This is some long horizon impact. Really just wildly unfortunate to see a disruption that feels unique. It's not due to war, even if academics could 'flee' to another institution, its a discarding of the prioritization of knowledge generation. The thing humanity has been built on.
Yeah, where do people think Technology Growth comes from. GOP is all Growth, Growth, Growth, will save us, but hey lets poison the well from which it flows.
All AI growth today, is actually from Academia from 20 years ago.
Growth comes from many sources. The supply-side economics wing of the GOP would claim that lower taxes and smaller, less intrusive government will allow for a higher private sector growth rate. There may be some truth to that, although the effects are probably limited compared to the development of disruptive new technologies.
Just yesterday I was talking with some friends about the disaster that neoliberalism has been.
I see billionaires as "water-balloon" (wealth) hoarders, and I see taxes on the rich as thorns on bushes. If the politicians ever wanted to make "trickle down" work, then we need thornier bushes and to make it impossible for rich people to not go through thorny bushes.
But the whole deregulation craze has made it so that the billionaires don't even need people to help them protect their "water-balloons"...
Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.
Academia didn't choose trickle-down policy. Quite the opposite -- that was you guys, after you purged all the leftist economists in the McCarthy era. In fact, the think-tank driven economics departments of recent years are so notoriously to the right of most academic faculty that this is a point of frequent conflict.
This is just partisan conspirational nonsense. Modern Economics took the useful things from Marx and left the rest in the dustbin of history like it should. Nor do Economists advocate for "trickle-down" theory, the answer has more to do with where one is on the laffer curve.
Economists clash frequently with other fields like social sciences because such fields continue to use unfalsifiable and highly flawed epistemic tools like dialectics to advocate for debunked theories like World Systems Theory.
Economic theory in western nations is so hilariously skewed towards free market capitalist think that obvious models are just straight up missed, or sometimes obviously wrong conclusions are drawn. Most economics start with the understanding that the answer or cause is something about free market forces, and then work backwards.
For example, when talking about the economics of healthcare (or anything else, but lets start with healthcare), the conversation is approached from the get-go under the assumption that:
1. Healthcare is already a free market.
2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free market.
1. is just not true. Healthcare, in the US and and all developed nations, is not a free market. But, economists will just assume it is, because they assume everything is a free market, and then apply free market dynamics. Basically, they skip step 1, and go to step 1000.
And, for number 2, it's very debatable. IMO no, healthcare cannot be a free market, just by virtue of what healthcare is as a service. But that's debatable, I won't get into it.
Point is, we immediately start our economic understanding based off assumptions on top of assumptions that come from free market thinking, thinking around IP, thinking about consumer knowledge, thinking about access, etc.
We make absolutely wild and unsubstantiated claims for free, and nobody checks them.
>But, economists will just assume it is, because they assume everything is a free market, and then apply free market dynamics. Basically, they skip step 1, and go to step 1000.
Which economist are you referring to here? It's hard to even see what specific policy conclusions you're critiquing here, beyond a vague strawman against "free market assumptions".
That isn't a vague strawman, that's a great point. Economists work from assumptions, which can be flawed in two ways: they can be blatantly wrong (see the work Kahneman and Tversky did on the rational individual hypothesis) and they can be unfalsifiable (you can't always gather data about the assumption itself). There is a good essay on this from Tirole (yet a very mainstream economist) here: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...
You're pointing to a critique of an assumption, what I'm saying can you name a specific economic policy or position given by an economist that is used in real public policy and then we can measure the merits of those policies and their assumptions as opposed to the counterfactuals. I'd bet 9/10 times the chosen policy likely would have been the most logical option.
After all, it's not like the epistemologies of the other humanities stands on far more shakier grounds...
Well for whom? Another aspect of this problem is an economic solution can have winners and losers. An economic policy that invokes slavery as solution to labor issues may actually be 'logical' but clearly puts the interests of one group over another. Economics is just the science resource allocation after all. People have some serious biases when it comes to deciding policy on who gets what and how.
I've asking multiple posters to give a specific policy example to critique and so far all of you have been unable to do so, instead dancing around and critiquing vague notions of a possibility of bias without giving concrete examples. Very postmodern, but this is why actual policymakers don't listen to critique like this.
Ok, cutting taxes to the very rich while raising them on middle and lower classes and cutting services. This was part of the big beautiful bill. This is 'logical' from the point of view of the billionaire class, but in terms of the economy that everyone else lives in, things will be worse for them.
>Ok, cutting taxes to the very rich while raising them on middle and lower classes and cutting services. This was part of the big beautiful bill. This is 'logical' from the point of view of the billionaire class
Deciding who benefits or not from legislation is not a Economist's domain, their work is descriptive, not normative. You're critiquing politicians here for prioritizing GDP, but that is divorced from your critique of economics. The economist will only tell you what they think will happen with regard to the economy if you pass a bill or not given the goals you've outlined to them.
Well you look at analysis here, do you then disagree with the predictions of the bill and the methodology used, and if so, what is your better analysis here with supposedly more refined epistemic assumptions?
Milei's government slashed the national health care budget by 48 percent in real terms and fired over 2,000 Health Ministry workers — 1,400 in just a few days in January. These drastic moves were part of Milei's broader plan to shrink the state and remake Argentina's debt-ridden economy.
Among the most dramatic cutbacks was the dismantling of the National Cancer Institute, which halted early detection programs for breast and cervical cancer. Funding was also frozen for immunization campaigns, severely disrupting vaccine access during Argentina's first measles outbreak in decades. The National Directorate for HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis lost 40 percent of its staff and 76 percent of its budget, delaying diagnosis and treatment across the country. Emergency contraception and abortion pill distribution have also stopped.
Prescription drug prices and private health insurance premiums have surged by 250 percent and 118 percent, respectively, according to official data.
Obviously, this is an article from the political side of things (I tried to cut out value judgements), but these are decisions made by actual economists like José Luis Espert, Agustín Etchebarne, Federico Sturzenegger, Alberto Benegas Lynch and probably a million others I'm not aware of.
There is no economics that involves enslaving other humans. Not slavery. Not ever. However, in debt in perpetuity is a thing. So you have to work to pay, so you can live, so you can work, so you can pay…
Debt crisis is a real problem. We have borrowed more than we can ever repay, all nations, for the last 30 years. Both sides. Just drove right off the cliff.
Which is fine, as long as your assumptions are good models of reality. When your assumptions are essentially articles of faith your models tend to be about as good as the guys who interpret patterns in chicken bones.
> the conversation is approached from the get-go under the assumption that:
1. Healthcare is already a free market.
2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free market
If you start talking about competition or consumer choice, surprise! You have made an extremely bold assumption: that healthcare is currently operating as a free market.
That assumption is actually, like, 1000 assumptions. Do people prove even one of those? No. They just move on and hope nobody notices.
And, well, we don't. We're so used to these economy falacies that they're practically invisible.
If yall want to know why "Im a Doctor" economists are dying out - look at this back and forth. There is not one single solution or thread here. It's a series of old married couples bickering.
> pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity
I'm not sure what 'half' means here. It's neither true that men make up half of applicants (which are really what we should be focusing on), nor that so-called 'conservatives' make up half of this population.
It’s funny that instead of making points or adding data, you just repeat the same slogan and act like a victim. Many of us have tried to listen for a long time but we have never found any intellectual meat on the slogans. It’s boring.
There is data that some ridiculous percentage of academics are on the left, and drastically so for liberal arts departments.
“Everyone knows” that they filter against conservatives (maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven).
Liberals deny this, so what’s the point of discussing it. Let the dismantling continue until corrections happen I guess.
There was a paper published in 2022 on the political leanings of scientists [1]. Here's the abstract:
> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.
An example they give of the changes in the Republican Party are the Republican position on climate change. For a good illustration at just how much Republicans have changed just take a look at the 2008 Republican Party Platform [2].
They wanted to address climate change by reducing emissions and greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency, promoting EVs and natural gas powered vehicles, and create multi-million dollar prizes for technological developments to eliminate the need for gas powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
They also talk about the need for renewables to become mainstream and supported long-term energy tax credits to promote that.
Compare to today. Now they are opposed to nearly all of that. The current administration's position is the climate change is a hoax or scam.
Members of an ideological group that sees educational institutions as their enemies less likely to find jobs in educational institutions, news at eleven.
Have you considered that it's not filtering for conservatives, but conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all? Isn't liberal arts degree a literal punchline to so many on the right, yet you cant figure out why that might skew left?
> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven
Huh, wonder why this world view doesnt jive with academia.
It’s worth thinking about why you’re wrong, because it explains why those comparisons aren’t valid. Modern conservatism is defined by rejecting ideas like objective truth or pluralism which are the core of academia. There’s no way to have conservatives more represented in science when conservatives refuse to allow people who practice science to be part of their movement: you used to be able to find Republicans who wanted to do something about climate change, for example, but anyone who wants to apply scientific principles there now has been purged from the party. Vaccines aren’t quite there yet but it’s trending in that direction and the percentage of doctors who are Republican have been declining since the pandemic.
Contrast that with women in tech or men in nursing and it becomes obvious why the comparison isn’t valid: women want to be good technologists, not to reject the validity of technology or say we should all go back to the Amish lifestyle (that desire is common to senior developers of both genders). Male nurses want to be good nurses, not claiming that their gender means they can commit medical malpractice.
Well if “I can only act until there is hard data” is a principle in academia then maybe academia deserves what it’s getting. We live in a Bayesian world after all.
Also the whole idea that they are self selecting out is absurd. There are many flavors of conservative, not just the ones you see on Ali G show or whatever.
> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven
This is not religious thinking? You’re arguing based on faith and claiming the rest of us have to prove there is no tea pot floating in orbit on the other side of the sun
At this point, we might be just fine. The academics won't be, but they were the ones telling everyone to wait on having kids in the first place. Demographic trickle down, biting the hand that feeds academia, is a big part of this story.
At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.
Academia didn't make it financially impossible to have kids. Just what control do you think academia has over the market? Over the government?
"Raise house prices now or I'll send you to the principal's office!"
The gays didn't send house prices to the moon. Mexicans didn't send the jobs to China. No, it's the people with assets who pursued asset-pumping policy to great effect. You're right to be angry, but you're a fool to believe them when they point at universities as the source of the problem.
> At this point, we might be just fine. The academics won't be, but they were the ones telling everyone to wait on having kids in the first place. Demographic trickle down, biting the hand that feeds academia, is a big part of this story.
> At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.
Hard to tell if this is just parody.
I will say that if feel that providing something equates to mandating it... I don't know how we're going to be able to have logical exchanges
America's greatest conservative government pressured a private business to fire a comedian for a remark on the death of someone who was basically a celebrity troll.
...and they turn around and complain about liberals' "moral purity."
To them, he was a master of manipulation, exactly what they’re looking for. Someone who can spout racism and bigotry and drive listenership based on what crazy thing he’ll say next. Where does this sound familiar? It’s playbook man. That’s their business. I don’t condone any of what happened but he’s not someone we should be building statues of.
Professors have told me it doesn’t matter which administration is in - they just need to rebrand their project to meet funding requirements. Isn’t that a scary thought? We have no visibility and they are skilled enough to transform into any form.
1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants.
2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people.
3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
Points (1) and (3) appear to contradict each-other, AFAICT. Surely if you made researchers "waste" less time on the grant process, that would reduce the public's ability to supervise and intervene on what get's funded in an informed way? Much to most of the grant procedures researchers have to follow consist precisely in generating metrics, documentation, and other material meant to demonstrate to a skeptical public where the money is going.
You can trust professionals to do their jobs as they see fit and write them a check, or you can make them "waste" time proving to you they're doing the job you want them to do. You can't have low-trust and low-effort grant administration.
You have no idea what you are talking about, and yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism.
>1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants.
There are all kinds of scientists, some do the research, some do the writing, some do the grantsmanship. Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part. It takes understanding an communication skills to convince a panel of peer-experts that your ideas are good enough to give millions of dollars to.
> 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people.
There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step, including opportunity for public commentary.
Just because you personally don't know it exists, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
>3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented. If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did and how they spent that money.
Please. PLEASE. I am begging you. Learn about a subject before forming an opinion about it.
> Please. PLEASE. I am begging you. Learn about a subject before forming an opinion about it.
I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
> Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part.
Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work!
And you’re right - promotors aren’t lesser. They are greater - more valued in academic job placement and promotion.
> There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step,
Did you miss the prior comment? The existing oversight is ineffective. Researchers see it as a hoop to jump through.
> If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did
Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career. Unless I attend a specialized conference I won’t hear about the latter, except in a form crafted for public reception. That’s the one that gets grants.
> Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented.
There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
> yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism.
>Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work.
Grants are hard, not because of admin/paperwork, but because coming up with a novel idea is hard and convincing others to fund it is harder.
The people leading the grants are the ones creating and guiding the ideas. They set the agenda.
A tech CEO doesn't spend their days coding minor bug fixes, in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work. They are leaders, who are occupied getting funding and setting the direction.
>Did you miss the comment we are replying to? The existing oversight is ineffective. It’s just a hoop for the professor to jump through.
It's not ineffective though, and an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
>Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
>There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
>Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career.
Wrong. Every PI I know does the stuff they like, and they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
>I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
>yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism.
>Name calling.
Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Yes, we are in agreement. That's why promoters are so valuable.
> in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work.
This large workforce of Phd's protecting the time of the PI also represents a massive allocation of young intelligent talent, and that's part of my concern.
> an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
It's difficult to talk about demand for required credentials. A large percentage is foreigners securing visas to work in the US.
> You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
> Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
I think researchers put a great deal of care into public reporting. And I think they use their intellect to construct a story conducive to their careers. Who doesn't?
I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. TTheir sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
> Every PI I know does the stuff they like
I don't doubt they are passionate and driven. I'm saying something different. When you are in the thick of establishing yourself you have to care more about what system cares about (this is maybe your situation?), and modern competition makes this all encompassing. But the book they write in sabbatical tends to look different than their official title.
> they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
How would we falsify this statement?
> You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
PhD to software engineer is a common career path.
> Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
EDIT: to focus on my personal beliefs and not yours.
>I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. TTheir sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
Yes, I would say that represents a gap between a public who want to see a science factory in which not one single blueberry muffin is ever wasted on an unworthy grad-student's wasteful seminar, and the actual reality of how science works. The problem is that going, "aha, gotcha, you were HIDING these ILLICIT SEMINARS on SPECULATIVE WORK!" doesn't educate the public on how science really works and also doesn't make the seminars unnecessary. If you eliminate all the scientific processes that don't conform to an uninformed popular image of white-collar "efficiency" (eg: Office Space), you won't have any good scientists left, because they'll fuck off to private-sector jobs where you don't have to justify a blueberry muffin to a hostile Senate subcommittee.
(For anyone wondering if I'm hungry or something, in January 2025 my lab's parent university forbade us from providing lunch during lab meetings because they were informed that the incoming Administration was going to start looking for efficiencies in scientific grant funding.)
I think our impasse is for some reason you have this idea that PI's hate their work / are gaming the system. I just don't understand where you are coming from. Maybe that's true sometimes, but most all PIs I have worked with are not gaming the system. They are just working on a decades-long line of inquiry.
>I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. Their sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
Their grant is public record. Their oversight during that grant is public record. Their regulatory approvals are public record. Their publications are public record.
"Basically finished" is not finished. It is not finished unless it has been published. Your statement is like saying "its wrong for a baker to buy an oven if he already has the flour and sugar. The cake is basically finished. He is just putting future costs into this current cake".
Most grant applications include prior work, current work, and future work. A program officer will make site visits and assess current work and upcoming work. Funding of a grant is not "do X thing and publish, end of project and money:. It is the pursuit of an idea. If task 1 is "basically finished" the PO will push for publication of that and moving on to the next aim.
In many cases having an aim "basically finished" is a good thing. It shows that prior work is successful and future work can produce similar success. Most grants have multiple aims and several sub-aims. If one aim is finished, they move on to the next. If all the aims are complete, the grant usually indicates next steps. The PI and PO will have discussed the next steps long before they are carried out.
If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for. Not all research can be speculative. Not at research can be mainstream. It is a mix, based on opportunity and expertise.
This is grants 101. Please, again, I'm not lecturing you on software development, because it is not my expertise. Please understand scientific funding before lecturing me about it.
>Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
Its not name calling to call out your anti-intellectualism. You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.
>Yes American science as a family of organizations deserves scrutiny and critiques. Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
They deserve scrutiny and critique from an informed point of view on what science can accomplish for the public, that is, what science can do for the absolute public good. "This doesn't work like I thought it did!" is not necessarily, in and of itself, an absolute public bad. It is, unfortunately, a cost of doing business in employing specialized labor to do specialized work.
Driving a truck doesn't work how the broad public thinks it does, either.
> My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.
There is a gap between how software is written and how it is used by the public.
Clearly computers are flawed and need a complete rework.
>Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.
Software is a illuminati scam perpetrated by bitter typesetters forced to get funding in a system they don't believe in. Anyone who says otherwise is in on it.
>Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
Are they flawless, no. Have they done more public good than any organization in history (or at least top 3)? yes.
And your response is to poo-poo the whole system because you had a bad time in your PhD. Sad.
> Did you miss the prior comment? The existing oversight is ineffective. Researchers see it as a hoop to jump through.
All oversight is a hoop to jump through in a low-trust principal-agent system. Adding oversight bureaucracy partially helps in aligning the scientists to the public interests (after all, if they're working on something totally disconnected from funding goals, they won't get funded) but can never really increase public trust in the scientists or the grant-agency bureaucrats.
"Yet the average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27% and 28% over time."
and a lot of that is simply because nobody wants to do the detailed accounting for things like: lab electricity usage, janitorial services, misc supplies.
> The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud.
This is dramatic nonsense; a simple made up number.
> Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high.
The 70% "indirect cost" number had latched into my brain. I was willing to concede this point, but it looks like 50, 60, 70% are accurate as of 2025 [0].
While there exist institutions with only 30% indirect cost, every single not-especially-prestigious university in my region are retaining 60% or more.
> As of May 2025, indirect cost reimbursements for [institutions of higher education (IHE)] are typically determined by an indirect cost rate that is pre-negotiated with the federal government and varies by IHE—ranging from 30% to 70%.
Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and lecturers.
This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests
Yeah it's more like "clamp down on higher education."
I've said it multiple times, Trump and his folks see higher education as the enemy, the anti-Christ that corrupts their vision of America. Protests and admin bureaucracy (give me a fucking break) are just convenient excuses.
The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more details would be really helpful. For example MIT and CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy, but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.
I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.
There's some examples in the first link, with the implication they're representative (unknown whether they are, yet, "detail about the distribution")
> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”
> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
I have a suspicion that as an entity such as a University (or government, or business, etc) gets larger, its bureaucracy/administrations needs grow (at a much faster rate)
Both of those links (thanks for providing them) only talk about raw numbers, no real in depth analysis of whether the administrators are needed at those levels, or not, nor even how they classify someone as being an administrator.
I don't have any serious evidence, but the idea of "bloated administration" has been a meme for many years and I remember this humorous article describing it as a new chemical element floating around since around a decade ago: https://meyerweb.com/other/humor/administratium.html
Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers"
That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the first place.
I know a current professor who has been in the same department for 15 years and the admin bloat thing is definitely real. Just tons of new people employed for who knows what. Maybe the numbers are out there maybe not (who is looking at them?) but it’s definitely not an imaginary thing or made up for political purposes.
It’s not feels when admin has grown massively in staff while other staff, faculty and students remain the same lol. It’s really not interesting talking to someone who actively and proudly places their head in the sand.
You don’t seem to be able to distinguish between an anecdote on feelings as opposed to anecdote on facts. That’s unfortunate but it’s not something I can help you with. So I will just leave you with your head in the sand.
Now you’re backing up to false claims lol. Seems to me you are clinging on to a hot take that you will do anything to defend. No point in a discussion with you.
Your false claim is that somehow I have my head in the sand for daring to point out that you are providing anecdotes which are feelings based (there are zero hard facts in your claim, no numbers, no examples, just "looks like more people")
The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you, because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that you could get away with BS, but you got called out instead.
If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable, you can post them at any time.
You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
Fascism is not an ideology, or a philosophical idea, it's a system of government. And dismantling and/or gaining control over academia is a core part of the system.
A little of column A and a little of column B. There is prestige in getting a PhD. There is also access and unique networking opportunities.
On the purely financial side, many top students work internships during the summers and make 40 or 50 thousand dollars during that time in addition to their academic stipend.
The payout is very, very long term and honestly you probably don't come out ahead.
Starting your career 10 years earlier (effectively) and immediately progressing in your career probably gets you further. Especially if you look towards management, which is where the money is (usually, million dollar AI research salaries is a new thing).
I don't think this is always true. AI research big payouts aren't even a new thing. It was common 10 years ago for big name professors to get hired by Google etc. and bring the whole lab with them.
Also a PHD is not 10 years long? You start your career 4-5 years after a typical BS in CS
Well, the big money is in becoming a leader in a field before it's hot - making the big payoffs very speculative.
In the mid 2000s, natural language modelling was a joke and the best performing ML systems for sentiment analysis would lose in benchmarks to emoji counters. Today, people with a PhD in ML language modelling and years of experience delivering projects in industry are finding the PhD in ML really pays off.
But what about someone who spent the mid 2000s working on formal methods for static analysis? Or a compiler responding to the challenges created by Intel's Itanium architecture? Or trying to fit FPGA accelerator boards into the niche CUDA fills today?
Well, honestly their career's probably still going fine, they're a smart person and there's been many years of high demand for competent programmers. But industry isn't beating their door down; the beneficial effects of the PhD will be a lot less obvious.
Honestly a lot of PhDs go to people from cultures that prize education; and to people from upper-middle-class backgrounds who've been brought up to do well in school, follow their passions, no need to worry too much about money.
PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.
They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through grants.
The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed to ensure compliance with grant terms.
>PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.
In America the students at the undergraduate and masters levels pay to pursue their degrees, while the PhDs are paid by the school. As these students do not directly generate revenue, the PhD programs will be first on the chopping block and the admin who make the 'tough decisions' to keep the ship afloat will be off at their next jobs by the time the chickens come home to roost.
PhD students are typically only paid by the university if they provide labor in the form of being a teaching assistant for undergrads, guiding lab sessions and grading assignments and exams. Alternatively they're paid through their advisor's grants, in which case the student brings in revenue in the form of the large overhead cut the uni takes.
The alternative would be hiring dedicated employees to help with grading and lab sessions, and they won't tolerate the $30k/yr a PhD student does. This would have immediate impacts too, as there's no way a lone professor can keep up with grading for the class sizes in early undergrad.
This seems to be the default defense - Is there no fraud/fat/waste etc in this thing which is being harmed?
It sounds like people don't understand bureaucracy is always imperfect. If it was perfect then you don't need to create another agency called DOGE while having Congressional Budget Office and do exactly the same things.
The question should be is there fraud/fat/waste which has a meaningful impact? If not then it changing it wouldn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that anecdotal evidence rules supreme and there are enemies every where.
"Data doesn't support a meaningful impact? I saw it with my own eyes so it should be true and the person reporting the data must have Democrat agenda"
The sources of university funding and spending on administration has been broken for a long time.
What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors.
What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the money is going, where the biggest growth in spending is going.
You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing. Start with the top 25 university presidents who all earn a slightly rounded up 2 million a year and more.
…and money to go to conferences and summer schools, and money for software licenses (especially in applied programs), and department funds to bring visiting academics, and the following things that get lumped under administration: money for grad student food pantries and childcare because funding streams for PhDs don’t provide for good salaries outright, and job advising centers because the math job market is a crapshoot, and free student health clinics for psychological and physical health because doing a PhD in any condition is rough…
Who pays for all that? Usually it's not the students or even private funders / donors. Most of the money comes from one level of the government or another, and it comes with all kinds of regulations and requirements. Complying with that requires a lot of specialized administrative staff.
Most of the time, when you hear a politician saying that universities should / should not do X, they are effectively saying that universities should spend more on administration.
Universities with a residential campus have a lot of staff in functions unrelated to the academic mission, such as student housing, food services, healthcare, or sports facilities. If they have to compete for students instead of most people just automatically choosing the nearest university, focusing on these tends to make them more competitive. And while student amenities are not particularly important to PhD students, they are important to the university if it also educates undergraduates.
Then there is the organization chart. In a traditional university, the faculty senate (or another similar body) is in charge and all administrators are subordinate to it. But the modern world prefers centralized organizations, with administrators at the top. And whoever is in charge also determines the priorities of the organization.
There are extreme downsides - for many colleges athletics is a money-maker. So is administering IP. There's is also lots of real estate, which appreciates value, but needs maintenance.
The big reason for all the extras is that it makes the school known, in a very big and important way. They host conferences, have archives that receive donations, give out awards.
Donors give all sorts of weird tasks - and funding to achieve them.
Modern colleges are so many different things.
There is a subset of colleges that adopt the "keep it simple" approach, but they often run into lots of trouble. The big problem is without doing tons of stuff, people forget they exist.
It's a bit like drug companies advertising at the super bowl. They hate doing it, but don't have a choice.
Cut the top 20 salaries in half and fire 10% of the staff who are not directly involved in academics (must teach, learn, or research) for starters. Sever any major athletics organization (i.e. football, basketball, etc) into a separate legal entity with something like a license fee to the university based on team revenue as a percentage so funds flow exclusively in one direction.
University admin work expands to the available workforce and I've heard first person accounts from long time senior university staff about admin employees who literally didn't do anything of any conceivable consequence.
I mean actually breakdown exactly where the spending is going and then show the cuts.
You can say “cut salaries in half” about any industry. You could say it about software engineers. But just because you say that doesn’t mean it’ll work out well for the industry. Non-minimum wage salaries should be market driven. I doubt you could just cut salaries in half and keep a reasonable work force.
