1. If you want to have some perspective on what indirect costs actually cover I'd recommend this video (published 2 years ago) by AAU, AAMC, and other partner associations. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
2. The courts have temporarily blocked the indirect cuts to existing grants, but the Trump administration is using other backdoor means to further withhold funding. See this article in Nature -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
The long and the short of it, is that NIH is not reviewing grants or making awards at anywhere near "normal". Study sections are being cancelled at the last minute without any certainty about when they will be held. Investigators with existing multi-year grants don't know what to expect at renewal time. Factor in the layoffs at NIH and NSF as well.
The administration has also said they intend to cut NSF budgets from $9B to about $3B dollars.
Under these circumstances it would be irresponsible for universities to admit normal numbers of graduate students.
Even if tomorrow the Trump administration said "Whoops, we messed up" and reversed all executive orders, I'd estimate they've cost the US research enterprise something like 12-18 months of productivity. And we're only 1 month into Trump 2.0.
Here's some other knock on effects I anticipate we'll see in the next 3-6 months:
1. Opportunities for undergrad research will be greatly reduced. If you have a college age kid who's interested in engaging in research of any kind (sciences, humanities, engineering) they will have many fewer opportunities and those opening that exist will be even more competitive to get into.
2. Universities will cut way back on lab renovations, new facilities, and delay upkeep. Few people understand just how many tradespeople work on a university campus every day. This includes both facilities staff but also many outside contractors. This will have a major impact on blue collar jobs.
3. IT companies, biotechs, and scientific suppliers for whom universities are key clients are going to be hit hard. Expect layoffs and small companies to close up shop in this sector as the effects of research cuts percolate through the system.
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.
Sure, it's "only ~2%", but surely I don't need to tell you how the money, meant to _persist in perpetuity_, a _237_ year old institution has accumulated to educate _30,000_ students is a different measure than an annual income? - a drop large enough to, as I pointed out above, no longer make it a viable sum of money in perpetuity?
Here I'm imagining you, sitting on let's say, $500,000 and thinking it's no problem if you spend _an extra_ $10,000 more every year, it's only 2%, and then wondering after a while where all the money to invest went, but where your money went entirely. I think rather than comment on a university's finances, better make sure yours are in order first because I suspect there's a troubling fundamental lack of financial literacy on display here that's going to come back to haunt you at some point.
https://www.biospace.com/business/big-pharma-rushes-to-china...
Come on, are we supposed to discuss the finance of university administration as if this is some well-thought-out proposal to make America's universities be better and more efficient? Don't give in to the gaslighting. The barbarians have breached the gate and we're arguing whether torching down the main street would help us with next city council meeting.
But that's not what they're doing. They're dismantling the executive branch of the federal government because they want less regulation for all their corporate buddies, and they want to privatize lots of government functions to, again, benefit all their corporate buddies.
And on top of that, they want to cut taxes (for corporations and the wealthy, mainly) at a level that will reduce tax revenue beyond the spending cuts they want to make. So they won't be balancing the budget, or reducing the deficit. We'll still have a federal government that borrows more and more money every year, but provides less and less to the people of the country.
That's it. There's no noble plan here.
I think beneath Musk's buffoonery there is a political pivot happening. Part of me wonders if he is a heel to make Trump seem more normal.
The current state of academia paper mills, unreproducible research and rampant fraud are a direct result of the spigot of money and lack of accountability.
Higher education is in for a rude awakening under the Trump administration. All I can say is it’s a shame Doge can’t do layoffs and clean house at some of these universities. Do away with tenure and get rid of the dead weight!
Innovation isn't found by making faster horses, you can't treat tomorrows tech as you would yesterdays line budget.
These actions by the government are fucking over people who have dedicated years of their lives to pursue advanced research degrees and academic careers.
We've seen how this model plays out. One by one, big pharma shut down its antibiotics division, precisely when we most need to antibiotics to be developed. Instead they target low cost, high reward directions, such as figuring out how to put Ozempic into a pill (instead of a shot).
What if we screw all our allies, make them scared for their safety so that they start building their own weapons, dismantle completely the government apparatus by assigning clowns to lead it, gut the income by incapacitating IRS and bringing down all the institutions we built as a nation (universities, congress, courts etc).
I am trying to avoid conspiracies, but how would an enemy from within would look like, if not like this? The only thing not done yet is to point our own ICBMs at us.
It really does not seem like they paused all PhD admissions as an honest way to optimize their money. It seems like they are using their institutional power to protest Trump's policies, to create a sad state of academic research so that Trump is blamed for it until he reverts his policies.
I feel sad for the rejected PhD students that were caught in the crossfire of Pitt's protest.
[1] https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pitt-s-endowment-2022-23
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 having tds so bad you support fraud etc because someone managed to put a "legal" label on it.
Moreover, anyone who paid the slightest attention to Trump's own words knows these cuts aren't paying off a deficit.
Another example of the stupidity of Trump/Musk's actions.
These things lead to (very) low-quality threads, as seen below.
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
I find people who feel glee at the suffering of these families disturbing.
This country would literally fall apart within the week and people will beg them to return.
also, nitpick:
>aren’t programmers with a LinkedIn inbox full of recruiters to draw on.
It's not 2022 anymore. Those LinkedIn inboxes are empty for me. This market sucks.
A full on government walkout for a day would fix a ton. They won't care, but even their voter base wouldn't ignore the late payments, cancelled appointments, and overall confusion a day would do.
Without the production of knowledge, it will soon prove impossible to levy objective evidence against the despicable lies of the Trump administration.
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.
Yes. That's the grand purpose. To do exactly that so they can exist in perpetuity.
Do you also go around pointing at hearts as if it's all some grand revelation that that's the main reason we're all here, making it also very clear that you don't mean it in the loving, metaphorical sense, but simply referring to its function of pumping blood about?
Sure, if you want to reduce a university down to simply existing for money's sake, then go ahead, but then you might as well say that about literally everything. Horrifyingly cynical. Is our grand purpose, in your eyes, the accumulation of money as well, simply because we want to live with a roof over our heads that costs money?
No it doesn't apply to literally everything. We are talking about the Universities that are completely pausing admittance to their graduate programs while sitting on billions or tens of billions of dollars.
It is deeply twisted and perverted that these schools are prioritizing the size of their endowments over taking on any new graduate students.
So pausing it now is more likely to make it possible in perpetuity. Now, if you don’t care about future students, if you don’t care about this institution existing in perpetuity, please just say so. Say that you couldn’t give a rat’s arse about our descendants and all that we’ve been able to keep alive to hundreds of years. A perfectly reasonable argument, I suppose, if you think a meteorite is about to hit us. Given how firm you are in your conviction, at least tell us where and when it’ll hurt us.
Let’s say a PhD student costs them $100k, and that they have a pile of $10 billion. All just hypothetical order of magnitude numbers. They are one of the biggest universities in a state of 13 million people. Now exactly how do you make that pile last for another 284 years if you have much less money you’re putting into that pile? Either dazzle us with your financial genius right now, or just admit “you don’t”.
Can you maybe see past a decade and see how it might be even more twisted and perverted if they lose the endowment entirely?
University exist for over 200 years. 200 years very long time. University want to exist 200 years from now.
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.
"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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
* (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.
> 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
I would love to have fewer vice presidents, etc., people who really are administrators / middle managers, on our campuses. But there really aren't as many of these positions as people seem to think. Articles like [0] (cited in one of the othe comments) seem to lump everyone who is not faculty or student an "administrator." Most such people are really staff; on the research side they help with accounting, compliance, etc. (On the student-facing side there's also a lot of staff -- students & families expect a lot more from universities now, everything from housing to fancy gyms to on-campus healthcare, and more. All that needs staff to run.) To confuse things more, some faculty (say at med schools) don't teach all that much, and some "administrators" do pitch in and teach from time to time.
Again, I don't disagree we can do better, but I also think any discussion of higher ed costs and inefficiencies really should start with the reality of what universities do.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
> The professor added that the University “pulled the rug out” from many faculty members, some of whom had already offered acceptances to students they had thought were admitted — only to now face the possibility of having to cut those students from the program.
If students were informed they were accepted, by anyone at the university (even verbally by a professor), then it's time for the university to cover this (regardless of which budgets it was supposed to come out of), even if it has to draw down the endowment.
Unless the university is willing to ruin a bunch of students' lives in brinksmanship, and then deal with the well-deserved lawsuits.
Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?
Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.
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.
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.
I certainly don't think shutting down American research and having a country where there are no new graduate students is a really sane scenario. I think some research is definitely inexplicable when it comes to being taxpayer-funded, and some labs are bloated and can run a tighter ship. But everyone is basically paying the price because of a small minority of labs who are operating as though they aren't receiving taxpayer money, and are conducting research that is truly pointless. Of course those labs exist, but they are a small group of labs... Clearly no one wants to spend the time to look at all the grants and projects individually to find the bloat. The strange part is that doing this sort of mass-culling actually just invigorates many to double-down on what they are doing if it is somewhat politically unsavory right now. So it really isn't achieving much other than recruiting an opposition to republican power, which is probably worth more to prevent than the money that could be saved.
I think it's realistic to assume that the federal government is going to just wholesale cut a lot of the science funding, because compared to other nations, America actually funds a whole lot of science, and from what I can tell, that's much less true in other countries. The effects of that might be a bit abstracted from this event, these cuts might just result in less scientific innovation, which could cost billions of dollars added up over time easily. But, if this is just a sort of shock-and-awe thing, and then money starts becoming available again and the result is that "DEI" practices are expunged from criteria, then maybe the takeaway is just that labs just act with a lot more caution. From what I see, most labs already operate under large amounts of caution because the grant system is tricky enough.
The academia model is deeply, profoundly broken.
So exactly what they introduced, except not applying to current grants?
> forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc.
Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?
only for a select few; most are a loss
I think there’s some truth to that criticism. I would prefer to see the institutions reformed democratically than destroyed by fiat. I contend that sacrificing rule of law is deeply counterproductive. But the core complaint that things aren’t working? There’s some truth to it.
> Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad [1]
If Penn suffers from this same bloat, maybe they should be cutting adminstrators. I see no mention of such cuts in this article.
[1] https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-university-employs-nearly...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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?
if they do know that, they don’t realize how tightly each term’s stipend is tied to a specific funding source.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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?
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.
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).
That's really depressing to be honest.
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.
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://bsky.app/profile/luiszaman.bsky.social/post/3ljsazk6...
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.
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.
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.
It's significant that U. Pitt. chose to stop admitting students rather than starting to lay off administrators.
If you build a good lab which has versatile equipment to address many use-cases, the indirect costs will be high.
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.
Two S&P 100s, one 500.
Academia is not "private industry."
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
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.
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.
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.
Typically, universities have a pretty hard and clear line between research funds and teaching funds. Teaching funds come from tuition, are under the purview of someone like a provost, and are distributed to the colleges. The colleges then pay tenure track/tenured faculty, associate faculty (teaching), and TAs with these funds. Typically, these TAs get a waiver for their studies -that also comes out of teaching funds.
Research funds come from granting agencies such as NIH, NSF, DoD, DoE, and to a much lesser degree, private partnerships. These funds go directly to the tenure track, or occasionally research-only faculty to pay for their research program. These funds can also be used for RAs (pay graduate students full time so they don't need to teach). TA and RA wages are usually the same, but graduate students working as a TA won't get as much done.
Usually a position such as Vice President of Research exists. That office takes IDCs (15-80% depending on the university negotiation with the granting agency). Both IDC funds (often called F&A funds) and teaching funds pay money to the colleges for some percentage of things like building costs, staff (janitors, safety folks, admin) etc. There are usually intense negotiations between the office of the provost, and office of research, over exactly who must contribute which funds.
Oftentimes, a successful and wise research office will realize that the more graduate students they have doing unencumbered research, the more federal grants they can bring in. So many research offices will sponsor RAs per department/college out of F&A funds. Additionally, they will often pay the tuition waiver to the graduate school out of F&A funds. This can lead to not enough TAs to teach classes though, so again, this is usually negotiated between the teaching and research sides.
Typically, teaching brings in most of the money at a university (outside of the biggest research universities), but teaching revenue is much more stable, so those funds are spoken for immediately, usually on fixed costs and union jobs.
Research funds are lower, and because they are brevet quite guaranteed, many folks that are paid from research funds are on contracts that must be renewed every fiscal year, etc.
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.
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…
Ruin what?
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.
> 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.
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.
I asked ChatGPT 4o for other examples, and it generated a list of 40. You can do that for yourself, if you're interested.
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.
Completing a PhD typically takes 5-7 years in the US. In my public university, the nominal tuition for that time would be $100-150k for in-state students and $180-250k for others. Then add living costs on top of that. A PhD increases expected lifetime earnings over bachelor's, but not in all fields and definitely not enough to justify such spending.
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.
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.
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.
Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big brands don't literally die often; someone will want to try and play around with it.
>but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
Twitter is technically stable in terms of servers. They did a good job doubling up by 1) minimizing the load needed by making users sign in to see more than a literal permalink (you can't even see comments anymore) while 2) being a bait to get more new accounts to report on engagement. Not that that matters now since Twitter is no longer publicly traded.
It's the everything else around it that caused it to plummet.
I can attack my own interpretation, that seems fair, doesn't it? You can have your own interpretation, and then attack it, (or not attack it) later.
> Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big brands don't literally die often
I had no idea! That's cool. I never really used either one that much. I do know yahoo is still around. One difference is I periodically I see links to X/Twitter. I never see people link to digg or myspace. But sounds like you have a different perspective, which is also cool.
> dismiss the truth because it's not literally dead?
Just to be clear, the truth for me is my impression from reading HN about 2022 or so. Namely from comments like these:
> (Nov 18, 2022) I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.
I agreed to them at the time. So not sure how "truth" and "dismissing" applies; it's really just an impression. Am I allowed to dismiss my own impression? Seems odd to object to that...
Your comment just gave some vibes that because Twitter didn't literally die 2 years ago (as you and others predicted) that it seems that introspection was completely proven wrong, "Yet, it's still around". I just simply wanted to assert that being nearly dead doesn't exactly inspire confidence, even though the doctor was technically disproven by his statement of "you'll be dead in 6 months".
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.
Grants paying for PhD students- sure, those cannot be shifted to pay for admin; that makes sense.
Are administrators line items in the state budget? Then this would make more sense.
To continue a SNAP example: it makes total sense that when you have less food money, you buy less food. You may proceed to sell your used video game consoles later but the very first thing you do is reduce your spending on food.
However, universities do research, and need research infrastructure. This includes administrators, safety people, compliance people, core research facilities, etc. Those are usually on what is called "soft money" - funds from IDCs. Those folks can be eliminated, of course, but there are typically very few of them and they are serving the most essential roles. If you eliminate them, you may need to eliminate your research program altogether. The NIH requires you to meet safety standards, the EPA requires specific waste disposal, etc. The folks that ensure that compliance generally are paid for by IDC funding.
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.)
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 negotiated rates must be accepted by all Federal awarding agencies. An HHS awarding agency may use a rate different from the negotiated rate for a class of Federal awards or a single Federal award only when required by Federal statute or regulation, or when approved by a Federal awarding agency head or delegate based on documented justification as described in paragraph (c)(3) of this section.
Subsection (c)(3), in turn, says:
> (3) The HHS awarding agency must implement, and make publicly available, the policies, procedures and general decision making criteria that their programs will follow to seek and justify deviations from negotiated rates.
Just based on a quick perusal it seems like the administration has a decent argument that the agency head can approve the 15% indirect by fiat as long as he or she comes up with a documented justification.
> So, an HHS division like NIH can use a different rate only for a “class” of grants or a “single” grant, and only with “documented justification.”
> There is nothing that says NIH could, in one fell swoop, overturn literally every negotiated rate agreement for 100% of all grants with all medical and academic institutions in the world, with the only justification being “foundations do it” rather than any costing principle whatsoever from the rest of Part 75 of 45 C.F.R.
Further, this doesn't allow a blanket adjustment to existing awards.
1) The “documented justification” must reflect the requirements of subsection (c)(3), but that provision imposes no real substantive requirements. It’s a litigable, but the linked article concludes there must be more justification than the statute seems to require.
Note also that, amusingly, Kisor is still the law of the land and under that decision agencies still get deference in interpreting their own regulations.
2) The article frames the Congressional rider as prohibiting changes to the indirects. But the statute only prohibits changing the regulation, which HHS hasn’t done.
It's very easy to lie in budgets by only counting a subset of expenses.
Great, this should be a enough of an argument then for the federal government to decide how grant money is used.
The one thing has nothing to do with the other.
Football funds itself. That's why the coach makes so much money. If research funded itself, researchers would make a lot of money.
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
I understand how grants and overhead rates work. It’s an embarrassment.
The kind of reform you are talking about does not work against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of small countries.
It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then it'll be a game of whack a mole.
There's a reason things got so bad.
Anyone complaining about slow courts should probably focus on the courts themselves, or the money coming in. Not the act of laws.
1) we’re talking about discretionary grants being made out of taxpayer dollars;
2) congress has delegated authority to make the grants and to the executive, including determining indirects; and
3) the executive action is being used to save money.
It’s also “the rule of law” in some sense when NIMBYs sue to keep a Ronald Mcdonald House from being built in their posh neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean we need to lionize it on that basis, or preemptively surrender to efforts to invoke the law to block reform. The universities can afford expensive lawyers with their 59% indirects, let those lawyers worry about it.
Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually and systematically through a series of conferences and meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented sometime in the future.
I bet the “people who actually know anything” at Boeing would also say their launch costs are as low as they can go and there’s nothing to cut.
We have had 3 populist elections in the last 5 cycles. Obama 2008 was co-opted and Trump 2016 was stymied by Russia investigations. So this time there’s RFK and Elon and Tulsi with chain saws. If the people don’t like the results they can vote for Harris in 2028. But at least sometime tried to do what the winning party voted for.
Here is a huge list of donations from various groups to an athletic endowment at the University of Alabama. Much of this money could have and would have been donated to schools directly for research and academic purposes instead the athletic foundations.
Alabama is one of the most successful Division 1 football programs in the nation. If these programs are so profitable, why do they need so much money for these endowments? And why all the money from governments and grants? Doesn’t add up.
https://crimsontidefoundation.org/ways-to-support/Endowments...
I wonder how all the PhD’s that spent 10 years of their life and can’t find a job feel about that?
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.
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.
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.
This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of examples would have been
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.
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".
thanks for correcting me.
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…
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.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/phrma-prepares-meet-trum...
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like blaming being three hours late on a single red light.
For example I know at my institution every dollar, every piece of effort, is painstakingly tracked and attributed to funding sources. We have extensive internal checks to make sure we aren’t misusing funds. Audits happen at every major milestone. All of that effort is reported. It’s exhausting but the government requires it because we have to be good stewards of the funds we have been granted. No one believes it.
While I won’t argue there isn’t waste (what endeavor doesn’t have waste?) it’s an incredibly tiny percentage (except in cases where there was actual fraud, which we also discovered and the Feds prosecuted and convicted people for).
The irony is that academia is so afraid of “waste” that I wouldn’t be surprised if colleges spend more money on the auditing and the compliances, etc than the actual waste they prevent.
A big part of the reason indirect rates evolved is because the administrative burden to track direct costs is immense. How do you split up direct costs on an electric bill? Do you place a meter on each wall outlet and try to assign each amp to a specific job? Or safety training? Divide the safety meeting minutes by ….. ? It’s impossible. Which is why Vannevar Bush pioneered indirect costs. See the history section here:
https://www.cogr.edu/sites/default/files/Droegemeier%20Full%...
It's a funny thing. there is a distinct chauvinism to any citizen's nation. Every American is confident and absolutely positive that we are the best in so many categories. By what metrics? And who measures these? What about other nations who claim the top spot as well?
Before I travelled to Europe in 2008 I had some mental image of backwards, technologically inept populace that had old electronics and lagging standards and rickety brittle infrastructure. I mean you watch films and look at pictures and you see the roads and the old buildings and the funky cars and there's just a mix of things that are 500 years old or 1500 years back and thoroughly modern.
when I finally showed up in Spain I was completely disabused because all the electronics and the homes were totally modern and there were big box superstores that looked exactly like Target or safeway.
We went to shopping malls, watched normal first-run films in luxurious theaters that sold beer, and we rode around in cars/trains/boats, and I visited veterinarian and physician and hospital, and the medical treatment was indistinguishable from the American type.
I mean, this is one consumer's anecdata, but you've got to consider that we're ready to believe vague propaganda about #1 America First Outclassing The Solar System, and the fervent patriotism is perhaps not a 100% accurate lens.
Universities are designed to collect and disseminate knowledge worldwide. The top institutions and even the worst ones thrive on international collaboration. Think about how difficult it is to achieve and hold military superiority even. Schools are an effective equalizer, and globalist mindsets are the default.
many people I know - mostly [science/math/etc. denying] republicans think the US is the best at everything including healthcare (!!!) despite reams of data conclusively proving otherwise
my fingers are crossed that DOGE/Dump does something stupid enough to irritate the populace (and by extension a handful of senators/representatives to grow a mini-spine) enough to stop this destruction
Further, it may be the case that Europe doesn't need/want a lot of high-tech, high-cost intellectual workers and opportunities that would drain brains from pools that do something more relevant, like soldiers, transport/shipping, or retail workers or HCPs.
Have you spoken to any professors lately?
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'll see what happens.
You’re assuming that the regulation would constrain the head of the agency but why would that be the case?
If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to follow it.
This is generally how civilized people are expected to behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to do away with the rule of law.
Universities have freedom in how to use grant money. The government had so far not bothered with controlling what they do with the money coming from the government. The situation is a bit like you donating to a charity and they spending it on executive bonuses.
Are you proposing that the government has to sign everything into law before taking any action? Can you think of why that might be a terrible idea?
(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.
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.
Uh, what? Why would that happen, exactly?
Because donations are made for tax purposes and virtue signaling … someone is going to get this money. Many of the donors are alumni and will donate money to the school. It was already targeted to the university athletic departments. It’s not a big stretch for it to be donated to another university department that has a direct academic role.
One of the options is “the donors kids” here. Donating money never leads to more savings than it costs, people donate because they support what they’re donating too. Sports boosters care about sports, not academics.
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").
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.
A $20 billion endowment at a 5% ROI is $1 billion per year
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.
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.
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.)
Online ad revenue has been growing, 15% per year recently. Huge growth. That includes legacy networks like (decrepit) Facebook, which is seeing double digit growth, and the short form video frontier is growing considerably faster and constantly pushing out new ad/partnership models and is very much a strong growth industry in an of itself.
Ad revenue is more than sufficient to sustain a billion dollar corporation. It can and does sustain trillion dollar corporations, and the industry is currently in a strong growth phase with a lot of obvious green fields for innovation.
Twitter was an imperfect yet functional website before Elon. Elon fired most of the staff. Twitter then continued to be an imperfect yet functional website.
Hell, I remember ten years of HN saying "WTF does Twitter need so many people for??", and then those same people said "OMG Elon is insane to fire so many people!!".
Twitter could be massively profitable, or woefully unprofitable ... it has no impact on anyone outside investors.
A glaring recent example. If Biden had taken action like Trump has to negotiate with Russia to stop the Ukraine war, would the Democrats be screaming that Biden is a “Putin apologist”?
If Barrack Obama made statements about deporting undocumented immigrants (which he did), Democrats fall largely silent. If Trump makes similar statements, same Democrats scream fascism, racism, and Nazi/white supremacy.
This is not the stunning retort to criticisms of Elon’s “fire them all” approach that some imagine it to be. It basically says “we cut expenses by 75% and only lost half our business.” Which half of the US government are you willing to lose, and are you sure you’re cutting the right 75% to lose the targeted half? Which half of the subjects that we fund R&D for are you willing to lose?
Increasing EBITDA by downscaling the business and severely cutting expenses is a common approach when turning around an unprofitable company.
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
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.
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.
Let alone that we’re talking about comparing an advertiser based social network to a government institution.
Since Congress passed The Constitution's Appropriations Clause and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (ICA) in 1974.
Because otherwise, the executive could just unilaterally shut down any part of the government at any time. Or siphon money from one department to another.
Which it can't by design, since congress controls the purse.
There's a process outlined in that act, under which the executive can report to Congress that it is reducing spending, and Congress must approve that reduction in order for it to take effect. That is the law of the land. The law is being broken.
If you don't like the budget, there is one governing body that can do something about it in this country. The legislature. They control spending, just like putting people in prison is controlled by the judiciary.
Strangely, all the people grousing about executive overreaches are dead silent on all this.
The sin has never been executive overreach, the sin was always an executive they did not control.
There’s a process to handle scenarios, where the administrative branch feels that more money is not needed to be spent for the purposes that the money was initially allocated for. At the very least, there is a 45 day process starting from the point that it is determined to be a “deferral of the budget process” (continuous days that Congress is in session) that is allowed for Congress to pass a rescission bill. I don’t believe Trump’s been in office long enough for that process to even have taken place.
I am not writing in support of funding cuts.
I am strongly supportive of stopping universities from skimming most of the funding, and the research getting a tiny bit. Student researchers doing the actual work get less than minimum wage.
If you are surprised by the 'less than minimum wage' part, it's a bit of creative accounting by universities counting a 'tuition waiver' as part of your wages.
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.)
We can quote secondary sources back at each other all day, but it's somewhat pointless because the truth is what I said already: EBITDA and revenue are merely indicators for cash flow, not synonyms. You used the wrong words dude.
I also noticed you only replied on a pedantic point while leaving the substantive questions on which half of the government and research funding you'd like to see gone (and how these cuts target that half) as an exercise for the reader.
The question we are talking about is whether Twitter makes more money now versus before Musk's take over. If "makes more money" means revenue, then the answer is a definitive no, it does not make more money now. If "makes more money" means profit, then the answer is that we don't know but probably not because profit is found after ITDA (hence the B in EBITDA) and we know the ITDA is substantial for Twitter given how it was acquired.
So yes there is a difference between cash flow and EBITDA that is germane here, and the difference is that cash flow doesn't help us answer the question that we are asking while the one piece of information that we do have (revenue) tells us the opposite of the answer you're trying to imply.