this also the university’s and government’s money by deliberately buying unnecessarily expensive stuff? It gets extra fun when the same research group has grants from different sources with different overhead rates: costs are allocated based on whether they are exempt from overhead!
And cost-plus disease is in full effect, too. If the research group doesn’t use all their awarded money because the finish the project early or below estimated cost, the university doesn’t get paid their share of the unspent money. This likely contributes to grantees never wanting to leave money unspent.
Of course, DOGE isn’t trying to fix any of the above.
I'm curious about where you would draw the line on government workforce/spending reductions. What specific cost-cutting measures would go too far and make you withdraw support from Trump/MAGA-related initiatives?
For example:
- Complete elimination of federal workforce (RAGE)
- Full military withdrawal from NATO/Europe
- Dramatic cuts to essential services (eg, Social Security)
What potential actions would make you feel the downsides outweigh any benefits? I'm curious what your threshold is for acceptable vs. unacceptable changes.
>For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job.
Honest question. If the job market is that competitive, why are we guiding people down this path that requires investing their entire young adult life? To me, it seems you've inadvertently made a case for cutting funding.
The big question is how should the government allocate the funding for basic research between career stages to maximize the benefit to the society.
If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating.
If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia, but it happens in a later career stage.
If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of their ability to contribute.
We aren't really. We are guiding people to get college degrees. However, undergraduate education and professional research are both done by the same institution. Further, that institution likes to have those professional and apprentice professional researchers work as teachers. The result of this is that undergraduates get a lot of exposure to professional Academia, so they naturally have a tendency to develop an interest in that profession. Given how small the profession actually is, even a small tendency here saturates the job market.
The people in charge don't want good action, they just want action and now. They want to damage these institutions. They have published and spoken extensively on this. That we keep letting their defenders change the narrative to pretend anything else and continue to give good faith WHEN THEY HAVE TOLD US THEY ARE NOT ACTING IN GOOD FAITH in insane to me.
BTW, interesting thinking on the action for action's sake governing style:
"The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this.
There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year.
This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.
Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run.
You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.
Spurious. Football coaches are not paid by overhead dollars. but mainly by alumni that like football wins.
No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they pay way more than a 50% “markup”. Unless they go to a research university: then they pay much less, and just like the federal government they are getting a fine deal.
Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are essentially mooching on the research institutions and the federal government.
Doesn’t the football stuff fund itself through tickets, licensing, etc? It seems hard to believe research overhead grants are going to the football coach.
> For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this
This comment encapsulates a big part of why people like Trump. They are sick of inaction in the name of careful consideration and nuance.
And I kinda understand it. By analogy, I've see this many times at different companies I've worked at. Whether it's a 20-year scripting engine or a hastily put together build system that barely works but the entire project depends on, whenever someone suggests to replace it you just get reason after reason for why you have to move slowly and consider all the fine details. Months and years pass and the core system never improves because an "old guard" shuts down every attempt to change it. Finally, someone new comes in and calls bullshit and says enough's enough, and rallies a team to rebuild it. After a difficult process, you finally have something that works better than the old system ever could.
Yeah, I understand the story doesn't always end well, but the analogy above helps me understand Trump's appeal.
Let’s ask ourselves what happens when the story doesn’t end well and it’s a service that government has been providing. The answer may be lives are lost, the economy breaks, enemies win victories, etc.
Move fast and break things is fine in a competitive marketplace. It’s asinine for the government to do.
The answer is to elect better politicians who can nominate better heads and those department heads can drive the necessary change without succumbing to the old guard.
The federal workforce, as a percentage of all jobs in the U.S. was 4% in the 50's, decreased steadily to 2% in 2000 and has held roughly steady since then. (The source is https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... second figure, and I'm taking total jobs as a proxy for the population that the workforce serves.)
The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency. Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project, managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well."
GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993, contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape, empowering employees, and enhancing customer service. Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-in-force or RIFs).
The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA, were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice vote.
I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in people's lives, because the changes were implemented over several years with much more warning.
I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are the stated goals, but that's a different issue.
Elon proved with Twitter that large corporations can survive drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts/layoffs (80%+) and still survive. If DOGE waited to do things less drastically, nothing would ever get done. The cuts that are going through are nothing as drastic as what Twitter endured (except USAID) so I guess he is willing to risk short term disruption for long-term spending cuts and that the organization will reorganize and restabilize pretty quickly.
> can survive drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts
I get ads on X that are just videos of animals being slowly shot multiple times to death. There's also some for tools to slim jim car locks. None of the mainstream/normal accounts I used to follow (shout out SwiftOnSecurity) are there, and instead it's a hotbed of crypto scams and deranged vitriol. The site is still running, but is a shell of its former self, making so little money that Elon is trying to sue people (and now, abusing US govt payment systems) to force them to pay him for advertising.
I can see how if you think that's a success, that you would think similar actions with regard to the US government are successful. The necessary cuts he's making are not necessary, and I'm guessing you aren't impacted, so, given the general lack of theory of mind towards others, I'm not surprised you think they're ok. The rest of us out there who understand the idea of human suffering are concerned for our fellow citizens facing arbitrary and unnecessary pain as the result of a capricious court eunach's drug influenced decisions before the "restabilization" that will never happen.
This is false. Twitter is not the US government. And Twitter is certainly not the US scientific establishment which is dispersed broadly across the nation and which has taken decades to build up. Many research universities will shutter their research departments permanently if these overnight changes are implemented. This is especially true in smaller states like Alabama, which is why Republican Katie Britt is sounding the alarm. Moreover, many people will leave the field permanently.
Moreover, scientific R&D is a strange place to slash if cost savings are the goal. Medicare and Medicaid comprise over 50 times the NIH and NSF combined budget of approximately $50B. If we want to save costs, research into diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease is the way to go. Alzheimer’s currently costs the nation $412B per year [1], eight times the NIH annual budget. Therapies which delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease by 20 years would nearly eliminate this cost.
Let’s be clear: DOGE is led by a self described autist who has little idea how government and broader society functions. The damage he will do if left unchecked is vast.
Twitter’s valuation has plummeted since Elon’s purchase.
And to the extent Twitter is still limping along it’s because Twitter due to its very nature benefits immensely from the stickiness of social networks.
For example, Facebook is almost completely junk. It hasn’t improved or been relevant in a long time. And yet it survives and makes tons of money simply because people don’t want to rebuild their networks.
There are many other examples where even minor cuts have been devastating. The classic example is of course GE, the ultimate example of cutting a company to the bone, which worked for a decade or so, but set the company up to essentially cease to exist after.
Then you have Boeing, a company in an industry with less competition than probably any other in the world and it’s struggling to make money because of this thinking.
This equivalence between a company that provides one app that, if it were to disappear, would hurt no one, and a government that has thousands of functions, many of which are life-and-death in both the short and long run, is just ridiculous.
Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country is far different than a government institution.
The comparison here isn’t encouraging and makes no sense.
Great euphemism for “In one month, we’re going to kill tens of millions by withholding food/medical care and permanently destroy institutions that took a century to build”.
This is the most infuriating part of this. Musk acted like a moron and overpaid for twitter. Then cash constrained, he rapidly cut things to save money. Now twitter is completely diminished in its reach, at an all time brand low, and at real risk from competitors.
Meanwhile, the companies Musk built that actually have dominated their space are big idea innovators like Tesla and SpaceX. Musk wasn’t successful because he’s a good penny pincher, he was successful by burning cash on big ideas and talented people.
But somehow we decided its case 1 that we’ll apply to the government.
It seems Twitter is in a death spiral. That is the model to apply to scientific research and academia that has powered Americas dominance for the past 100 years?
Sure, if we detonate all nukes, I imagine 20% of humanity will survive. "We" won't die out that easily. Me and you are probably dead, though. Statistically speaking.
Elon proved with Twitter that he doesn't know what he is doing. Huge loss, zero lessons. If US ends up being downsized financially and ethically the way Twitter has, that will also provide zero lessons for Musk.
Having spoken with people who worked there, Twitter built a system for which the technical its mostly ran without much help. So it’s not surprising that you can still tweet with most of the staff gone.
> Twitter that large corporations can survive drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts/layoffs (80%+) and still survive.
US Government is not Twitter, but yeah, I can see some element of it. Now I suddenly remember, the various comments here convinced me that X/Twitter will be dead in just two months. Yet, it's still around. Not that I care to make account there or bother looking at it, but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
OP here: I think the reason for reducing Ph.D. admissions is very simple and should be understandable to anyone who has ever been responsible for making payroll. We (at universities) have great uncertainty about future "revenue" (grants) with even funding for ongoing contracts/ grants not being guaranteed to come in next fiscal year. So we need to reduce expenses which are placed on the grants, the largest amount of which is paying for our trainees. The vast majority of universities in the US do not have extremely large endowments, and at least at the school I work at, the (very modest) endowment amounts that can be used for ongoing expenses already are.
I, as a PI, am not directly admitting anyone into my group this year to ensure I have enough funding to pay existing group members. We're hunkering down and making sure those we have now will be funded through the rest of their Ph.D. While this article is talking about program-level decisions, there is a bottom-up aspect as well - at my program and many others, we (faculty) directly admit students into our group and are often responsible for their salaries from day one. Many faculty are, at an individual level, making the same decision I am, to reduce or eliminate any admissions offers this year.
Edit: For reference, I am not at UPenn, but at a "typical" state school engineering program.
In theory it is less at risk, but in practice there may be fewer TAships due to general budget shortfalls and also more students competing for those spots.
I am on fellowship, but have already been warned where I am that TAships might be cut. New rules have been put in place for maximum number of years one can teach, whereas it used to be a requirement that we TA a certain amount of time at all because of the high need (not sure if it is, maybe this hasn't been removed, just to emphasize that this is despite a need for TAs).
It's a different budgetary item. Unlike a household budget where people are given a general income and then asked to decide to spend it on housing, gas, groceries, etc. It's far more like SNAP, where the money given to you is legally bound to very specific things-- you can buy baby food but not diapers for your baby.
Cutting admin people might mean more paperwork for professors and researches, which can lead to less grants and funding because you can’t do science while doing paperwork. Not that easy to be efficient without losing productivity.
All: some of the comments in this thread are about the University of Pittsburgh, not Penn, because there were two Pennsylvanian-university-pauses-admissions-due-to-funding-cuts threads duelling on the front page and we merged the Pittsburgh one hither. Sorry to any Pittsburghers; it was purely because this thread was posted earlier.
Hosting a large number of top universities which conduct research attracts the best and brightest minds from around the world, many of whom stay in the US after doing their PhD, and is a significant factor in what makes the US the biggest economy in the world.
Even if you subscribe to an America First policy, tearing down university research labs (which is the knock-on effect of cuts at the NIH, NSF, etc.) is one of the worst things you could do.
Want to actually cut gov spending? Look no further than the military budget (which the GOP Congress is proposing to _increase_, not decrease).
(That being said, yes, there is waste at universities. I'm all for some reform, but this is not reform, it's destruction.)
Defense, social security, Medicaid should all have high scrutiny, but that would be unpopular so neither party will touch those; thus, serious deficit reduction won't happen because doing so requires making unpopular decisions
Via Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is that this is a foreign agent demolishing US democracy from within.
It makes not an iota of difference whether somebody "was chosen by the people" (the Felon), or not (the Husk).
We can all plainly see what's going on, and there isn't any need to steelman it, or contort ourselves to deduce what pretzel logic might cause Felon/Husk to choose these particular actions.
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.
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.
> If institutions don't push back together, they will cease to exist in the form they are now. I don't know how to say this more clearly.
And my heavens yes. This is the government threatening to end funding for universities. This movie here is no where anywhere near enough. This is an attempt to end the entire higher education system.
Does it need help & reform? Yes. But simply destroying education outright serves no good. This is a destruction of civilization by radical extremists. Universities need to be working together to defend against this mortal threat to the existence of higher education.
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
Readit News
"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...
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.
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)
Here is a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
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.
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.
The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?
[1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673
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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.
Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.
I have a friend who’s a fairly established scientist in his field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have exactly the effect you’re describing by requiring them to spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying to save money there will cost more than it’s worth because most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid for by NIH but they’d have to add accounting staff to document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that level of precision.
In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.
No doubt you need admin to help accommodate students learning needs but I've come around to thinking that they should change the parameters around testing and give every student the opportunity to use "accommodations" rather than making them prove their disability. Everyone is being granted the same degree, if a significant number of the students in your program need accommodations, like extra time on the exam, why not grant it to everybody who asks? Or better yet, just give everyone the time they need. It seems silly to me that you need to prove your need before you can get things like extra time - I think it should be opened up to everybody
Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out of having to tighten up the finances.
I’m reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two prior. The administration went on and on about how there was absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public statements about how they would “need” to do ridiculous things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department, etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol building, and the state relented.
Dead Comment
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
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 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.
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...
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.
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...
It is a vicious feedback loop.
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.
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.
It's an example of how you can take something that's true, put it out of context, and be completely wrong.
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.
I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.
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?
- talk about academic "administrators"
- lazily generalize
- be intellectually honest
The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole book of information!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed to be cut.
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.
For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
If the government decided that a cap was necessary it should be phased in to allow for insitutions to adjust the operational budgets gradually rather than this shock therapy that destroys lives and WASTES research money (as labs are potentially unable to staff their ongoing projects). A phased in approach would have nearly the same long-term budget implications.
Are there too many admin staff? Likely? Is this the right way to address that? Absolutely not.
For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. If you're on year 12 of an academic career, attempting to get your first job after your second (probably underpaid) postdoc and suddenly there are no jobs, you can't just wait it out. You are probably just done, and out of the market forever as you will lose your connections and have a gap in your CV which in this market is enough to disqualify you.
Why should the public believe that procedures that produced 59% overhead rates in the first place can be trusted to fix those overhead rates now? Sounds like a demand for an opportunity to derail needed reform by drowning it in red tape.
Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress.
First some basic math: if a project is budgeted at a direct cost of $500,000, the indirect rate of 60% applies to the $500,000, i.e. $300,000.
The total grant is thus $500K + $300K = $800K. The $300K indirect costs are thus 37.5% of the total. This is an upper limit, as many direct costs such as equipment do not get indirect rates applied to them.
Second, these rates are painstakingly negotiated with the NSF and NIH. Yearly audits to ensure compliance must be passed if funding is to continue.
Third, these indirect cost go towards to items such as electricity, heat, building maintenance, safety training and compliance, chemical disposal, and last by not least laboratory support services such as histology labs, proteomics core, compute infrastructure, and some full time staff scientific staff. Only a relatively small portion goes to administration.
Finally, scientists generally would welcome review and reform of indirect costs to ensure they get the maximize benefit from the indirect rates. However, DOGE is not interested in reform. They are interested in raze and burn destruction.
If DOGE gets its way, it will knock the Unites States off its perch as the world’s technological leader.
2024 appropriations (and it showed in many years before then-- Public Law 118-47. Statutes at Large 138 (2024): 677.
SEC. 224. In making Federal financial assistance, the provisions relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, including with respect to the approval of deviations from negotiated rates, shall continue to apply to the National Institutes of Health to the same extent and in the same manner as such provisions were applied in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. None of the funds appropriated in this or prior Acts or otherwise made available to the Department of Health and Human Services or to any department or agency may be used to develop or implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of the approval of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond the proportional effect of such approvals in such quarter.
At the *very* least you should be following the administrative rules act (requiring you to solicit 45 days for comments by effected parties) before making such a dramatic change in policy.
Courts absolutely love striking down EOs (of both Dems and Reps Admins) when they should have been following the administrative rules act.
But the real question is why does the general public think 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an appropriate level of “overhead” is 1000%.
In reality the people who actually know anything about how this is calculated, across the board and across the political spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all.
The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means other than taking a lay persons understanding that all overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that anything above 0% is bad.
2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is actually negotiated directly between the institution and the NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but my read of this is that this is a change that would need to come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates through the mandated process.
[1]: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-result...
Besides the president screwing with the budget agreed upon by Congress that kicked all this off?
Instead, the grant is for $1.59M, and each individual charge to the grant pays an extra 59% to the university, conditionally, depending on the type of charge and the unbelievably messed up rules set by the university in concert with the government. Buying a $4000 laptop? Probably costs your grant balance $6360. Buying a $5000 laptop? Probably costs $5000 becuase it’s “capital equipment” or “major equipment” and is thus exempt. Guess who deliberately wastes their own and this also the university’s and government’s money by deliberately buying unnecessarily expensive stuff? It gets extra fun when the same research group has grants from different sources with different overhead rates: costs are allocated based on whether they are exempt from overhead!
And cost-plus disease is in full effect, too. If the research group doesn’t use all their awarded money because the finish the project early or below estimated cost, the university doesn’t get paid their share of the unspent money. This likely contributes to grantees never wanting to leave money unspent.
Of course, DOGE isn’t trying to fix any of the above.
For example:
- Complete elimination of federal workforce (RAGE)
- Full military withdrawal from NATO/Europe
- Dramatic cuts to essential services (eg, Social Security)
What potential actions would make you feel the downsides outweigh any benefits? I'm curious what your threshold is for acceptable vs. unacceptable changes.
Honest question. If the job market is that competitive, why are we guiding people down this path that requires investing their entire young adult life? To me, it seems you've inadvertently made a case for cutting funding.
If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating.
If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia, but it happens in a later career stage.
If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of their ability to contribute.
BTW, interesting thinking on the action for action's sake governing style:
"The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...
If that action also hurts liberals working at traditionally liberal aligned institutions, all the better in their minds.
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There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year.
This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.
You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.
No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they pay way more than a 50% “markup”. Unless they go to a research university: then they pay much less, and just like the federal government they are getting a fine deal.
Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are essentially mooching on the research institutions and the federal government.
In academia*
This comment encapsulates a big part of why people like Trump. They are sick of inaction in the name of careful consideration and nuance.
And I kinda understand it. By analogy, I've see this many times at different companies I've worked at. Whether it's a 20-year scripting engine or a hastily put together build system that barely works but the entire project depends on, whenever someone suggests to replace it you just get reason after reason for why you have to move slowly and consider all the fine details. Months and years pass and the core system never improves because an "old guard" shuts down every attempt to change it. Finally, someone new comes in and calls bullshit and says enough's enough, and rallies a team to rebuild it. After a difficult process, you finally have something that works better than the old system ever could.
Yeah, I understand the story doesn't always end well, but the analogy above helps me understand Trump's appeal.
Move fast and break things is fine in a competitive marketplace. It’s asinine for the government to do.
The answer is to elect better politicians who can nominate better heads and those department heads can drive the necessary change without succumbing to the old guard.
This NEVER works. It just doesn't.
Bureaucracies are self perpetuating, it's just their nature. Each person at the bureaucracy is 100% certain they are essential.
The only way to shrink them is to force them.
The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency. Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project, managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well."
GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993, contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape, empowering employees, and enhancing customer service. Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-in-force or RIFs).
Source: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...):
The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA, were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice vote.
I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in people's lives, because the changes were implemented over several years with much more warning.
I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are the stated goals, but that's a different issue.
I get ads on X that are just videos of animals being slowly shot multiple times to death. There's also some for tools to slim jim car locks. None of the mainstream/normal accounts I used to follow (shout out SwiftOnSecurity) are there, and instead it's a hotbed of crypto scams and deranged vitriol. The site is still running, but is a shell of its former self, making so little money that Elon is trying to sue people (and now, abusing US govt payment systems) to force them to pay him for advertising.
I can see how if you think that's a success, that you would think similar actions with regard to the US government are successful. The necessary cuts he's making are not necessary, and I'm guessing you aren't impacted, so, given the general lack of theory of mind towards others, I'm not surprised you think they're ok. The rest of us out there who understand the idea of human suffering are concerned for our fellow citizens facing arbitrary and unnecessary pain as the result of a capricious court eunach's drug influenced decisions before the "restabilization" that will never happen.
Moreover, scientific R&D is a strange place to slash if cost savings are the goal. Medicare and Medicaid comprise over 50 times the NIH and NSF combined budget of approximately $50B. If we want to save costs, research into diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease is the way to go. Alzheimer’s currently costs the nation $412B per year [1], eight times the NIH annual budget. Therapies which delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease by 20 years would nearly eliminate this cost.
Let’s be clear: DOGE is led by a self described autist who has little idea how government and broader society functions. The damage he will do if left unchecked is vast.
[1] https://nchstats.com/alzheimers-disease-in-the-us/
And to the extent Twitter is still limping along it’s because Twitter due to its very nature benefits immensely from the stickiness of social networks.
For example, Facebook is almost completely junk. It hasn’t improved or been relevant in a long time. And yet it survives and makes tons of money simply because people don’t want to rebuild their networks.
There are many other examples where even minor cuts have been devastating. The classic example is of course GE, the ultimate example of cutting a company to the bone, which worked for a decade or so, but set the company up to essentially cease to exist after.
Then you have Boeing, a company in an industry with less competition than probably any other in the world and it’s struggling to make money because of this thinking.
Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country is far different than a government institution.
The comparison here isn’t encouraging and makes no sense.
Great euphemism for “In one month, we’re going to kill tens of millions by withholding food/medical care and permanently destroy institutions that took a century to build”.
I’m going to use that phrase.
Meanwhile, the companies Musk built that actually have dominated their space are big idea innovators like Tesla and SpaceX. Musk wasn’t successful because he’s a good penny pincher, he was successful by burning cash on big ideas and talented people.
But somehow we decided its case 1 that we’ll apply to the government.
Sure, if we detonate all nukes, I imagine 20% of humanity will survive. "We" won't die out that easily. Me and you are probably dead, though. Statistically speaking.
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[0]: <https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...>
US Government is not Twitter, but yeah, I can see some element of it. Now I suddenly remember, the various comments here convinced me that X/Twitter will be dead in just two months. Yet, it's still around. Not that I care to make account there or bother looking at it, but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
I, as a PI, am not directly admitting anyone into my group this year to ensure I have enough funding to pay existing group members. We're hunkering down and making sure those we have now will be funded through the rest of their Ph.D. While this article is talking about program-level decisions, there is a bottom-up aspect as well - at my program and many others, we (faculty) directly admit students into our group and are often responsible for their salaries from day one. Many faculty are, at an individual level, making the same decision I am, to reduce or eliminate any admissions offers this year.
Edit: For reference, I am not at UPenn, but at a "typical" state school engineering program.
if they do know that, they don’t realize how tightly each term’s stipend is tied to a specific funding source.
* (It was this one: U. of Pittsburgh pauses Ph.D. admissions amid research funding uncertainty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43145483.)
Even if you subscribe to an America First policy, tearing down university research labs (which is the knock-on effect of cuts at the NIH, NSF, etc.) is one of the worst things you could do.
Want to actually cut gov spending? Look no further than the military budget (which the GOP Congress is proposing to _increase_, not decrease).
(That being said, yes, there is waste at universities. I'm all for some reform, but this is not reform, it's destruction.)
social security and medicaid, absolutely not (scrutiny, fine; cuts, no)
It makes not an iota of difference whether somebody "was chosen by the people" (the Felon), or not (the Husk).
We can all plainly see what's going on, and there isn't any need to steelman it, or contort ourselves to deduce what pretzel logic might cause Felon/Husk to choose these particular actions.
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> If institutions don't push back together, they will cease to exist in the form they are now. I don't know how to say this more clearly.
And my heavens yes. This is the government threatening to end funding for universities. This movie here is no where anywhere near enough. This is an attempt to end the entire higher education system.
Does it need help & reform? Yes. But simply destroying education outright serves no good. This is a destruction of civilization by radical extremists. Universities need to be working together to defend against this mortal threat to the existence of higher education.
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