[ta98789878]

Actually, he addresses it quite clearly, and points out that there are also attempts to reduce universities' other source of income, the "overhead" portion of grants.

FTA: Note that the Trump administration has already ("already" links to: https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/22/trump-budget-research-gr...) made tightening overhead rules—i.e., doing the exact opposite of what would be needed to counteract the new tax—a central focus of its attempt to cut federal research funding.

The point is that this is the system and it has been for decades, and everybody involved knew it and knows it. And the tax changes are a deliberate attack on the system i.e universities.

If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed, well, you're free to believe that, but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.

[rdtsc]

> The point is that this is the system and it has been for decades, and everybody involved knew it and knows it.

This system is also why I didn't get much from my grants because the university took out the "tuition". So just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.

> but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.

Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed". This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.

[ta98789878]

This system is also why I didn't get much from my grants because the university took out the "tuition".

I don't know the particulars of your situation so I can't comment specifically. But the grants in questions are primarily from the federal government and they are sized with the understanding that universities will deduct this "tuition" from them. If you're talking about a typical NSF, NIH, or DOD grant made to a typical research university, then the "tuition" portion of that money was intended to go to the university all along.

just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.

Scott's counterpoint to this view is that destroying something that has problems doesn't mean something better will pop into existence. Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air, and it's hard to believe these changes are intended to help rather than to hurt.

Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed"

That argument supports "the system is bad" but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed to work that way. I don't know how much the cost of research would increase if grad students were paid more. If it were practical to raise their stipends I would be for it. But the changes discussed in the post will not help grad students, even if the universities stop charging the fictitious tuition.

This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.

Addressed in the post: "except for the richest few universities, they’d have to scale back research and teaching pretty drastically" yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.

[Finnucane]

Even the richest universities still have to contend with finite limits on income from the endowment. And the bill adds a tax on that, as well.

[rdtsc]

> If you're talking about a typical NSF, NIH, or DOD grant made to a typical research university, then the "tuition" portion of that money was intended to go to the university all along.

They know and add extra expecting it is going to go to the tuition and the lab and grad student won't even see parts of it. The university can also then "know" that graduate students have to pay taxes now so they should accordingly pay a more competitive salary for research.

> Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air

I don't think research is going to stop. Universities will have to find a way to be more competitive, spend more money on stipends, limit the number of PhDs they accept. Some might have to reduce administrative costs, dip into their endowment to provide fellowships or tuition endowments.

> yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.

I can see that point and it is unfortunate, but it is also unfortunate that this expensive research had to be hidden behind a tuition "charade" (universities skimming a good part off of grants) and a tax loophole. Some of the tuition taken from the grants were not even going to the labs, they ended up supporting the administrative bloat.

Without having any insight into the reasons for this specific legislation, I am speculating that it might target two things: 1) Rising tuition and administrative bloat. Maybe it is trying to force universities to become more fiscally conservative. 2) Reduce overall the number of PhDs. I maybe misremembering but I've been hearing how we pump out too may PhD candidates compared to the available positions for them. Maybe PhD positions have to become more competitive and accept only a fraction of the students they accept today. I remember my classmates wanted to do a PhD just because the market was slow after a crash so it was a way to postpone graduating for a few years. That just didn't seem quite right. Also on an interesting side-note, the same universities that admit a larger number of graduate students, then turn around and limit tenure track positions. At some point, after a few decades of that, something has to give, it's not sustainable.

[theptip]

> he addresses it quite clearly

I don't think that sentence at the end of his article is particularly clear; it doesn't give the question much attention. I'm not even sure the linked article supports the point that Aaronson is trying to make with it; my mental model of this could be wrong but it seems to me that the NIH overhead tightening is saying that more money must be spent on direct research (researcher salaries, reagent costs, etc) and less on overhead like facility operating costs, administrators, etc. So after the tightening there should be more money for direct research costs and less for overheads.

But the student tuition fee laundering scheme that we're discussing is not about the split between overhead vs. direct research costs as far as I can tell; it's about taking the direct research spending pot and laundering it so that it can be spent on anything, such as a new campus, which wouldn't be covered by the NIH grant at all.

If the laundering scheme goes away, then the university can't spend the direct research or overhead earmarked funds on a new campus, and so the campus just won't happen. And if the direct research portion of funding grows, then there's actually more money that can be spent on students, not less.

If that's right, then there's definitely a question about whether universities can adapt to be more efficient and lower overhead, and if they can't then research could well be disrupted, which would not be good -- but that's a very differnt concern than "the destruction of graduate education in the USA".

> If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed

I'm not sure where you got that impression. I think that it's worth trying to improve the system so that grad students are treated more equitably (and that will have to be at the cost of the administrative class). I'm not sure that this tax change will have a net positive effect on students' wellbeing, as I already mentioned, and I think that's a bad thing.

But most importantly, I don't think we should give universities or anyone else a free pass to make this a "Trump VS Students" story, when it's more complicated than that.